The Development of Text Evaluation and Revision Skills

Children in elementary school settings generally do not revise frequently or skillfully, but relatively little is known about the source of their difficulty with revision. 3 studies were conducted to investigate children's developing ability to evaluate and revise problematic texts. In the first 2 studies, fourth-grade (10 years) and sixth-grade (12 years) students were asked to evaluate 3 types of problematic texts and suggest changes to make the texts easier to understand. In the third study, children were asked whether 4 types of revisions improved the comprehensibility of problematic stories. The results showed, first, that older children detected more of the text problems; second, that when younger children spontaneously detected a text problem they were as likely as older children to revise the text adequately; third, that younger children were less able than older children to revise text problems that they had originally overlooked; and, fourth, that younger children overestimated the informativeness of several types of revisions. The results suggest that developmental differences in constructive processing contribute to children's ability to detect and revise text problems.     

Children's understanding of the implications of causal attributions for emotional experiences

Children's perceptions of how the cause of achievement outcomes affects individuals' emotional responses were studied. In Study 1, children aged 6 and 7, 9 and 10, and 12 and 13 listened to stories describing hypothetical children's achievement outcomes. Success and failure were explicitly attributed to luck, ability, effort, or another person's intervention. After each story subjects rated the story child's emotional reactions. Only seventh graders associated pride and shame exclusively with outcomes attributed to ability and effort. Guilt was strongly associated with effort attributions, and surprise was associated with luck attributions for fourth- and seventh-grade children but not for first-grade children. The attribution-affect linkages assumed by the older children are the same as those found in previous studies of adults. In Study 2, children aged 6 and 7, 9 and 10, and 12 and 13 rated the cause of the outcomes in the same stories according to Weiner's controllability and locus dimensions. Children's placement of specific attributions on these dimensions was used to explain age differences in their beliefs about the effect of the attributions on emotional responses.     

The effects of morphological structure on reading proficiency—A developmental study

The present report with three inter-related studies examined the effects of morphological complexity on reading proficiency in 103 fourth graders, 88 fifth graders and 107 sixth graders trichotomized into below average, average and above average readers. The reaction time paradigm and the developmental framework with three age groups provided more sensitive and stable results for inferring mental processes in accessing the lexicon. Study 1 on lexical decision with visually presented words and non-words with different morphemic boundaries suggests that words can be accessed in a decomposed state as morphemes by children. Study 2 and the complementary Study 3 requiring the vocalization of derived or base forms of words primed by target items in sentence frames indicate that words might be accessed in full forms. Further, the depth of derivational morphology and of base morphology with correlated phonological changes affect reading proficiency.     

Look Again: Pedagogical Demonstration Facilitates Children’s Use of Counterevidence

In learning about the world children must not only make inferences based on minimal evidence, but must deal with conflicting evidence and question those initial inferences when they appear to be wrong. Four experiments (N = 144) found that young children were significantly more likely to revise their initial inferences when conflicting evidence was explicitly demonstrated for them. Four- and five-year-old children saw deterministic evidence about which objects had causal powers, and then saw counterevidence conflicting with that initial pattern. Critically, the conflicting evidence was either demonstrated communicatively and pedagogically, or produced in an intentional but nonpedagogical manner. Only when evidence was explicitly demonstrated for them did children revise their initial hypothesis and use a subtle clue to infer the correct rule.     

Learning from analogy-enhanced science text

The present study examined the role that an elaborate analogy can play when middle school students learn a major concept from a science text. The elaborate analogy had both graphic and text components that integrated and mapped key features from an analog (a factory) to the target concept (an animal cell). The target features were the functions of the cell parts. In Experiment 1, eighth graders who studied an analogy-enhanced text had greater immediate and 2-week recall of cell-part functions than students who studied a control text. In Experiment 2, sixth graders who studied an analogy-enhanced text considered the target concept to be more understandable than students who studied a control text. The sixth graders who studied the analogy-enhanced text also had greater immediate and 2-week retention, as measured by both recall and recognition. In both experiments, the analogy was interpreted as acting as a mediator between the students' existing knowledge and the new knowledge in the text. The analogy mapped a familiar, concrete schema onto that of the target concept, making the target concept more understandable and memorable. Implications for the meaningful learning of science text are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 1129–1149, 1998.     

Realizing that you don't understand: elementary school children's awareness of inconsistencies.

