The effects of a community-based literacy program on young children's language and conceptual development

Effects of a community-based literacy program on 1−, 2−, and 3-year-old children's language and conceptual development were assessed. University students were trained to teach Head Start parents effective methods for reading to their children. Families were randomly assigned to receive 18, 3, or 0 instructional visits. Results indicated that parents in the 18-instructional-visit program increased their participation in appropriate literacy behaviors such as reading to their children, teaching concepts to their children, and using the library, more than parents in the 0-instructional-visit groups. Children in the 18-instructional-visit program showed greater gains in language and conceptual development than children in the 0-instructional-visit group. Few differences were found between children in the 3-visti and 0-instructional-visit groups. Thus, only a high-intensity community-based intervention designed to train parents was effective in increasing emergent literacy in low-income ethnic children. Supported by Commission on National and Community Service grant 92HELOCA0039, the Dr. Seuss Foundation, Head Start, and the College of Sciences at San Diego State University. The authors gratefully acknowledge William A. Hillix, Leah K. Gensheimer, and Larry Fenson for their helpful reviews of drafts of this article, Florence Goldman for her training of tutors in techniques for developing emergent literacy, and the many students who assisted in the implementation and evaluation of this project.     

When Astronomy,Biology, and Culture Converge: Children's Conceptions About Birthdays

The authors investigated the development of children's understanding of birthdays using structured interviews of 102 Israeli children aged 4 to 9 years. To fully comprehend the concept of birthday, children must grasp the relationship between the social occasion (the birthday party), irreversible biological growth, and the cyclical nature of the calendar. The authors' findings affirmed that a child's early conception is wholly social and self-contained (birthday parties confer a new age) and that young children believe that age can be affected by multiplying or skipping birthdays. The mature conception is socially based, but it is integrated with additional conceptual subsystems: the irreversible and independent unfolding of biological growth and the cyclical aspect of time. This enables the child to go beyond a magical approach to birthday rituals.     

Assessing Intellectual Development: Three Approaches, One Sequence

In this paper, I compare three developmental assessment systems, employed to score a set of 152 interviews of engineering students: the Perry Scoring System (W. G. Perry, 1970), the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System (T. L. Dawson, 2004, 1/31/03), and the Lexical Abstraction Assessment System (LAAS; T. L. Dawson & M. Wilson, in press). Overall, the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System and Perry Scoring System agree with one another within the parameters of interrater agreement commonly reported for either one of the systems, and the Perry system and the LAAS agree with one another about as well as the LAAS and the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System, upon which the LAAS is based.     

Promoting Student Cognitive Development

This study focused on a theoretically grounded counselor preparation curriculum that was designed to enhance the moral reasoning and cognitive complexity of students as well as teach them the basic skills and theories of counselor education. The curriculum for the counselor training was rooted in a teaching–learning framework that included conditions for facilitating cognitive–developmental growth and skill and theoretical training components. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the developmental effects of the counselor training program as measured in 2 domains of cognitive development: conceptual level and level of moral reasoning. The participants were assessed at 3 different times: prior to entering the counseling program, 1-year into the program, and the month marking the completion of their 2nd year in the program. The Paragraph Completion Method (PCM) and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) were used as estimates of cognitive–developmental level. Analysis of the results revealed a significant gain for the group on the PCM between the 2nd and 3rd assessments and a positive but nonsignificant trend for the DIT.     

Memory abilities in generally gifted and excelling-in-mathematics adolescents

This paper presents part of a multidimensional examination of mathematical giftedness. The present study examined the memory mechanisms associated with general giftedness (G) and excellence in mathematics (E) in four groups of 10th–12th grade students (16–18 years old) varying in levels of G and E. The participants first underwent the Raven test for general ability evaluation and SAT-M — the mathematical excellence tests in order to design the study groups. Afterwards, the students were tested on a battery of three memory tests including tests for short-term (STM) and working memory (WM). The results reveal that the G factor is related to high STM for both phonological loop and phonological central executive mechanisms. It was also found that the E factor is associated with high visual–spatial memory (VSM), in particular with the visual central executive mechanism. An interaction effect was found between G and E factors regarding WM. The central executive mechanism appeared to be related to both G and E factors. In addition, gender differences were shown within the groups. Male participants performed better than their female counterparts on a phonological storage task and a phonological central executive mechanism task. The results can contribute to the theoretical knowledge regarding similarities and differences in memory mechanisms in G and E groups.     

Cultural influences on children's understanding of the human body and the concept of life

This study aimed to identify the age by which children begin to demonstrate a biological understanding of the human body and the idea that the purpose of body functioning is to maintain life. The study also explored the influence of education, culturally specific experiences and religion on knowledge acquisition in this domain. Children aged between 4 and 7 years from three different cultural backgrounds (White British, British Muslim, and Pakistani Muslim) were interviewed about the human body and its functioning. At least half of the 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds in each cultural group, and almost all 6‐ to 7‐year‐olds, referred to the maintenance of life when explaining organs' functions and so were classified as ‘life theorizers’. Pakistani Muslim children gave fewer biological responses to questions about organs' functions and the purpose of eating and breathing, but referred to life more than their British counterparts. Irrespective of cultural group, older children understood organ location and function better than younger children. These findings support Jaakkola and Slaughter's (2002, Br. J. Dev. Psychol., 20, 325) view that children's understanding of the body as a ‘life machine’ emerges around the ages of 4–5 years. They also suggest that, despite many similarities in children's ideas cross‐culturally, different educational input and culturally specific experiences influence aspects of their biological understanding.     

