Describes research aimed at informing and improving AIDS prevention efforts for urban African American youth and their families during the children's transition to adolescence. Also presents are a theoretical model and preliminary descriptive data focusing on the implications for preventive intervention work and the need for ongoing collaboration…

Studied collaborative reasoning in 86 seventh-grade minority students in an urban low-income school. Students who collaborated had higher percentages of fully correct explanations on the posttest than those who worked alone. Collaborative experiences were beneficial for reasoning about unfamiliar, moderately difficult, nonverbal problems. (SLD)