Interactional obligations within collaborative learning situations bringing forth deeper collective argumentation

Following an interactionist approach to learning, social interaction is to be understood as constitutive of learning processes. Based on this idea, learning of mathematics can be described as the increasingly autonomous participation in processes of collective argumentation (Krummheuer & Brandt, 2001). This study aims at describing, on an empirical level, how children receive optimised conditions for learning opportunities when, within the interaction with other learners, the children are interactively "obligated" to participate in bringing forth warrants or backings within collective argumentations. Specifically for this research, children between the ages of 6 and 12 were filmed when learning collaboratively in multi-age groups. The three interactional obligations which have been reconstructed so far-a strong contradiction, a mistake and certain types of questions-are described in this paper with the help of exemplary interactional sequences.