The educational value of pair and group-based activity in the classroom has been a matter of dispute for years. Looking back through published research, you can find educationists and psychologists arguing that peer group interaction is where the best kind of learning takes place; look elsewhere, and you will find someone of similar stature reporting that much of it is a waste of time.

We can also see how encouragement for group work has ebbed and flowed in educational policy documents. A systematic and careful examination of what happens when children take part in group-based activity and what they get from it might be expected to clarify matters. This is what Kumpulainen and Wray, and their colleagues who have also contributed, aim to provide.

The book is not unique in this respect, but its review of the field comes with a new method for analysing pupils’ group interaction. The book is subtitled “from theory to practice” and it is mainly based on a Vygotskiansociocultural perspective, from which learning and development are seen as strongly influenced by children’s participation in social events and by the guiding influence of more knowledgeable people around them.

In an early chapter, the authors compare this approach to the older “cognitive” perspective and discuss the relevance of both for educational research.

The publisher’s intended audience for this book is “teachers and researchers”, but my guess is that its style and content will give it appeal only to teachers who are themselves researchers. This is not meant as a criticism of the book as a research-based publication, just to say that it will be intelligible and informative only to readers who are already familiar with terms such as “triadic interaction sequence” and “cognitive conflict”. The review of relevant research is thorough, but condensed to an extent that differences between methods and approaches will, again, be meaningful only to those with a background in educational research.

However, the method of analysis the authors (and their colleagues) have created is described in sufficient detail to be useful to anyone who would like to try using it. It is certainly more comprehensive than any existing system in its treatment of how patterns of talk and other aspects of social interaction are related to the expression of ideas and ways of thinking.

The authors apply it to examples of children working together in various situations - for example, 11 to 12-year-olds writing together at the computer, seven to eight-year-olds doing a practical science activity. From this analysis, Kumpulainen and Wray are able to show that group work does indeed provide excellent opportunities for learning and development (of a kind that cannot be found in teacher-led activities).

But they also confirm the findings of other researchers (such as Barnes and Todd, Bennett and Dunne and myself) that many children seem unable, without guidance, to make the most of those opportunities.

This supports the view that if we want most children to grow up able to work effectively and productively with other people, we must teach them how to do so.

It is therefore good to see that this is now explicitly recognised in the latest key stage 3 strategies for literacy teaching and learning in the foundation subjects.

Someone up there does listen to researchers after all.

NEIL MERCER

Neil Mercer is professor of language and communications at the Open University