ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on an intervention study that began as an effort to apply theory and data from two long-standing lines of research in developmental and learning psychology: how reasoning and thinking abilities develop and might be cultivated in school; and how particular mathematical concepts, such as number, develop. During our intervention work, we realized that a new theoretical direction was increasingly dominating our thinking about the nature of development, learning, and schooling. This is the view, shared by a growing minority of thinkers in the various disciplines comprised in cognitive science, that human mental functioning must be understood as fundamentally situation-specific and context-dependent, rather than as a collection of abstracted-from-use abilities and knowledge. This apparently simple shift in perspective in fact turns out to entail reconsideration of a number of long-held assumptions in psychology and education. We will point to several of these in the course of this chapter, even as we focus most directly on a school intervention programme and its early effects.
