Microcomputers in schools: Impact on the social life of elementary classrooms

Microcomputers are becoming increasingly available to schools, but little research is available concerning the impact of this technology for children. Two studies were conducted to examine some possible social effects of the use of microcomputers in elementary school classrooms where children are learning to program in LOGO. First, the task-related interaction that children engaged in with each other was observed and recorded in two classrooms (8- to 9-year-old s, and 10- to 11-year-olds) as the children worked on both computer and non-computer tasks. The children in both classrooms were significantly more likely to collaborate with each other when they worked with the computers, when compared with their interaction over other classroom tasks. The second study examined children's perceptions of their peers as resources for help with a variety of classroom tasks. When compared with other work, the computer context was the one where children more consistently identified certain of their peers as resources for help.     

Conditional reasoning and the competence-performance issue: A developmental analysis of a training task

Empirical investigations of conditional reasoning have generally found that both children and young adults perform poorly on tasks that require the selection or evaluation of those propositions that test the truth status of conditional statements (if p then q). Earlier work (D. O'Brien & W. F. Overton, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 1980, 30, 44–60) suggested that poor performances with these tasks by young adults show improvement following the introduction of evidence that contradicts earlier faulty inferences, and this improvement generalizes to other conditional reasoning tasks. The effects of the contradiction training were not found with younger subjects. The present research is an extension of the contradiction training paradigm. Ten-, fourteen-, and eighteen-year-olds were tested to assess developmental differences in improvement with an evaluation and a conditional syllogism task. Significant improvement in performance was found for the twelfth grade students following the contradiction training, and this generalized across tasks. This effect was not found for the two younger groups. The usual poor performance of the oldest group is considered to be a false negative assessment of their conditional reasoning competency. Further, it is suggested that several correct performances of younger reasoners are false positive assessments of their conditional reasoning competency.     

Developmental effects of typicality and superordinate property dominance on sentence verification

Second graders (mean age, 8 years 3 months), fourth graders (mean age, 10 years 4 months), and adults verified telegraphic sentences with typical or atypical subject nouns and high or low dominant property predicates. The hypothesis tested was that the similarity in the attribute structures of category members to their superordinate prototype should be related to degree of typicality. Adult reaction time and error data supported the prototype model of semantic category structure. Second and fourth graders showed comparable property knowledge to adults, but evidenced different organizational patterns than predicted by the adult model. The results suggest that with development children learn to simultaneously use many attribute dimensions and to abstract the family resemblance structure and relative importance of category properties.     

Imitation in language development: If,when, and why

In order to explore the function of imitation for first language learning, imitative and spontaneous utterances were compared in the naturalistic speech of six children in the course of their development from single-word utterances (when mean length of utterance was essentially 1.0) to the emergence of grammar (when mean length of utterance approached 2.0). The relative extent of imitation, and lexical and grammatical variation in imitative and spontaneous speech were determined. There were inter-subject differences in the extent of imitation, but each child was consistent in the tendency to imitate or not to imitate across time. For those children who imitated, there were both lexical and grammatical differences in imitative and spontaneous speech, and a developmental shift from imitative to spontaneous use of particular words and semantic-syntactic relations between words. The results are discussed as evidence of an active processing of model utterances relative to the contexts in which they occur for information for language learning.     

Alcoholics treated by individualized behavior therapy: One year treatment outcome

One-year treatment outcome results are reported for 70 male alcoholics who, while hospitalized at Patton State Hospital, served as subjects in an experiment evaluating ‘Individualized Behavior Therapy (IBT)’ techniques. Initially, subjects had been assigned to a controlled drinking or non-drinking (abstinence) treatment goal, and then were randomly assigned to either an experimental group receiving IBT or a control group receiving conventional state hospital treatment. One year follow-up results demonstrated that IBT treated subjects had functioned significantly better than control subjects. Dependent variable measures included daily drinking disposition, general emotional adjustment, vocational satisfaction, occupational status, driving status and an index of residential status and stability. The results support the view that some ‘alcoholics’ can acquire and maintain controlled drinking behavior over at least a 1-yr follow-up interval. The difficulties of designing and applying sophisticated follow-up procedures and measures are discussed.     

Children's decision strategies and their adaptation to task characteristics

Recent research has established decision making as an important type of strategic problem solving. From this perspective, the present paper examines strategic decision behavior in children and, in particular, the ability to adapt decision strategies to task characteristics. Twelve-year-olds' strategies were identified through analyses of information search patterns with different-sized matrices of information. Using a similar procedure, Payne (1976, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16, 366–387) found that adults shifted to more efficient (but less “optimal”) strategies as task complexity increased. The present study indicates that, by 12 years of age, children understand many of the basic concepts of strategic decision making, such as compensation and elimination, and, like adults, they modify their strategies appropriately in response to complexity. However, their behavior differs from that reported for adults in that the distinctions among specific decision strategies are not clear cut, and there is frequent use of less demanding, cost-cutting strategies even with smaller decision tasks. Memory capacity and topic interest also affect decision strategy. The results support the feasibility of further developmental study of decision strategies. Analytical techniques developed here for use with children may profitably be applied in studies with adults as well.     

A case of literal alexia: evidence for a disconnection syndrome

We describe a patient with literal alexia, agraphia, and only minimal aphasia, resulting from a left occipito-parietal ischemic infarction. Neither impaired visual processing nor impaired oral output could explain the patient's letter reading deficit, since he retained the ability to match letters of mixed case, and remained able to spell aloud and to pronounce and comprehend orally spelled words. His residual word reading was characterized by better performance for nouns and highly imageable words than for functors , poorly imageable words, and nonwords. We propose that this patient's letter reading deficit was due to a partial disconnection of his visual from his linguistic systems, with residual word reading accomplished by a semantically mediated compensatory mechanism. We suggest, further, that the dissociations between word and letter reading observed in some alexic individuals may be attributed, in part, to a difference in the relative contributions of dorsal and ventral occipital structures to the reading process.