The Role of Gender-related Information and Self-Endorsement of Traits in Preadolescents' Inferences and Judgments

The major purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a target child's gender typicality on different aspects of preadolescents' inferences and judgments. The secondary purpose of the study was to investigate the relation between children's self-endorsement of traits and their inferences and judgments. Fifth and sixth graders were shown a video film, portraying a child playing either a gender-appropriate game with members of the same sex or a gender-inappropriate game with members of the other sex. In addition, subjects completed an adapted version of the BSRI and were categorized into sex-typed, androgynous, and undifferentiated subjects. Subjects made a number of different types of judgments and inferences about the target, including inferences about traits, popularity, choice of gift and name, and willingness to engage in activities with the target. All types of inferences and judgments were affected by the variations in the targets' gender-related behaviors, whereas self-endorsement of traits was not related to the inferences and judgments. The results suggest that the gender typicality of the target behavior is salient to preadolescents, regardless of their sex-role orientation.     

Effects of informative feedback in relation to retention of initial responses

Ninety-seven fifth graders read a 900-word text followed by a multiple-choice test consisting of factual and guess questions that, respectively, could or could not be answered on the basis of the text. They received informative feedback either immediately after the test, after a day, or no feedback. All children were retested 7 days after the initial test and subsequently asked to identify their initial-test responses. On the delayed test, subjects in the feedback conditions outperformed subjects in the no-feedback condition on both types of question, but they did not identify more initial responses correctly. There were no differences between the feedback conditions. Initial-response identification was better for factual than for guess questions. Analysis of identification scores in relation to initial- and delayed-test response sequences suggested that awareness of initial errors may be helpful rather than detrimental for the acquisition of correct responses through feedback.     

Gender and age differences in awareness and endorsement of gender stereotypes about academic abilities

We measured age and gender differences in children’s awareness and endorsement of gender stereotypes about math, science, and verbal abilities in 463 fourth, sixth, and eighth graders. Children reported their perceptions of adults’ beliefs and their own stereotypes about gender differences in academic abilities. Consistent with study hypotheses, fourth and sixth graders had a stronger tendency than eighth graders to favor their own gender group rather than report traditional stereotypes. On average, girls favored girls over boys in all three domains. Fourth grade boys favored boys in all three domains; middle school boys reported traditional verbal stereotypes and were on average egalitarian in beliefs about math and science. Children’s reports of their perceptions of adults’ stereotypes mirrored age and gender differences in their own stereotypes and were correlated with their own stereotype endorsement. In addition to showing beliefs favoring girls in verbal domains and a tendency for most age and gender groups to not endorse traditional math and science stereotypes, the results support a synthesis of developmental and social identity theories regarding individual differences in children’s stereotype endorsement. Children’s tendency to favor girls in verbal domains may contribute to gender differences in educational and career choices by pulling girls toward the humanities and social sciences and discouraging boys from pursuing those domains.     

Immediate and delayed recall of incidentally learned material: A comparison of paradigms across three developmental levels

Memory of incidentally learned material was investigated across three developmental levels in immediate and delay conditions. Subjects (56 first graders, 56 sixth graders, and 56 college students) were assigned randomly within developmental level to one of four experimental conditions: Type I immediate, Type I delay, Type II immediate, or Type II delay. In the Type I paradigm, subjects looked at pictures but were given no explicit instruction to remember, and in the Type II paradigm, subjects were instructed to remember specific pictures when shown all stimuli. Paradigm interacted with recall condition and significant amounts of incidental learning proved durable for sixth graders and college students. Incidental learning increased with age in both paradigms, suggesting that previously reported divergent developmental trends may not be the result of the type of paradigm.     

Delayed benefits of learning elementary algebraic transformations through contrasted comparisons

Students studying algebra often make mistakes because of superficial similarities between addition and multiplication problems. In two experiments, we investigated whether these errors can be prevented by presenting addition and multiplication problems in such a way that students are encouraged to compare the problems at a deeper level. In Experiment 1, 72 sixth graders were assigned to two self-learning programs. In the contrast program, addition and multiplication were mixed and juxtaposed. In the sequential program, students first received only addition problems followed by multiplication problems. The results revealed that during the training, students performed worse under the contrast condition. However, in the follow-up tests (1-day, 1-week, 3-months), these findings were reversed: the contrast group clearly outperformed the sequential group. The findings were replicated under improved methodological conditions in Experiment 2 with 154 sixth graders. These experiments show that contrasted comparison of superficially similar but conceptually different material results in improved long-term learning.     

