Relative Age Effects are a developmental problem in tennis: but not necessarily when you’re left‐handed!

Relative Age Effects (RAEs), describing attainment inequalities as a result of interactions between biological age and age‐grouping procedures, have been demonstrated across many sports contexts. This study examined whether an additional individual characteristic (i.e., handedness) mediated RAEs in tennis. Relative age and handedness distributions of 1027 male professional tennis players ranked in the year‐end ATP Top 500 for 2000–2006 were analyzed. Relatively older players, born in the first two quartiles, were over‐represented for right‐handed players (86.56%), whereas no RAEs were found for left‐handers (13.44%). Findings seem to suggest that left‐handers in tennis gain advantages that circumvent the RAE problem.     

Chinese Children’s Statistical Learning of Orthographic Regularities: Positional Constraints and Character Structure

This study examined how Chinese children acquire the untaught positional constraints of stroke patterns that are embedded in left–right structured and top–bottom structured characters. Using an orthographic regularity pattern elicitation paradigm, 536 Hong Kong Chinese children at different levels of reading (kindergarten, 2nd, and 5th grades) were asked to produce invented characters with left–right and top–bottom stroke pattern pairs. Even kindergartners were aware of the positional constraints of stroke patterns and were able to produce orthographically legal pseudocharacters with different stroke pattern pairs. This ability improved across grade level. Moreover, there was a production asymmetry in which children produced more top–bottom structured pseudocharacters than left–right structured pseudocharacters. The error pattern analysis further revealed that more positional errors were observed in producing left–right structured noncharacters than in the top–bottom structured noncharacters. This production asymmetry seemed to reflect children’s experience with a distribution asymmetry observed between left–right (59.19%) and top–bottom structured characters (23.46%) in a corpus of school Chinese. These results are discussed within the framework of statistical learning of orthographic regularity in Chinese.     

The Air‐gap Phenomenon in Young Children's Pictures

In Experiment 1, 221 children aged 5;l‐10;2 were asked to crayon or paint an outdoor scene. The shift from leaving an air‐gap to filling in the sky occurred at approximately 8 years of age whether crayons or paint were used. In Experiment 2 four groups of children (mean age, 6;8) who normally left an air‐gap were asked to draw a photographic slide of an outdoor scene projected onto a screen. We manipulated the amount of exposure to the slide and also the information about it given by the experimenter. More children relinquished their air‐gap response when the experimenter had drawn their attention, verbally, to the full sky. When children received this information and were able to view the slide throughout the drawing session, there was also a tendency for more of them to draw the full sky and for those who left an air‐gap to draw the sky significantly deeper.     

学前儿童解决算术应用题能力的培养研究

采用操作法、图示法和语言法,对120名4-7岁的学前儿童解答算术应用题的能力进行了为期两周的培养,结果发现:学前儿童解答算术应用题的成绩随年龄增长而提高;运用操作法解题的成绩最好,其次是图示法,运用语言法解题的成绩最差,培养学前儿童解答算术应用题的能力,应采用操作法、图示法等直观形象的方法;学前儿童解答转换题的成绩最高,其次是合并题,解答比较题的成绩最低。     

学前儿童绘画教育之思索

学前儿童的绘画是溶入其自身情感及其表象,通过儿童内在自我建构形成的一种自我表现形式。学前儿童绘画是社会文化的一种反映,是儿童的发展水平的一种表现。学前儿童绘画教育必须在尊重儿童发展水平的基础上,结合本民族的文化特点,在尊重儿童的主体性和为儿童绘画提供有效帮助的两极动态变化之间加以调适,使之趋向平衡,使儿童潜能得以最大限度的舒展。     

Young Children's Depiction of Contrast in Human Figure Drawing: standing and walking

Children aged 4 to 10 years old were asked to draw a person standing absolutely still and a person walking very fast so that someone not present would know from the pictures alone what had been depicted. Even at four some children were able to convey the difference to a viewer and there was increasing success with age. The number of differentiating cues increased with age and there was an age‐related trend in the order in which specific cues appeared in the drawings. The ability of the children to respond flexibly to the task gives no support to notions of rigid mental representations determining what young children can draw. It is argued that contrast tasks are a useful tool for investigating problem solving skills in the domain of drawing and could be used to extend children's skill by providing an occasion for explicit dialogue about how representational information is conveyed to a viewer.     

