![[just a line]](../../images/JPS-HR-2.GIF)
![[JPS
logo]](../../images/JPS-logo-sm.GIF){kind=logo}
Paper Session 1:
(Sonata 3, Thursday 10:30 - 12:00)
Chair: Cynthia Lightfoot, SUNY College at Plattsburgh
This study examined children's skill at using written plans to construct objects, as well as the influence of working with a more experienced partner on the development of this skill. The use of established plans is a common activity in literate cultures and such plans appear in many forms, e.g. diagrams and maps. Sixteen 4-year-old and sixteen 6-year-old children and their mothers participated in three problem-solving sessions that involved constructing a toy from multiple pieces using a pictorial, step-by-step plan of construction. The first and third sessions were a child-only pretest and posttest, respectively. The second session involved children working with their mothers. Older children showed greater skill at a number of activities related to using the written plans. They referred to the plan more often and these references were both anticipatory and confirmatory. Experience reading plans and assembling objects with a more experienced partner were related to the use of these skills in the posttest by older but not younger children.
This study examined children's use of prospective memory, this is remembering to attend to a future event, during planning. Five- and eight-year old children participated in a task that involved planning and retrieving items from a model grocery store. Seventy-two children participated, with 16 (8 at each age) participating alone, 16 (8 at each age) participating with a peer, and 40 (20 at each age) participating with their mother. Analysis focused on two activities that were to occur at the end of each planned shopping trip: remembering that at the end of the shopping trip the toy shopper was to be moved to the cash register so that he/she could pay for the grocery items and that after the shopping trip was completed the shopper was to be moved out of the store through the doorway. Older children remembered both these prospective activities more than younger children. However, for both younger and older children, planning with another person facilitated children's prospective memory for these planned activity. This suggests that when complex memory activities, like prospective memory, are embedded in planning, children's skill at this type of remembering improves with age and is influenced by the social context of performance.
The aim of the present study was to directly test whether learner activity and strategy explanation enhance the success of peer tutoring. Tutors taught a same-age, same-sex friend (tutee) a planning task. Half of the tutors received training which emphasized strategy instruction and the importance of an active role of the tutees. As expected, tutor-tutee dyads in the trained condition showed greater efficiency in problem-solving during their interactions than dyads in the untrained condition. Furthermore, tutees taught by trained tutors had significantly higher individual posttest strategy scores than tutees taught by untrained tutors. This is the first study to provide experimental evidence that an intervention emphasizing strategy instruction and an active role for the learner will improve tutoring effectiveness.
Piaget (1973) envisioned the role of the teacher to be that of a "mentor stimulating initiative and research." In my work in unstructured learning environments I have found that teachers can mentor children's understanding without undercutting the process of individual construction of knowledge. Reframing introduces a new way to think about the problem, which frees us from the boundaries of our current conceptions. It is one of the ways to re-envision teaching in support of the development of children's spontaneous thought.
Paper Session 2:
(Sonata 5, Thursday 10:30 - 12:00)
Chair: Kurt W. Fisher, Harvard University
Center for Developmental Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Developmentalists are increasingly employing epigenetic approaches to the study of cognition. However, some researchers may hold assumptions that depart from a genuine epigenetic perspective. We will highlight three issues that have been inconsistently addressed: a) innate competencies, b) contextual primacy, and c) the status of cognition within a holistic, developmental system. This latter point is a particular focus; we review four different ways that cognition has been conceptualized by epigenetic researchers. We suggest that these ambiguities do not reflect an inability for epigenetic approaches to incorporate cognition, but rather result from a mismatch between original tenets of epigenesis and traditional methodologies used by cognitive developmentalists.
This paper will consider the implications of three very different readings of Piaget's works. Chapman's (1989) account of the "unknown Piaget," Vidal's (1994) reconstruction of "Piaget before Piaget," and Beilin's "Piaget's New Theory" will be considered. It will be argued that such readings suggest a postmodern understanding of Genetic Epistemology, albeit with drastic implications. Such readings subvert some of the traditional topics that have been part of the Piaget opus; most notably, structure, stage, and operation diminish in importance. The problems of epistemology are replaced by questions of interpretation; the notion of a human subject as an agent begs clarification; and the varieties of interpretive actions need explication.
This paper is a comparison of the English translation of Piaget's The Origins of Intelligence and The Construction of the Real with the French originals. Three substantial findings are discussed: 1) many of Piaget's biological metaphors are altered in favor of mechanistic ones, 2) some of Piaget's metaphors are entirely eliminated, and 3) a frequently used philosophical terms are routinely rendered in mechanistic terms. I conclude that the French originals offer more support for the assertion of Piaget's "organismic" model, and that the reader's understanding of Piaget is hindered by the exclusion of Piaget's metaphors from the English texts.
