Throughout development, children undergo moments of abrupt conceptual transitions, often replacing intuitive knowledge with grounded scientific theories. This typically also creates a situation of social conflict, as different children may hold at the same time substantially different theories and explanations about the same phenomenon. The main objective of this work is to understand whether social interaction and exchange of arguments and reasoning may be a catalyzer for conceptual development. Dyads of 7-year-old children with different conceptual understanding of the Earth were asked to reach a consensus about its astronomic and geometric properties. Our results show that mere minutes of deliberation can result in substantial changes in children’s conceptual representations, and moreover, that this transition was consistently in the direction of reasoned and scientific opinions. These results provide empirical evidence and suggest specific ways in which peer interaction can be used effectively to promote conceptual change in school settings, in a knowledge domain at the center of this era’s post truth and science denial crisis.

在整个发展过程中，儿童经历了突然的概念转变，经常用扎根的科学理论代替直觉的知识。由于不同的孩子可能同时对同一现象持有不同的理论和解释，因此这通常还会造成社会冲突的情况。这项工作的主要目的是了解社会互动以及论点和推理的交流是否可以促进概念发展。要求对地球有不同概念理解的7岁儿童的二元组就其天文和几何特性达成共识。我们的研究结果表明，仅仅几分钟的审议就可以导致儿童的概念表达发生重大变化，此外，这种转变始终朝着理性和科学观点的方向发展。这些结果提供了经验证据，并提出了在这个时代的后真理和科学否定危机的中心的知识领域中，可以有效地利用同伴互动来促进学校环境观念转变的具体方式。