• Focuses on the peer group experiences of children attending school in Western societies, from five years of age through to adolescence
• Considers peer groups in classrooms, friendships made within and outside of school, and the groups that children participate in for extra-curricular activities
• Includes a final summary which brings together the significant implications...

'Heat breaks up charcoal and puts sulphur dioxide in'; 'The air pulls faster on heavy masses.' These and other similar statements by school-aged children untutored in physics carry two messages. First, children's pre-instructional conceptions of the physical world are a far cry from the received wisdom of science; second, despite their lack of orthodoxy, children's conceptions carry a definite sense of causal mechanism. This sense of mechanism is the focal concern of this book, originally published in 1998, for it raises issues of central importance to both psychological theory and...