2 factors were proposed to affect awareness of one's comprehension failure: the inferential processing requirements, and the kind of standards against which comprehension is evaluated. These studies investigated elementary school children's awareness of their own comprehension failure when presented with inconsistent information. Study 1 showed that children were more likely to notice explicit than implicit contradictions. However, even 12-year-olds judged as comprehensible a sizable proportion of essays with seemingly obvious inconsistencies. Yet, the children had good probed recall of the information, the logical capacity to draw the inferences, and were not generally reluctant to question the experimenter. In subsequent studies children were (a) asked to repeat sentences in order to guarantee that the 2 inconsistent propositions were concurrently activated in working memory, and (b) warned about the existence of a problem in order to promote more careful evaluation. Taken together, the results suggest that to notice inconsistencies children have to encode and store the information, draw the relevant inferences, retrieve and maintain the (inferred) propositions in working memory, and compare them. Third through sixth graders do not spontaneously carry out those processes that they are capable of carrying out.     

《阿黑小史》的悲剧命运——从人物形象角度分析

在沈从文的乡村爱情小说中《阿黑小史》是其悲剧小说的代表作之一,但其独特之处是,《阿黑小史》由《油坊》、《秋》、《病》、《婚前》、《雨》五个篇章组成,各自独立,却又前后贯通,它不同于传统短篇小说的格局.沈从文用最平和、最幽静的语调向我们描述了湘西的人性美与自然美.一切似乎都在朝美的方向发展,但在末篇作者却以闪电般的速度转变了人物命运,并且直到小说结束,也没有一处明确提到或者涉及导致悲剧产生的原因.就此本篇论文立足于文本,分析沈从文在谋划人物形象、人物形象间的结构时,早已潜伏其中的人物命运.     

Pictures and children’s story recall: Some questions of durability

It has been found that story-relevant pictures help children recall stories. But do those gains endure over time? Those of the second graders in this study did, over a 3-day period. Although they had more to forget, children aided by pictures did not forget more than those in a control group.     

Cross‐ and mono‐linguistic text processing in bilingual children

Bilingual German fourth‐graders are expected to develop greater linguistic awareness than monolingual children and therefore should habitually apply different text‐processing strategies compared with German monolingual fourth‐graders when comprehending and recalling a text. Bilingual children are expected to process texts from the bottom up, from the text base to the gist, whereas monolingual children should engage in top‐down processing, which is indicated, for example, by more text intrusions and inferences. This research attempts to clarify whether bilinguals show this shift in direction of processing when they process cross‐linguistic versus mono‐linguistic texts. The results of Experiment 1 supported our main hypothesis. Monolingual German fourth‐graders had more intrusions than same‐aged German–English (L1–L2) bilingual children. In Experiment 2, nearly balanced German–English and German‐dominant children were tested separately in within‐language free recall in both languages and in across‐language text recall. For nearly balanced bilingual children, within‐ and cross‐language recall was equally efficient in both languages but not for German‐dominant bilingual children – in their recall, more intrusions appeared in their L2 recall. Top‐down processing seems to increase when it is in the weaker language. Engaging in bottom‐up processing apparently is associated with cognitive functioning in L1.     

Age Differences in Understandings of Disease Causality: AIDS, Colds, and Cancer

The development of concepts of disease causality was explored by asking 9-, 11-, and 13-year-olds and college students about risk factors for AIDS, colds, and cancer. Their knowledge became more accurate and differentiated with age. Although younger children knew a good deal about what causes each of the diseases, they lacked knowledge of what does not cause them, often inferring that risk factors for one disease, especially AIDS, cause other diseases as well. Knowledge of true risk factors for a disease was largely independent of knowledge of non-risk factors, and knowledge of one disease was largely independent of knowledge of another. These findings provide clues as to how disease understandings evolve with age and suggest that health educators must both understand students' current knowledge structures and explicitly teach students to make important differentiations between risk and non-risk factors for a given disease and between distinct diseases.     

Age and Gender Differences in Children's Self- and Task Perceptions during Elementary School

We examined the development of children's self- and task perceptions during the elementary school years. 865 first-, second-, and fourth-grade children (ages 7–10) completed questionnaires assessing their perceptions of competence in, and valuing of, activities in several activity domains (math, reading, sports, and instrumental music). Factor analyses showed that even the first graders had differentiated self-beliefs for the various activities. These analyses also indicated that children's competence beliefs and subjective task values formed distinct factors. Analyses assessing age and gender differences in children's beliefs showed that for all the activities except sports, younger children's (particularly the first graders) perceptions of competence and subjective task values were more positive than the beliefs of the older children. Boys had more positive competence beliefs and values than did girls for sport activities, and more positive competence beliefs for mathematics. Girls had more positive competence beliefs and values than did boys for reading and music activities.     

Preservice Teachers Map Compassion: Connecting Social Studies and Literacy Through Nonfictional Animal Stories

Nonfiction stories of animal compassion were used in this literacy-social studies integrated lesson to address both efferent and aesthetic stances in transmediation of text from picture books to maps. Preservice early childhood and elementary teachers chose places from the nine recent children’s stories, symbolizing them on a map while completing other map elements such as legend, index, title, and compass rose. Compassion and social-emotional skills were woven into the project by representing the affective tone of story events at various places through choice of place name adjectives. A social studies extension included analysis of how the five themes of geography were depicted on the map. Synopses of the books, one map made by first graders, and three preservice teacher-made maps, along with efferent and aesthetic elements and examples of geography themes from the maps are included. Suggestions for implementation and extension of the lesson with early elementary students are provided.     

