ABSTRACT
As part of efforts to investigate social processes in cognitive development, researchers have found it useful to distinguish between two general types of social contexts for learning. Out-of-school contexts are those that are generated in everyday interactions, interactions not purposely contrived to foster learning. For a child, such contexts may include playing with games or building a toy model, and the learning that may occur in such contexts includes learning the consequences of violating a game's rules or learning about mechanical relations among a model's parts. School contexts are those specifically designed to further learning. In school contexts, a more knowledgeable individual arranges materials and communications in a way specifically designed to facilitate the learning of particular concepts that are potentially applicable to a wide variety of activities, concepts like government or the physics of gear ratios.
