The development of social perspective coordination skills in grades 3-12

In the United States today, there is a widespread demand for curricula and assessments that reflect research on how students learn. One such type of research focuses on learning sequences, which are descriptions of the increasingly adequate conceptions that students adopt as they learn. Developmental maieutics (Dawson & Stein, 2008) is a set of research methods that are employed to produce learning sequences. At its core is a domain-general scoring system—the Lectical® Assessment System—that makes it possible to assess the developmental level of performances in any knowledge domain. With developmental maieutics, researchers produce learning sequences that are comparable across multiple topics, because they are all calibrated to the same scale—the skill scale (or Lectical scale). These sequences reveal how learners think at different developmental levels and how they construct new concepts by building upon foundational concepts from the prior level.

In this study, I apply developmental maieutics in the domain of social perspective coordination (for the first time in this age range), using data from 149 interviews conducted with students in grades 3-9 and 343 written essays collected from students in grades 6-12. I build learning sequences for social perspective coordination concepts, allowing me to address the research question: "what are the pathways through which social perspective coordination skills develop?" In particular, I examine two themes: (1) how children understand why people disagree about violent television (How can some scientists think that violent TV is bad for children and some think it is okay? How can some parents want to pass a law banning violent TV in schools while some do not?); and (2) how children understand the impact of violent TV on children's behavior (What happens to children when they watch violent TV? Why do some children copy what they see and some children do not? Is TV a bad influence?). These learning sequences shed new light on the development of social perspective coordination skills.