Training in clinical child psychology: doing it right

Discusses (a) what roles the specialty of clinical child psychology fulfills and how societal and professional changes have enhanced the need for the specialty, (b) how the field defines itself, (c) how models of training are conceptualized for the specialty, and (d) how some training programs implement specialty training with broad, interdisciplinary components. Clinical child psychology is a professional field of research and practice that, when adequate training is provided, properly deserves a places as a specialty. The dangers of overspecialization and narrowness are more likely present in traditional clinical (adult) psychology than in clinical child psychology, especially when the clinical child training is done in a broadly comprehensive and integrated manner.     

A subset selection technique for scoring items on a multiple choice test

On a multiple-choice test in which each item hask alternative responses, the test taker is permitted to choose any subset which he believes contains the one correct answer. A scoring system is devised that depends on the size of the subset and on whether or not the correct answer is eliminated. The mean and variance of the score per item are obtained. Methods are derived for determining the total number of items that should be included on the test so that the average score on all items can be regarded as a good measure of the subject's knowledge. Efficiency comparisons between conventional and the subset selection scoring procedures are made. The analogous problem ofr > 1 correct answers for each item (withr fixed and known) is also considered.The authors are grateful to M. Aitkin, C. Coombs, F. Lord, and the reviewers for their comments and suggestions.     

Blickets and babies: the development of causal reasoning in toddlers and infants

Previous research has suggested that preschoolers possess a cognitive system that allows them to construct an abstract, coherent representation of causal relations among events. Such a system lets children reason retrospectively when they observe ambiguous data in a rational manner (e.g., D. M. Sobel, J. B. Tenenbaum, & A. Gopnik, 2004). However, there is little evidence that demonstrates whether younger children possess similar inferential abilities. In Experiment 1, the authors extended previous findings with older children to examine 19- and 24-month-olds' causal inferences. Twenty-four-month-olds' inferences were similar to those of preschoolers, but younger children lacked the ability to make retrospective causal inferences, perhaps because of performance limitations. In Experiment 2, the authors designed an eye-tracking paradigm to test younger participants that eliminated various manual search demands. Eight-month-olds' anticipatory eye movements, in response to retrospective data, revealed inferences similar to those of 24-month-olds in Experiment 1 and preschoolers in previous research. These data are discussed in terms of associative reasoning and causal inference.     

Can You Do It? How Preschoolers Judge Whether Others Have Learned

Two experiments investigated how preschoolers judge whether learning has occurred. Experiment 1 showed that 3- and 4-year-olds used an individual's ability to demonstrate knowledge to judge whether he/she had learned something, regardless of that individual's claim about whether he/she had learned. Experiment 2 considered whether children responded based on just the character's demonstrative ability or whether children integrate various pieces of mental state knowledge to make a judgment about learning. Using a similar procedure, preschoolers were first told that the character claimed to be ignorant and then that they learned or did not learn a piece of information. In these cases, judgments of learning changed when the characters' claims and demonstrative abilities conflicted. These results suggest that children's understanding of learning involves the integration of various pieces of mental state knowledge. This process starts in the preschool years, but these data also suggest that crucial developments are taking place after age 4.     

Children’s developing understanding of the relation between variable causal efficacy and mechanistic complexity

Two experiments investigated 3–4-year-olds’ ability to infer the causal mechanisms for a pair of lights. In both experiments the exterior of the two lights appeared identical. In Experiment 1, one light displayed a stable activation pattern of a single color while the other light displayed a variable pattern of activation by cycling through a series of different colors (i.e., a more varied effect). Children were asked to judge which light had a more complex internal structure. Four-year-olds were more likely to match the light with the more variable effect with a more complex internal mechanism and the light with the more stable effect with a less complex mechanism. Three-year-olds’ responses were at chance. Experiment 2 replicated this finding when the activation patterns of the two lights were described verbally but never demonstrated. Taken together, these results suggest that 4-year-olds appreciate that the variability of an object’s causal efficacy is related to the complexity of its internal mechanistic structure.     

The Development of Diagnostic Inference About Uncertain Causes

Young children can engage in diagnostic reasoning. However, almost all research demonstrating such capacities has investigated children’s inferences when the individual efficacy of each candidate cause is known. Here we show that there is development between ages five and seven in children’s ability to reason about the number of candidate causes whose efficacy is unknown (Study 1). We also find development between ages six and seven in these abilities when children are presented with several uncertain candidate causes in an additive causal system (Study 2). These findings demonstrate how children’s diagnostic reasoning abilities develop beyond the preschool years and illustrate possible relations between children’s developing diagnostic inference and scientific reasoning capacities.     

Spacing effects in real‐world classroom vocabulary learning

As a primary goal, educators often strive to maximize the amount of information pupils remember. In the lab, psychologists have found efficient memory strategies for retaining school‐related materials. One such strategy is the spacing effect, a memory advantage that occurs when learning is distributed across time instead of crammed into a single study session. Spaced learning is not often explicitly utilized in actual classrooms, perhaps due to a paucity of research in applied settings and with school‐aged children. The current study examined the spacing effect in real‐world fifth‐grade classrooms. We taught 39 children unfamiliar English words using both massed and spaced learning. Five weeks later, we tested vocabulary recall. One‐week spacing produced superior long‐term retention compared to massed learning. This finding demonstrates that the spacing effect can be generalized to vocabulary learning in applied settings and middle‐school‐aged children. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bayes and blickets: effects of knowledge on causal induction in children and adults

People are adept at inferring novel causal relations, even from only a few observations. Prior knowledge about the probability of encountering causal relations of various types and the nature of the mechanisms relating causes and effects plays a crucial role in these inferences. We test a formal account of how this knowledge can be used and acquired, based on analyzing causal induction as Bayesian inference. Five studies explored the predictions of this account with adults and 4-year-olds, using tasks in which participants learned about the causal properties of a set of objects. The studies varied the two factors that our Bayesian approach predicted should be relevant to causal induction: the prior probability with which causal relations exist, and the assumption of a deterministic or a probabilistic relation between cause and effect. Adults' judgments (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) were in close correspondence with the quantitative predictions of the model, and children's judgments (Experiments 3 and 5) agreed qualitatively with this account.     

Children's knowledge of the relation between intentional action and pretending

Two experiments investigated preschoolers’ understanding of the relation between pretending and intentional action. In Experiment 1, both 3- and 4-year olds recognized that characters whose actions were intended as pretense were pretending. However, children also judged that characters whose actions gave them the appearance of an entity unintentionally were pretending to be that entity. In Experiment 2, 3-year olds reliably chose a character whose pretense actions were intentional as pretending over a character whose actions were guided by another intention. These data suggest that preschoolers have some understanding of the role of intentional action in pretense.