Ethnographers generally allow educational psychology to define research problems, to set limits on what they can study, and to dictate some key theoretical concepts. As a consequence, lacunae in descriptions of complexities in the intellectual lives of children have not been filled in by ethnographers. Problems in the focus and methods of…

This study is an attempt to identify social interactions which fit into a Piagetian model for cognitive change, and specifically to examine the degree to which the frequency of those interactions predicts the rate of cognitive development. The subjects were 74 elementary school children enrolled in 19 K-4 classrooms. These children were in the…