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Neil McKay Mercer is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge.^[3][4][5][6]

Mercer grew up in Cockermouth in Cumbria, and was educated at Cockermouth Grammar School before studying for a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree in psychology at the University of Manchester.^[3] He was awarded a PhD in psycholinguistics by the University of Leicester in 1973.^[2][3]

Mercer’s research explores the role of oracy^[1] and dialogue in education and the development of children’s reasoning.^[3] He served as director of the study Centre Oracy Cambridge and is a life fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge.^[3][7] Prior to working at the University of Cambridge, he served as director of the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technologies (CREET) at the Open University.^[3] and a member of the Centre for Language and Communications. Mercer previously served as co-editor of the journal Learning, Culture and Social Interaction,^[8] editor of the journal Learning and Instruction^[9] and the International Journal of Educational Research.

Mercer has emphasised the use of language to “inter-think” and build “common knowledge” – shared understandings and perspectives to work together, particularly in classrooms.^[10] From Common Knowledge^[10] onwards his work has been explicitly Vygotskian, fitting into a wider sociocultural and dialogic learning focus in education.^[11] However, in contrast to Lev Vygotsky‘s zone of proximal development, Mercer proposes we consider the ‘intermental development zone’^[12] – the space that language creates which allows peers to interact and develop their reasoning together, in the absence of a guiding teacher. This work is cited as important in development of understanding of language for learning. ^[13]

Mercer’s key interest is in the quality of talk and its impact on educational outcomes, including talk in the home^[14] for example, arguing that “‘social interaction and collaborative activity’ in class can provide ‘valuable opportunities’ for learning”^[15] and that classroom talk should be oriented around co-operation rather than competitiveness, to encourage exploratory talk rather than disputational^[15] where the former focuses on explaining ideas, listening to others, and the building of mutual understanding and the latter on a lack of constructive argument which is characterised by disagreement with little explanation.^[16] Research exploring this typology and its third component – cumulative talk, in which ideas are shared but not built upon or critically analysed – has found “evidence of the link between the development of children’s communication skills and improvements in their critical thinking.”,^[17] leading to the suggestion that there should be more focus on these skills in classrooms, and commensurately teacher education programs,^[18][19] including in the context of computer use.^[20][21] This approach has been called Thinking Together.^[4] This approach has been used internationally particularly in Mexico^[22] and recently Chile.^[23] Mercer’s research into the educationally salient components of discourse has been grounded in ‘sociocultural discourse analysis’ – a theory to which he has contributed.^[16] Sociocultural discourse analysis focuses on what language is used to do, and in Mercer’s work, how it is used to share meaning, create common knowledge,^[10] and interthink.^[16]