How Children Understand Sarcasm: The Role of Context and Intonation

To recognize ironic sarcasm, adults may rely on either of 2 cues: the context in which the utterance is made, or the speaker's intonation. In 2 experiments comparing third graders (8–9 years old), sixth graders (11–12 years old), and adults, we investigated the development of children's ability to use these cues. In the first, children were able to recognize sarcasm when the speakers used sarcastic intonation but failed to do so without the intonation cue, even if the context strongly indicated a nonliteral interpretation. In the second experiment, subjects delivered dialogue with intonation they deemed appropriate—and justified their choices—based on contexts that either suggested sarcasm or not. Young children again appeared largely oblivious to contextually implied sarcasm. These results suggest that children initially depend more heavily on intonation than on context in recognizing sarcasm.     

Dutch sixth graders’ use of shortcut strategies in solving multidigit arithmetic problems

Strategy flexibility, adaptivity, and the use of clever shortcut strategies are of major importance in current primary school mathematics education worldwide. However, empirical results show that primary school students use such shortcut strategies rather infrequently. The aims of the present study were to analyze the extent to which Dutch sixth graders (12-year-olds) use shortcut strategies in solving multidigit addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems, to what extent student factors and task instructions affected this frequency of shortcut strategy use, and to what extent the strategies differed in performance. A sample of 648 sixth graders from 23 Dutch primary schools completed a paper-and-pencil task of 12 multidigit arithmetic problems, designed to elicit specific shortcut strategies such as compensation. Based on the students’ written work, strategies were classified into whether a shortcut strategy was used or not. Results showed that the frequency of shortcut strategies ranged between 6 and 21% across problem types, and that boys and high mathematics achievers were more inclined to use shortcut strategies. An explicit instruction to look for a shortcut strategy increased the frequency of these strategies in the addition and multiplication problems, but not in the subtraction and division problems. Finally, the use of shortcut strategies did not yield higher performance than using standard strategies. All in all, spontaneous as well as stimulated use of shortcut strategies by Dutch sixth graders was not very common.     

Conceptual Resources in Self‐developed Explanatory Models: The importance of integrating conscious and intuitive knowledge

This study explores the spontaneous explanatory models children construct, critique, and revise in the context of tasks in which children need to predict, observe, and explain phenomena involving magnetism. It further investigates what conceptual resources students use, and in what ways they use them, to construct explanatory models, and the obstacles preventing them from constructing a useful explanatory model. Our findings indicate that several of the children were able to construct explanatory models. However, of the six children interviewed multiple times (three third‐graders and three sixth‐graders), only one was consistently able to critique and revise her models to arrive at a consistent, coherent, and sophisticated explanatory model. Connecting intuitive knowledge and abstract knowledge was important in her construction of a coherent and sophisticated explanatory model. Students who relied only on intuitive knowledge constructed tentative and non‐sophisticated explanatory models. Students who relied only on verbal‐symbolic knowledge at an abstract level without connection with their intuition also did not construct coherent and sophisticated models. These results indicate that instruction should help students to become meta‐conceptually aware and connect their verbal‐symbolic knowledge and intuition in order to construct explanatory models to make sense of abstract scientific knowledge.     

The Relationship between Convergent and Divergent Thinking in Science as Revealed in Sixth and Seventh Graders

Abstract

A positive correlation between scores on tests of divergent and convergent thinking in science was found for 92 sixth graders, but no correlation was found for 97 seventh graders. On the test of convergent thinking, seventh graders outperformed the sixth graders, while the latter group reversed the picture for the test of divergent thinking. Plausible interpretations of the data are discussed.     

Pizzas or no pizzas: An advantage of word problems in fraction arithmetic?

Fractions are an important but notoriously difficult domain in mathematics education. Situating fraction arithmetic problems in a realistic setting might help students overcome their difficulties by making fraction arithmetic less abstract. The current study therefore investigated to what extent students (106 sixth graders, 187 seventh graders, and 192 eighth graders) perform better on fraction arithmetic problems presented as word problems compared to these problems presented symbolically. Results showed that in multiplication of a fraction with a whole number and in all types of fraction division, word problems were easier than their symbolic counterparts. However, in addition, subtraction, and multiplication of two fractions, symbolic problems were easier. There were no performance differences by students’ grade, but higher conceptual fraction knowledge was associated with higher fraction arithmetic performance. Taken together this study showed that situating fraction arithmetic in a realistic setting may support or hinder performance, dependent on the problem demands.     