New evidence from various scientific disciplines supports Piaget's concept of a tertium quid (middle-ground) position for evolution. In the past, there was concern that this position, which was essentially against the emphasis chance in the Neo-Darwinism, was a weak part of Piaget's theory. Current research and writings not only bolster Piaget's position on evolution and related meaning of equilibration but also shed new light on problems of reductionism, a technique firmly at the fore-front of scientific methodology.
Paper Session 3:
(Sonata 5, Thursday 1:30 - 3:00)
Chair: Marvin Berkowitz, Marquette University
The study was conducted in Jerusalem, Israel and on kibbutzim with 72 English speaking children from second, fifth, and eighth grades. The three events in the interview varied by the level of threat (i.e., least, moderate, high) to a target character. It was found that more participants prescribed passive reactions to the least and moderately threatening events while more participants prescribed aggressive reactions to the most threatening event. Moreover, participants evaluated physically defensive reactions to be more acceptable as level of threat increased. Finally, more participants judged authority as legitimate in making rules to allow physically defensive reactions as level of threat increased.
It has long been established that when children and adults are asked to provide explanations about a given concept, they are likely to produce gestural responses along with their speech. The purpose of the present study was to extend our understanding of gesture in two ways: (1) to examine the role of gesture in moral reasoning, and (2) to determine if gesture/speech mismatch can serve as a marker of moral reasoning transition. Fifteen adolescents were videotaped while providing explanations to two moral dilemmas. Results demonstrated that individuals produced gestures while explaining their answers to moral dilemmas and these gestures could be coded for level of moral reasoning. Moreover, several adolescents produced gestures reflecting a level of moral reasoning that was different from that level of moral reasoning conveyed in speech. This latter finding suggest that gesture/speech mismatch may be a way in which to operationalize moral reasoning transition.
This paper sketches the outlines of an explicitly "Vygotskian" approach to moral development and education. This approach, which extends to Vygotsky's ideas about "zone of proximal development" to the moral domain, offers a sensitivity to context and culture, and an appreciation of the power of social interaction, that are largely lacking in existing approaches to moral development and education.
Proponents of character education argue that hearing or reading moral stories builds moral literacy. They assume that children comprehend moral stories in the same way that adults do and that adults understand these stories in a uniform fashion. Both assumptions are specious. This research will present evidence that suggests moral stories are understood differently by individuals with different levels of development. Persons who reason at more complex levels of Kholberg's justice scheme processed moral events in stories differently. They are better able to recall everything in complex moral stories, including moral reasoning, even after reading comprehension skills are factored out.
Paper Session 4:
(Sonata 3, Friday 9:00 - 10:30)
Chair: Michael Mascolo, Merrimack College
Preschoolers' understanding of pretense as non-representational "situated action" was explored in a series of 5 studies that modified Lillard's (1991) quasi-logical design by loosening its constraints and eliminating contradictory information. Children's response to the questions that probed their understanding of pretense varied as a function of the format in which the information was cast: correct answers increased in the conditions that eliminated cognitive conflict and reference to action as justification for responses declined markedly. A majority of children explained pretense in terms of mental referents.
This paper addresses the claim that a picture is not only an entity in itself, but also a representation of an entity. This problem is addressed by examining children's comprehension of both make-believe and literal events whose outcomes are represented in picture form. To succeed on such a task, young children must learn to map from either an actual or imagined event to an iconic representation of that event. The results of our research suggest that the ability to do so occurs at approximately age 2, and that it develops synchronously for both real and imagined events.
Observational pickup and deferred imitation of actions with objects was studied at 12, 18, and 24 mos. in connection with two main classes of actions, Sequentially-Coordinated and Serial, using modeling vs. control group design. There was an absence of reliable deferred imitation at 12 mos. for any of six tasks; in contrast, 18 mos. proved to be a transitional age wherein some tasks were accomplished by large majorities, while others were not. Further gains were made by 24 mos., in particular with respect to Sequential tasks, whereas Serial tasks continued to be difficult for a majority of children at 24 mos.
The present paper will address the conflicting views about the origins of mental representation. The paper is divided into three sections. First, Piaget's explanation of the development of mental representation will be discussed. It will be argued that Piaget's explanation runs into conceptual problems and is in need of modification. Second, such a modification will be proposed by drawing on Jonas Langer's research and integrating his findings with Piaget's account, second-order operations are a prerequisite for mental representations, and mental representation emerges during the second year of life. Third, J. Mandler's image-schema theory will be discussed. It will be argued that the empirical findings on which Mandler bases her arguments are inconclusive, and that her theory faces several conceptual problems.