Knowing how to look predicts the ability to draw realistically

Some young children are able to create stunningly realistic drawings resembling those of adult artists. What perceptual abilities underlie this talent? This study examined two candidate skills on which adult artists excel: the ability to segment a complex form mentally (measured by the Block Design Task) and the ability to see hidden forms (measured by the Group Embedded Figures Test). Sixty‐seven 6‐ to 13‐year‐olds with a wide range of drawing abilities completed these tasks as well as an IQ test and an observational drawing task. While children who scored high on drawing realism outperformed those who scored low in drawing realism on both perceptual tasks, only detection of embedded figures predicted drawing realism. This occurred independently of age, gender, years of training, and verbal and non‐verbal IQ. There are certainly many contributors to this complex ability, but one component appears to be the tendency to see things more as they really are and thereby recognize the continuous contour of an object despite interference from other overlapping objects.     

Changing Minds: Developmental Education for Conceptual Change

The study investigates the impact of a teacher education program on preservice teachers' intellectual development, specifically, their capacity to deal with pedagogical complexity, to recognize agency as internal, and to be critically reflective, together with development of more autonomy-supportive motivating styles. The study combines a repeated-measures design with qualitative analysis of interview data. The sample comprises 175 third-year preservice teachers at an Australian university. The program is inspired by a teaching model, Developmental Education for Conceptual Change (DECC), which combines conceptual change theory with the Developmental Instruction Model based on the Perry scheme of intellectual and ethical development. Findings suggest that, on average, students' participation in the DECC program has made a modest contribution to their intellectual growth and tendency to adopt more autonomy-supportive pedagogical approaches. The model might have wider application in educational settings.     

Children's scale errors: A by‐product of lexical development?

Scale errors occur when young children seriously attempt to perform an action on an object which is impossible due to its size. Children vary substantially in the incidence of scale errors with many factors potentially contributing to these differences, such as age and the type of scale errors. In particular, the evidence for an inverted U‐shaped curve of scale errors involving the child's body (i.e., body scale errors), which would point to a developmental stage, is mixed. Here we re‐examine how body scale errors vary with age and explore the possibility that these errors would be related to the size and properties of children's lexicon. A large sample of children aged 18–30 months (N = 125) was tested in a scale error elicitation situation. Additionally, parental questionnaires were collected to assess children's receptive and expressive lexicon. Our key findings are that scale errors linearly decrease with age in childhood, and are more likely to be found in early talkers rather than in less advanced ones. This suggests that scale errors do not correspond to a developmental stage, and that one determinant of these errors is the speed of development of the linguistic and conceptual system, as a potential explanation for the individual variability in prevalence.     

Mature Ego Development: A Gateway to Ego Transcendence?

This paper explores whether the highest stage in ego development is indicative of ego-transcendence as I initially surmised. Overall, I will explore some of the similarities and differences between rational awareness of the limits of representational thought and genuine postsymbolic knowing. I will present the research territory with a linear and a non-linear model of human development. Both models can accommodate both Eastern and Western self theories including ego development theory and Alexander's levels of mind. Next, I will outline an alternative developmental trajectory based on Alexander's notion of the shifts in the dominant mode of processing from personal–verbal–discursive to transpersonal–postsymbolic. Then, I will present ego development theory as I conceive of it now and outline the important characteristics of the highest stage (Cook-Greuter, 1999). Finally, I will consider the question of whether and in what way the Unitive ego stage is related to higher consciousness and introduce two testable propositions to clarify the issue.     

Developing symbolic capacity one step at a time

The present research examines the ability of children as young as 4 years to use models in tasks that require scaling of distance along a single dimension. In Experiment 1, we found that tasks involving models are similar in difficulty to those involving maps that we studied earlier (Huttenlocher, J., Newcombe, N., & Vasilyeva, M. (1999). Spatial scaling in young children. Psychological Science, 10, 393-398). In Experiment 2, we found that retrieval tasks, where children indicate the location of a hidden object in an actual space are substantially more difficult than placement tasks, where children put a visible object in a particular location in an actual space. We discuss possible implications of the differential difficulty of retrieval and placement tasks for the understanding of symbolic development.     

A tutorial introduction to Bayesian models of cognitive development

We present an introduction to Bayesian inference as it is used in probabilistic models of cognitive development. Our goal is to provide an intuitive and accessible guide to the what, the how, and the why of the Bayesian approach: what sorts of problems and data the framework is most relevant for, and how and why it may be useful for developmentalists. We emphasize a qualitative understanding of Bayesian inference, but also include information about additional resources for those interested in the cognitive science applications, mathematical foundations, or machine learning details in more depth. In addition, we discuss some important interpretation issues that often arise when evaluating Bayesian models in cognitive science.