Participants
Participants were 60 children attending public schools in areas of Bariloche (a town in
Patagonia, Argentina, with a population of 100,000) with different sociocultural and
economic characteristics. Twenty children were attending kindergarten (mean age: 5
years 3 months), an educational level that prepares children for learning to write and
corresponds to a developmental period characterized by a direct theory of learning.
Twenty children were attending first grade in elementary school (mean age: 6 years 5
months), when systematic teaching of writing begins and an interpretative theory of
learning emerges. The remaining 20 were attending fourth grade (mean age: 9 years 8
months), when students have already mastered technical-notational aspects of writing,
begin to focus on organizational aspects of texts and develop an increasingly
interpretative theory of learning