Paper Session 5:
(Sonata 5, Friday 9:00 - 10:30)
Chair: David Moshman, University of Nebraska
This paper will explore the dialectic that exists, when developing expertise, between the personal construction of knowledge and its interiorization through participating in cultural activities. For individual members of a culture, expertise develops through mediated learning in which more knowledgeable others introduce cultural knowledge to the individual. In the individual, expertise develops dialectically through progressive equilibriums in which knowledge that produces a more adequate fit for certain social, or pragmatic niches is selected, and replaces less able forms of representation. Individuals are expected to advance and surpass existing knowledge by improving their individual understanding, thus giving back to their culture.
Much recent evidence has suggested that particularly Piaget's findings concerning the formal operational stage can be called into question in areas where formal operations are used in pragmatic reasoning. This paper specifically examines the universality of this stage cross-culturally from sociogenetic, cultural psychology and narrative psychology, and in situations within this culture in which logical problems that typify formal operations are embedded in every day contexts. These positions reconfigure in important ways ideas such as the competence/performance distinction and the effect of the epistemic isolation of the subject on logical reasoning.
The development of metacognitive skill--the ability to reflect on one's own cognition (Kuhn, 1991)--is the focus of this work. The methodological challenge of assessing metacognition (Schraw & Moshman, 1994) is addressed using a method of peer communication, and the development of metacognitive understanding over a period of months is examined using a microgenetic method (Kuhn, 1995). Categories were formulated to differentiate metacognitive levels of understanding of scientific reasoning tasks having both physical science and social science content. Some participants showed progress in metacognitive understanding with repeated engagement with the tasks, while others did not. Correspondences between strategic and metacognitive advancements are examined, and future research directions are suggested.
Three to seven year olds judged sensibleness, anomaly, and implausibility for persons, natural kinds, and artifacts, and provided explanations for their judgments. A sentence judgment task and a picture forced choice task were administered. Previous studies demonstrated that young children can competently judge sensibleness and anomaly. However, implausibility constitutes an interesting test of children's domain-specific knowledge; they must recognize that the information presented, though atypical, is domain-consistent. Even the youngest children easily judged sensibleness and anomaly. Performance on the implausible items was inferior to that on the sensible and anomalous items, and was best in the persons domain. Thus, domain-specific knowledge is not entirely stable even at age seven.
Paper Session 6:
(Sonata 3, Friday 10:45 - 12:15)
Chair: Anita Meehan, Kutztown University
Learning thermal physics involves conceptual restructuring. Given that mental models are used by students to reason about thermal phenomena, we teach with models, some providing the syntax (mathematical structure) of the theory, some its semantics. Six ninth-graders were taught with models. Protocol analyses suggest that the different teaching models and students' own models interact in complex ways to produce conceptual restructuring. Students' conceptual change seems embodied in mental models, some internalized teaching models, other synthetic models, and still others close to students' initial models.
The conceptual change perspective tends to minimize the role of language in theory change. Researchers argue that adult terms do not necessarily map onto the same child categories (Carey, 1985; 1991) Because of this, the concepts themselves, rather than their verbal labels, have been the focus of research (Carey, 1985). Although there are benefits to this approach, we argue that the way certain verbal labels are used by students can affect learning. In illustration, we describe how the everyday use of "heat" and "temperature" interferes with students' abilities to differentiate the scientific concepts needed to acquire a textbook understanding of thermal phenomenon.
To examine verbalization of problem solving strategies as a mechanism, for learning in peer interaction, a control study was conducted. This study controlled for the presence of another peer while examining the learner's verbalization during independent problem solving. 52 children participated in three video taped sessions of pre-test, "working alone," and post-test. When verbalization was examined, we found that children who verbalized while working alone were more likely to learn than children who did not verbalize. The findings suggest that peer interaction facilitates learning by providing an opportunity for self-guided verbalization in problem-solving.
Prior research has examined children's ability to imagine spatial transformations to compare shapes and orientations. In this work, we look at children's ability to use imagery to depict causal interactions between physical objects. Fifty-four children, from 3 to 12 years, saw cups of two widths that were filled to the same level with pretend water. They tilted each cup until the pretend water touched the rim of each cup. Children at all ages correctly tilted thin cups further than wide cups. In contrast, when asked verbally whether one cup would pour sooner than the other, they were rarely correct.
Paper Session 7:
(Sonata 5, Friday 10:45 - 12:15)
Chair: Susan Gelman, University of Michigan
Starting from Piagetian perspective, a theoretical distinction between recognition and conceptualization is presented. Infants' object directed action was subjected to sequential analyses for the investigation of categorical abilities in infancy. Seven-month-olds employed the same pattern of object interaction independent of changes in the object attributes. Ten-month-olds differed in that changes in their action patterns corresponded to changes in the object attributes. In a test of categorization, only the 10-month olds demonstrated results consistent with an interpretation of categorization. The necessity of distinguishing between recognition and categorization in studies of infants' developing conceptual abilities is affirmed.