The mediation of tools in the development of formal mathematical concepts: The compass and the circle as an example

This study focuses on the process by which children develop a formal mathematical concept of the circle by using various instruments to draw circles within the context of a goal-directed drawing task. Particular attention was given to the transition from using tracers and templates to using a compass for drawing circles and to the extent to which the use of different drawing instruments may contribute to the formation of a formally defined mathematical concept of the circle. The critical difference considered in the study is that the compass, in contrast to circle-drawing tracers or templates, induces by its physical structure and its functional use the generative features of formal mathematical concepts of the circle, that is, the centre and the radius. Analysis of the empirical data indicates that the use of the compass in circle drawing structures the circle-drawing operation in a radically different fashion than circle tracers and templates, and brings into play an action-bound practical thinking. Such thinking has an overall positive influence on the construction of analytical concepts by children that are analogous to the formally defined mathematical concepts of the circle. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Drawing in Preschools: A Didactic Experience

To be understood, visually, often depends on how skilled one is in catching form and translating it into a two‐dimensional surface. This is a challenge we are confronted with early in life. Children's learning strategies in drawing are not always understood or encouraged. This article presents a socio‐cultural analysis from Norway of a pedagogical practice that attempts to shed light on the question, How does the preschool teacher support 3–5 year old children when they are drawing something they see, and how do children in this age group respond to this support?     

Teaching about the Holocaust: a consideration of some ethical and pedagogic issues

The Holocaust is now part of the history curriculum for all 11‐14 year‐olds in maintained schools in England and Wales. This paper directs attention to some of the ethical and pedagogic issues involved in teaching the subject. In particular, concern is expressed at the dangers of teaching it in ways likely to promote anti‐Semitism. Other ethical issues raised include the extent to which freedom of speech should be permitted in the classroom; the merits or otherwise of drawing children's attention to Holocaust denial; the lengths to which teachers should go in introducing children to inherently painful subject matter and the rights of parents to withdraw their children from this part of the curriculum. The question of whether to accord teachers a similar right of withdrawal is also addressed. The chief pedagogic concern of the paper is the failure of existing Holocaust curricula to take cognisance of the way children conceptualise Jewish culture and identity. Findings from some small‐scale research in this area are reported and their implications discussed.     

Action,Autobiography and Aesthetics in Young Children’s Self-Initiated Drawings

Lark-Horovitz, Lewis, and Luca [1973] described the emergence of ‘subject matter specialists,’ children who create series of self-initiated or voluntary drawings featuring consistent themes, characters, or settings that seem particularly compelling to them. A decade-long study of the images preschool and kindergarten children create when invited to draw in their own sketchbooks in the context of a weekly art class suggests that the choice of what to draw shapes the process of learning how to draw in decisive ways. The interests young children develop and pursue in drawing and in other forms of symbolic play are influenced by gender and by culture, by personality and circumstance. The choices children make inevitably open certain possibilities and foreclose others, shaping early artistic learning in decisive ways. Many early childhood educators [e.g., Katz, 1993] maintain that young children’s learning should be firmly grounded in first-hand experience. However, children whose drawings are autobiographical in content may be less consistent in choosing topics for drawing and prone to pass the time between significant images by drawing designs and symbols which seem less personally meaningful and engaging. Children who draw upon imaginative themes seem to have an inexhaustible source of inspiration ready at hand when they begin to draw. According to Egan [1988], the fictional or mythic nature of these representations may serve young children’s quest to make sense of their experiences in ways that explorations of the everyday do not.     

论彝文书法章法中行款的发展转变及其标准

彝文书写的行款,在古代就已经形成了从上到下、从左到右的格式.近代以后由于受到巨大的历史变革的影响,偶尔有从上到下、从右到左的形式,但不是主流.近年来,多次比较大型的彝文书法展览和出版的彝文书法选集,绝大多数作品都采取了从上到下、从右到左的形式,背离了传统彝文书法的行款格式,应该从加强传统彝文的学习教育、坚持彝文书法传统的左书标准模式等方面给予及时纠正.     

Local and Global Processing in Blind and Sighted Children in a Naming and Drawing Task

This study investigated the spatial analysis of tactile hierarchical patterns in 110 early‐blind children aged 6–8 to 16–18 years, as compared to 90 blindfolded sighted children, in a naming and haptic drawing task. The results revealed that regardless of visual status, young children predominantly produced local responses in both tasks, whereas the production of integrated responses emerged later. Development of local and global processing seems to proceed similarly in the two populations, but local processing continued to occur at high levels over a larger age range in the blind. The possibility of visual mediation is pointed out, as totally blind children tended to process information locally more often than blind children with minimal light perception.     