Mental arithmetic in children with mathematics learning disabilities: the adaptive use of approximate calculation in an addition verification task

The adaptive use of approximate calculation was examined using a verification task with 18 third graders with mathematics learning disabilities, 22 typically achieving third graders, and 21 typically achieving second graders. Participants were asked to make true-false decisions on simple and complex addition problems while the distance between the proposed and the correct answer was manipulated. Both typically achieving groups were sensitive to answer plausibility on simple problems, were faster at rejecting extremely incorrect results than at accepting correct answers on complex addition problems, and showed a reduction of the complexity effect on implausible problems, attesting to the use of approximate calculation. Conversely, children with mathematics disabilities were unaffected by answer plausibility on simple addition problems, processed implausible and correct sums with equal speed on complex problems, and exhibited a smaller reduction of the complexity effect on implausible problems. They also made more errors on implausible problems. Different hypotheses are discussed to account for these results.     

Early Adolescents’ Food Selection After Evaluating the Healthiness of Remote Peers’ Food Choices

This study investigates whether asking early adolescents to evaluate the food choices of remote peers improves their own food selection. Participants were students from fifth (N = 219, M_age = 9.30 years) and sixth grades (N = 248, M_age = 10.28 years) of varying nationalities living in the United Arab Emirates (race and ethnicity were not collected). Students saw peers’ healthy or unhealthy food choices before picking their own food. In some conditions, students also critically evaluated the healthiness of the peers’ choices. Evaluation of peer choices led to healthier decisions (d = .53) to the point that it offsets the negative impact of observing unhealthy peer choices. This effect is larger for sixth graders compared to fifth graders.     

A Study on Sixth Grade Students’ Misconceptions and Errors in Spatial Measurement: Length,Area, and Volume

The purpose of the present study was to portray students’ misconceptions and errors while solving conceptually and procedurally oriented tasks involving length, area, and volume measurement. The data were collected from 445 sixth grade students attending public primary schools in Ankara, Türkiye via a test composed of 16 constructed-response format tasks. The findings revealed a wide range of misconceptions and errors such as “believing that all rulers are 30 cm long,” “confusing area formula with perimeter formula,” “believing a box has more than one surface area,” “using the volume formula for surface area,” “believing that ruler must be longer than the object measured,” etc. These misconceptions and errors could be considered as the evidences indicating the sixth graders’ lack of comprehension of the fundamental concepts of spatial measurement and their relationships and the procedures and formulas used for measuring length, area, and volume. The possible causes of such misconceptions and overcoming ways were also discussed.     

Social skills training with underachievers,disruptive, and exceptional children

One hundred-one fourth, fifth, and sixth graders at a Southern California elementary school were randomly assigned by classroom to either a social skills training program or a no treatment control condition. On the basis of teacher ratings, subpopulations of subjects were identified: 17 Underachievers, 40 Disruptive children, 29 children with Multiple Problems, and 15 Exceptional children. In the intervention classes, subjects were randomly assigned to groups of 6 subjects each and received training for one hour twice a week for 12 weeks. Measures of social skills, peer popularity, teacher ratings, and grade-point averages were collected to evaluate the intervention. The results indicated that subjects improved most in the area not targeted as a problem for the subject; i.e., Underachievers improved their social relationships, Disruptive children increased in academic skills, and Exceptional children increased significantly in both areas. A discussion followed of the optimum intervention strategy, building on children's existing strengths vs. targeting deficits.     

Student-Created Digital Media and Engagement in Middle School History

In this study, student engagement during classroom activities was investigated where sixth graders created digital media projects using historical images. The study employed a qualitative design involving observations, student artifacts, and interviews while students were creating digital storyboards using a Web-based application developed for this research. Several patterns of student engagement were identified, such as time on task, level of detail, and extra effort, which subsequently led to the development of four distinct profiles among the students. Applications of these findings and directions for future studies are discussed.     

Reasoning about science-related uncertain issues and epistemological perspectives among children

In order to fulfill social responsibility, one of the goals in science education is to equip students with the competence of scientific reasoning. Nevertheless, psychological studies have found that people in general do not have adequate ability to make scientific arguments in everyday situations. Later studies found that the inadequate ability was associated with the development of personal epistemology. However, the conclusion is drawn mostly from research with adults or adolescents. This study attempted to examine the relation between scientific reasoning in informal contexts and the epistemological perspectives demonstrated by elementary school pupils. Participants of the study were 62 sixth graders who were interviewed to criticize two science-related uncertain issues. Content analysis showed that most children had developed the absolutist form of personal epistemology. Chi-square analyses suggested that the more multiplist view toward the certainty of knowledge and the process of knowing, the better coordination of theory and evidence as well as reflective reasoning. In addition, children’s beliefs about the certainty of knowledge, source of knowledge and concept of justification were seemingly consistent across different issues. Nevertheless, content analysis showed that the criteria used to make judgments varied with problem contexts.     