We examined lexical extension in 18- to 30-month-olds, employing a match-to-sample task. The results of the study presented here, along with our previous work, indicate that perceptual similarity plays a major role in lexical extension, with basic level responses decreasing significantly as the perceptual similarity of taxonomic choices decrease. We found that: (a) 27-month-olds are able to extend a novel word at the basic level when both object kind and perceptual similarity co-occur: and, (b) 20-month-olds rely primarily on perceptual similarity for extension decisions, although the labels applied to objects do not yet trigger taxonomic responding. A developmental progression, following the lexical principles framework of Golinkoff, Mervis, and Hirsh-Pasek (1994), which captures the apparently qualitative changes that characterize children's lexical extensions, is suggested.
When do children recognize that two apples are numerically equivalent to two honks or two jumps? The present study used a nonverbal matching task to test preschoolers' cardinal equivalence judgments for a variety of set types and presentations. The results revealed a gradual progression in the ability to recognize equivalence during the age period of 3 to 4 years. This begins with success on comparisons of highly similar, static, homogeneous sets. Mastery of the conventional counting system appeared to be necessary for some, but not all comparisons.
Recent data on young children's and adults' inductive inference, that is, generalizations made under uncertainty, indicate that characteristics of the task determine the similarities attended to when making inductions. A model designed to account for this finding, the Task-Filter model of inductive inference, predicts that subjects evaluate a pool of potential stimulus features with regard to the nature of the inductive task. Subjects create mapping between critical aspects of the task and features of the stimulus array, with activation level of stimulus features depending on relevance to the task. Subjects verify that the stimulus feature with greatest activation is available for comparison, and report that feature. All features activated above a certain threshold are primed for future inductive decisions. Four sources of developmental change are proposed and evaluated in light of existing data: knowledge- and attention-based broadening of the initial feature pool, increasing ability to notice and understand relevant task information, age-related changes in response strategies, and increasingly efficient inhibition of primed features that are inappropriate for the current task. Ongoing research to evaluate and expand the model will be described.
Paper Session 8:
(Sonata 3, Friday 1:30 - 3:00)
Chair: Joyce Benenson, McGill University
The study examined the development of tolerance. 240 children (grades 1st, 4th, and 7th) were interviewed about unfair social practices taking place in their own or in another culture. The findings indicated that children's tolerance for such practice does not proceed unidimensionally from lack of tolerance to complete tolerance but is, rather, affected by the belief underlying the practice, the context in which the practice takes place, and what (i.e., belief, practice and person) they are asked to tolerate. Although overall children become more tolerant with age, even adolescents do not display a blanket approval of all beliefs and practices.
The sense of agency has been described in theoretical and empirical research as an integral part of the self system which may promote positive development. Yet the field remains without a conceptual framework for characterizing and interpreting agentic behavior. This paper presents a definition and conceptualization of agency which is inclusive of the transactions between the self, contexts for life experience, perceptions of contexts and resultant behaviors. Agentic behavior resides in the individual's awareness of him or herself as an active agent in that he or she can make choices even though the outcomes may be positive or negative in social terms.
Previous research claims that children as young as 3 can distinguish intended and unintended actions. However, this research may simply test whether children knew the outcome was desired or not. Preschoolers played a bean bag toss game that allowed intentions to be separated from desires. Whether they hit the target they intended was independent of whether they won the desired prize. Children as young as 4 had no difficulty telling which target they had intended to hit, regardless of whether they actually hit it or whether they received a prize. Findings are discussed in terms of children's use of a desire-outcome matching strategy.
The role of parental linguistic input on the acquisition of the cognitive internal state word know by 2- to 8-year old children was examined. The levels of meaning of cognitive words can be categorized hierarchically along the dimensions of conceptual difficulty and abstractness (see Booth and Hall, 1994, 1995). The study found that children and their parents expressed low levels of meaning less frequently, whereas they expressed high levels of meaning more frequently as a function of age. The children's use of know was also correlated positively with their mean length utterance (MLU) and their number of different words. The children's use of know was positively correlated with parental use of those same words and with parental MLU. Finally, children tended to use know more to refer to themselves than to refer to others, whereas adults tended to use know equally to refer to self and others.
|
© 1996 The Jean Piaget
Society
Send comments to: Chris Lalonde (webmaster@piaget.org) Last update: 8 June 1997 |
|
|---|