Bilingual Chinese/English first‐graders developing metacognition about writing

This study investigates metacognitive development of 16 bilingual Chinese/English first‐graders. The researcher analysed the metacognitive utterances produced by the children while they were engaged in the writing task of composing dictated stories. The results suggest that the young bilinguals demonstrated metacognitive abilities and were able to employ metacognitive knowledge during their writing attempts. There is also indication that metacognition is closely connected to these children's ability to compose stories and the qualities of their stories.     

Individual Differences in Fifth Graders’ Literacy and Academic Language Predict Comprehension Monitoring Development: An Eye-Movement Study

In this study, we investigated fifth graders’ (n = 52) fall literacy, academic language, and motivation and how these skills predicted fall and spring comprehension monitoring on an eye movement task. Comprehension monitoring was defined as the identification and repair of misunderstandings when reading text. In the eye movement task, children read two sentences; the second included either a plausible or implausible word in the context of the first sentence. Stronger readers had shorter reading times overall suggesting faster processing of text. Generally fifth graders reacted to the implausible word (i.e., longer gaze duration on the implausible vs. the plausible word, which reflects lexical access). Students with stronger academic language, compared to those with weaker academic language, generally spent more time rereading the implausible target compared to the plausible target. This difference increased from fall to spring. Results support the centrality of academic language for meaning integration, setting standards of coherence, and utilizing comprehension repair strategies.     

Intentionality, degree of damage, and moral judgments.

153 first graders were given Piagetian moral judgment problems with a new simplified methodology as well as the usual story-pair paradigm. The new methodology involved making quantitative judgments about single stories and examined the influence of level of intentionality and degree of damage upon absolute punishment ratings. Contrary to results obtained with a story-pair methodology, it was found that with single stories even 6-year-old children responded to the level of intention in the stories as well as the quantity and quality of damage involved. This suggested that Piaget's methodology may be forcing children to employ a simplifying strategy while under other conditions they are able to perform the mental operations necessary to make complex moral judgments.     

The effectiveness of a highly explicit, teacher-directed strategy instruction routine: changing the writing performance of students with learning disabilities

This study examined the effectiveness of a highly explicit, teacher-directed instructional routine used to teach three planning strategies for writing to fourth and fifth graders with learning disabilities. In comparison to peers who received process writing instruction, children who were taught the three planning strategies-goal setting, brainstorming, and organizing-spent more time planning stories in advance of writing and produced stories that were qualitatively better. One month after the end of instruction, students who had been taught the strategies not only maintained their advantage in story quality but also produced longer stories than those produced by their peers who were taught process writing. However, the highly explicit, teacher-directed strategy instructional routine used in this study did not promote transfer to an uninstructed genre, persuasive essay writing. These findings are discussed in terms of their relevance to effective writing instruction practices for students with learning disabilities.     

The effects of effort feedback and performance patterns on children's attributions and task persistence

This study examines the effects of performance patterns (ascending versus random) and attributional information regarding the causes of that performance (effort feedback versus no feedback) on attributions and task persistence. Subjects were 40 fourth and fifth graders with dispositional tendencies not to perceive effort as a cause of their school-related performance. Results indicated that performance patterns did not systematically influence either children's attributions or persistence. As predicted, children given effort feedback exhibited greater levels of task persistence than those given no feedback; unexpectedly, however, this effect was not mediated by children's attributions.     

Children's knowledge of contagion and contamination as causes of illness

Children's knowledge of contagion and contamination as causes of illness was examined in 3 experiments. In Experiment 1, preschoolers and children in grades 1 and 3 were shown videotaped segments of puppets with colds and toothaches who explained their ailments in terms of contagion and immanent justice. The children were instructed to evaluate and correct the puppets' explanations and, in addition, to indicate the possible effects on health of drinking milk that had come into contact with objects such as a cockroach, used comb, and spoon. Even preschoolers displayed some knowledge of contagion and contamination. However, compared to the third graders, younger children were less likely to reject proximity to a sick person and naughty behavior as causes of toothaches. They were also more likely to indicate that to drink milk that had come into contact with a spoon was unhealthy. In Experiment 2, preschoolers rejected the proposition that an ailment caused by accident (i.e., a scraped knee) is contagious and, in Experiment 3, they generally accepted that contamination through contact with a dirty spoon can be prevented by washing. Altogether, preschoolers have a more substantial knowledge of contagion and contamination than has been estimated previously. The results are discussed in terms of children's ability to understand causal relations.