CREATIVITY AND BRAIN HEMISPHERES: EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS

The problem of defence and development of the creative and humanistic potential of human beings (as a problem of psychoecology) is discussed in the context of brain hemispheric asymmetry. Data from experiments (drawing and writing with the right and left hand, their interference with solving of mathematical tasks) show simple practical methods for the facilitation of nonverbal creative self‐realisation in art. The nature of aesthetic feeling and its connection with creative psychic states is discussed in this context. Research (creative work of pupils aged 7‐11 in art) shows that the unconscious collective hostility of traditionally educated children to creative self‐expression increases with age, and that there is a high correlation of creative activity with ambidextrousness. A broad psychoecological program is proposed on the basis of the data.     

Early Histories of School‐Aged Children With Attention‐Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder

In a prospective study of developmental outcomes in relation to early‐life otitis media, behavioral, cognitive, and language measures were administered to a large, diverse sample of children at 2, 3, 4, 6, and 9–11 years of age (N = 741). At 9–11 years of age, 9% of the children were categorized as having attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) based on parent report. Compared to the non‐ADHD group, the ADHD group had higher (i.e., less favorable) scores on parent and teacher versions of the Child Behavior Checklist at all ages. Children in the ADHD group also had lower scores on cognitive and receptive language measures in preschool. The findings support the concept that ADHD is a cognitive as well as a behavioral disorder.     

Young children's encoding of images based on motor and verbal modes of mediation

Twenty-four kindergarten subjects were given practice producing a geometric production when given the three dimensional object. Six children were told how to draw the projections, six children drew the projections, six children drew the projections and were told how to draw the projections, and six children were told to remember the drawings. Using a two-way analysis of variance, the main effect of motor activity (drawing the projections) was significant (p < .05). It was concluded that children's learning activities should be motor based, rather than verbal.     

Ascertaining teachers’ perceptions of working with adolescents diagnosed with attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder

There are few studies that have directly examined teachers’ perceptions of children with ADHD, particularly children in the adolescent age range. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of general‐education ninth through twelfth grade teachers regarding working with adolescent students with ADHD. Sorted responses from a sample of 100 general‐education high school teachers were analysed and then represented visually using a concept‐mapping technique. The final concept map suggests that teachers perceive adolescents with ADHD along two dichotomies of thematic clusters on an orthogonal axis. Clusters at the top area of the concept map suggest perceptions related to high confidence and willingness, while clusters at the bottom suggest perceptions related to uneasiness and frustration. Clusters along the left side of the concept map suggest perceptions related to behaviour issues, while clusters along the right side suggest perceptions related to classroom teaching issues. Central to the vertical and horizontal dichotomies is a solitary central dimension, which highlights training as an important component of teachers’ perceptions of adolescents with ADHD.     

Cognitive Style and Gender Differences in Drawing from Memory Versus Copying in 11‐year‐old Children

A total of 71 11‐year‐old children were asked to draw two pictures: one by copying and one from memory. The quality of each of their drawings was assessed on a five‐point scale by four adult judges rating independently. The cognitive style of each child was assessed by means of the Cognitive Styles Analysis. A significant effect of Verbal‐Imagery Style was observed in which Verbalisers were superior to Imagers in overall drawing performance. There was also a significant interaction between drawing task‐type and gender in which females were superior to males, particularly in drawing from memory. These findings were discussed in terms of the representation of information in memory.     

Drawing Development: Stages in the Representation of a Cube and a Cylinder

A new schema for defining developmental stages in the drawing of geometrical objects is proposed. In four studies, ( N = 917, 1851, 673, and 437, respectively) children and adults drew cubes and cylinders. The data demonstrate that the proposed stages appear in an invariant order: 2-year-old children almost always draw Scribbles; Single Units appear at the age of 3 years, Differentiated Figures at the age of 4 years, and Integrated Wholes after the age of 7 years.     

The Moving Window Technique: A Window Into Developmental Changes in Attention During Facial Emotion Recognition

The strategies children employ to selectively attend to different parts of the face may reflect important developmental changes in facial emotion recognition. Using the Moving Window Technique (MWT), children aged 5–12 years and adults (N = 129) explored faces with a mouse‐controlled window in an emotion recognition task. An age‐related increase in attention to the left eye emerged at age 11–12 years and reached significance in adulthood. This left‐eye bias is consistent with previous eye tracking research and findings of a perceptual bias for the left side of faces. These results suggest that a strategic attentional bias to the left eye begins to emerge at age 11–12 years and is likely established sometime in adolescence.     

Laterality and motor skills in four-year-olds

From a population of 512 4-year-olds attending preschools, 41 children were identified as left-handed and 23 as lacking definite hand preference. Using the McCarthy Motor Scales and a fine-motor scale designed by the investigator, these children were compared with right-handers matched for age, sex, and preschool attended. T tests indicated no difference between left-handers and right-handers of either sex, but the children lacking hand preference had lower scores than right-handers. Implications for the education of children lacking handedness and possible sex differences are discussed.