Listening to Children's Voices: Psychological theory and educational implications

An integration of psychological theories and educational practice has long been the aim of educational psychologists. This article is an attempt to contribute to this task by presenting results from a study on elementary-school children's communicative actions. The term ‘communicative action' captures both communicative understanding (the social-cognitive ability to comprehend the social world) and action resolutions (actions in the social world). The study focuses on how children understand and resolve classroom conflicts where either a teacher or a classmate entertains opinions concerning academic work and class behavior that conflict with the protagonist's own. The results are presented descriptively and with regard to implications for educational practice. The theoretical and empirical model on which the study is based is used as a guideline for classroom discussions and as a criterion for the evaluation of children's responses concerning social conflicts.