ABSTRACT
The opening chapter of this book (by Baker, Andriessen & Järvelä) starts by reporting an interesting extract of a discussion between two secondary pupils who are trying to solve a science problem. The discussion ends with little agreement and one child finishing with ‘I don’t give a damn’. For the authors of this chapter, one of the interesting aspects about this extract is that one student is a boy and the other student is a girl. The abrupt and uncooperative nature of the exchange is often characteristic of boy–girl interactions at this age. For a long time now theories of collaborative learning have ignored the social and affective dimensions of collaborative learning situations, such as gender. We know gender is an important part of a child’s everyday life (Lloyd & Duveen, 1992). It determines the name of the child, the way a child is talked to and played with, the clothes he or she wears and the toys they play with. At school, gender influences the choices of subjects students choose to take and their performance at school. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the impact of social categories, such as gender, on the conversational dynamics of collaborative activity and how these are related to learning and development. We will then examine a number of explanations for these gender differences, before reporting a study which investigates these different theories in the context of collaborative problem-solving English-language task.
