Development of strategic skills in impulsive and reflective children: a longitudinal study of metacognition

This study examined the relationships between metamemory and strategic behavior in impulsive and reflective children. One hundred thirty children from the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades participated. Seventy-seven of these children had been tested 3 years earlier on metamemory and cognitive tempo tasks. At pretraining, children were assessed on metamemory, cognitive tempo, summarization skills, and teacher ratings of impulsive behavior in the classroom. Next, children in three experimental groups received prose summarization instructions, summarization instructions in conjunction with metacognitive training about the importance of a reflective approach to learning, or no instructions. Following training, children were again measured on tempo, summarization skills, and teacher ratings of impulsivity. Analyses of strategy maintenance data indicated superior performance for children who had received both summarization and metacognitive training. Causal modeling analyses showed that early metamemory was an antecedent of later strategy acquisition. The dual role of metacognition as a precursor of later strategy acquisition and controller of lower level strategies was highlighted.     

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963)

Allatum est die 6 Aprilis 1965     

How learning contexts facilitate strategy transfer

The present study assessed the role of context in the acquisition and transfer of a mathematical strategy. One hundred and six children were assigned to four conditions: direct strategy instruction, guided discovery, direct teaching plus discovery, or a control condition. The intervention consisted of fourteen sessions during which the number-family strategy, useful for addition and subtraction, was taught. Third grade students in the guided discovery condition performed better than those in the direct instruction condition on far transfer problems that measured deep conceptual understanding. Students who had total or partial exposure to guided discovery held stronger beliefs and adopted more positive goals about the importance of mathematical understanding and peer collaboration, attributed less importance to task extrinsic reasons for success, and reported greater use of deep processing strategies than students exposed to direct, explicit instructions. Finally, students in the discovery conditions were able to communicate more effectively during problem solving than students in the direct instructions condition.     

Enhancing possible selves in Mexican American students

This project assessed the modifiability of possible selves in young Mexican American children. Three intervention conditions were compared in a pre- and posttest design: child-only intervention, parent and child intervention, and a no-intervention control. Following eight intervention sessions, children in the two intervention groups showed significant gains in understanding the characteristics associated with becoming a good student and in recognizing the value of education in bringing about future occupational goals. Children in the intervention conditions also reported greater interest in becoming a physician, judge, or pilot — occupations they had directly experienced during training. The parent intervention phase contributed little to augmenting the positive results attributable to the child intervention component.This research was conducted under the auspices of NIH Grant HD-24003. We wish to thank Maritza Robles and the staff of the Bilingual program of the South Bend, IN, Corporation for their support.     

Reading deficits in learning disabled children

The purpose of this study was to determine whether LD children exhibited problems in the processes of attention, memory, or syntactical awareness when decoding written prose. Eighteen LD children and 18 normal controls were matched for initial word recognition skills. Subjects were then trained to read a list of individual words to criterion. Subsequently, they were tested on their ability to decode the same words in paragraph form, presented both immediately after training, and then again one week later. Half the children read paragraphs following standard English syntax, while the other half read a syntactically scrambled version of the same paragraph. The results indicated that a major contributing factor in the reading (decoding) difficulties demonstrated by the LD children derived from problems of acquisition and retrieval from long-term memory storage. The results were discussed in terms of their implications for the developmental lag theory of learning disabilities.     

O terminach modalnych

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On modal terms