The Application of Moral Judgments to Other Cultures: Relativism and Universality

This study examined how moral judgments are applied to events in other cultures. It was hypothesized that subjects make both universal and relativistic judgments, contingent on the types of beliefs held in the culture to which the moral judgments were applied. It was furthermore expected that subjects would be both relativists and universalists at all ages. 72 subjects (aged 11–9, 15–10, and 21–3 years) were asked to apply moral judgments which they had made about a familiar context to 2 types of cultures, 1 where different informational beliefs were held and 1 where different moral beliefs were held. The results confirmed the hypotheses. Most subjects, at all ages, contextualized their moral judgments when they applied them to cultures with different informational beliefs but made nonrelativistic judgments with respect to cultures with opposing moral beliefs. Furthermore, subjects justified their relativistic judgments on informational grounds and their nonrelativistic judgments on moral grounds. These findings demonstrated that nonrelativistic and relativistic thinking coexist throughout a wide age range and underscored the need to distinguish between moral and nonmoral relativism when studying developmental patterns in the moral domain.     

Reasoning about structure and function: Children's conceptions of gears

Twenty-three second graders and 20 fifth graders were interviewed about how gears move on a gearboard and work in commonplace machines. Questions focused on transmission of motion; direction, plane, and speed of turning; and mechanical advantage. Several children believed that meshed gears turn in the same direction and at the same speed. Many second graders provided very incomplete explanations of transmission of motion. Most children confused mechanical advantage with speed. Yet as the interview proceeded, several fifth graders generalized conceptions about transmission of motion into a rule about turning direction. They increasingly justified their ideas about gear speed by referring to ratio. Children's reasoning became more general, formal, and mathematical as problem complexity increased, suggesting that mathematical forms of reasoning may develop when they provide a clear advantage over simple causal generalizations. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 3-25, 1998.     

Children''s Understanding of Action Lines and the Static Representation of Speed of Locomotion

Children's understanding of the static representation of speed of locomotion was explored in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, 20 7-year-olds and 20 9-year-olds drew pictures of 2 people walking and running at different speeds. Children then made judgments about pairs of unambiguous drawings of a person walking or running, as did a sample of 20 adults. The drawings varied according to whether action lines, background lines, or no lines were present. Children were asked to say which figure appeared to be moving faster. In Experiment 2, 20 7-year-olds, 20 9-year-olds, and 21 adults sorted ambiguous drawings of a person walking and running at different speeds. The pictures again contained action lines, background lines, or no lines. In the drawing task, children more frequently used page position and biomechanical information than action lines to represent fast and slow walking and running. In the judgment task, 7- and 9-year-olds offered equivalent judgments of action lines and background lines, whereas adults distinguished between these pictorial devices. In the sorting task, all subjects distinguished between action lines and background lines and judged that pictures containing action lines looked faster than pictures containing background lines and pictures without lines. Taken together, the results indicate that subjects' judgments were influenced by the form of locomotion and degree of ambiguity in the depicted events they saw. The findings are consistent with the view that different categories of pictorial devices exist, but the effectiveness of each device is contingent upon the perceiver's experience with it and the context in which it appears.     

Visual perspective-taking skills in children

The present study evaluated the effects of stimulus complexity and rule usage on a visual perspective-taking task. Preschoolers, first, third, and fifth graders, and adults were shown arrays of dolls and performed a series of perspective-taking tasks. Errors decreased with age, and more errors occurred with the more complex visual arrays. A significant number of errors were made in self-view trials, especially by the preschoolers, showing that the ability to relate an array to a pictorial representation of it is not perfect. A conditional probability analysis showed that most egocentric errors were not due to an inability to relate the array to pictorial representations, but rather to a lack of mastery of Flavell's different positions--different views rule. When the array was covered, however, even first graders showed almost perfect mastery of this rule. There were also task effects on the use of Flavell's same position--same view rule: children performed better for a task involving self and other than for 2 others. Response latencies and effects for the observer's relative position provided evidence for a new rule: opposite positions--opposite views. In addition, front and back views of the dolls were significantly easier than the side views, which suggests a role of labeling or stimulus-discrimination skills.