Pupils' knowledge building as a co-constructed process; a quantitative approach.

When children learn in a group context they also co-construct knowledge (Thelen & Smith, 1994). This means that, rather than undergoing parallel learning processes, we conceive knowledge as emerging between two or more individuals. In this presentation, we aim to demonstrate the process of knowledge co- construction situated in peer interaction.The child utterances from the two video fragments were first coded based on their complexity level of reasoning, using a coding scheme based on Fisher’s SkillTheory (Fischer, 1980). This is a cognitive developmental theory that categorizes scientific knowledge into three increasingly differentiated tiers of complexity (Fischer &Bidell, 2006). Next, the moment-to-moment codes were smoothed using a LOESS technique. This allows us to visualize the real-time dynamics of co-constructedknowledge. We examined the data for two peers separately as well as for the whole interaction as one process. With this distinction, we aim to highlight characteristics ofthe co-construction of knowledge (i.e., how do key individuals co-construct knowledge), and characteristics of the emergent knowledge (i.e., how does the general level of complexity emerge over time?).Results show that, as a group, the students reached a relatively high level of complexity over the course of the interaction and that, when zooming in on the interaction between two specific students (L1, L3), the utterances of one student (L3) often followed those of another (L1). In the presentation, we will discuss how these process characteristics contribute to our understanding of problem-solving processes, as well as advantages and disadvantages of using time series