Clotilde Pontecorvo is Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology and has been for two mandates Director of the Department of Developmental and Social Psychology of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. She has done research on cognitive development and curriculum in different domains, on teacher training, on educational continuity. More recent research interests concern early literacy and writing, the development of social concepts through discussion and arguing, the relationships between arguing and thinking in educational contexts, the socialization practices in Italian families dinner conversations. She has been the chairperson of the ESF Network on Writing and she is coordinating since 2002 the study on the Everyday life of Italian working families
She is the author of more that 200 articles in national and international journals, chapters in books, and of about 30 books. Among her publications: Cognition & Instruction (1993, as special issue on “Forms of discourse and shared thinking”); Children’s Early Text Construction (LEA, 1996); Little Red Riding Hood learns to write (with. E. Ferreiro et al., published in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, 1996); Discourse, Tools and Reasoning (edited with L. Resnick and R. Saljo, Springer-Verlag, 1997); Writing Development (John Benjamins, 1997); Joining Society (co-edited with A.N. Perret-Clermont, L. Resnick, T. Zittoun, B. Burge, Cambridge, CUP, 2003).