Evaluating “cognitive competences”
| Number: | P46 |
| Organizer: | Hougaard, Gitte |
| Co-Organizer: | Rineke Brouwer, Dennis Day, Anders Hougaard |
| Abstract: | |
| Since its inception Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis have investigated how people deal publicly with each others’ states of mind (Garfinkel 1967, Sacks 1992). Studies in this tradition focus on how people deal interactively with ‘cognitive’ matters (Antaki 2006, Edwards 2006, Lynch 2006, Lynch & Bogen 2005, Potter 2006, Wooffitt 1992) and avoid commenting on the ‘actual’ states of mind of the participants (see though Drew 2005, Heritage 2005). This panel follows that line of investigation, methodologically as well as thematically, as it presents studies of how people ‘evaluate’ what they may take to be “cognitive competences” as reflected in their everyday understanding of ‘knowing’, ‘remembering’, ‘understanding’, ‘recognizing’ and so forth, by use of conversation analysis. When participating in exam situations (Maynard & Marlaire 1992), class-room interactions, job-interviews, when visiting the doctor or when doing parenting, evaluation of each other’s “cognition” is often, locally of concern to participants. The panel focuses specifically on how participants organize conversational objects as indices of “cognitive competences”, and how evaluations hereof might be unfolded in sequences of (talk-in) interaction. In some instances participants treat an action straightforwardly as indicative of “cognitive competences”, for example answers given at an exam. On other occasions, participants may have to work out whether this is the case, for example when people are trying to work out whether or not a co-participant has heard them, has understood them or is simply ignoring them. The papers in the panel will consider the evaluation of “cognitive competence” in a variety of institutional settings, such as audiological clinics, schools for children with special educational needs, in speech pathology clinics and in class rooms, as well as in more mundane settings where people simply deal with issues of “cognitive competences”. |
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