TALKING GEOGRAPHY: an investigation into young children's understanding of geographical terms PART 1

This research investigates the understanding by children of seven years of age of certain geographical terms. These terms are selected from the programme of study for geography for Key Stage 1 within the English National Curriculum (this approximates to the first two years of compulsory schooling in England ie. from 5 to 7 years). These terms represent some of the basic geographical concepts which teachers are required to teach at this stage. The interviews took place prior to the implementation of the English National Curriculum for Geography, in June 1991, and further interviewing is now being undertaken after two years’ implementation of the Curriculum to enable comparisons to be made. The initial findings clearly indicate that children of this age have considerable difficulty with some concepts and that even vernacular terms are often misunderstood. The research provides useful insight into the language young children currently use to describe geographical features. The ways in which young children respond to this type of questioning are discussed in relation to assessment and a preliminary analysis is made of the implications of the outcomes of the study for the teaching of geography to young children.     

Making Meaningful Choices: an investigation into young children's intonation patterns in storytelling

Abstract This paper investigates the meaningful choices in intonation made by young children. A category system for classifying choices is outlined and an experiment is reported in which randomly selected groups of 41/2‐5 year‐olds heard and retold stories in different situations. Results indicate that all groups distinguished narrative from other forms of discourse and drew upon intonation resources appropriately. Differences were found between recalling a story with pictures and one without, suggesting that these are different cognitive tasks and that children make different selections from choices available to them.     

Taking decisions seriously: young children's understanding of conventional truth

Research suggests that young children may see a direct and one-way connection between facts about the world and epistemic mental states (e.g., belief). Conventions represent instances of active constructions of the mind that change facts about the world. As such, a mature understanding of convention would seem to present a strong challenge to children's simplified notions of epistemic relations. Three experiments assessed young children's abilities to track behavioral, representational, and truth aspects of conventions. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 30) recognized that conventional stipulations would change people's behaviors. However, participants generally failed to understand how stipulations might affect representations. In Experiment 2, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children (N = 53) were asked to reason about the truth values of statements about pretenses and conventions. The two younger groups of children often confused the two types of states, whereas older children consistently judged that conventions, but not pretenses, changed reality. In Experiment 3, the same 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 42) participated in tasks assessing their understanding of representational diversity (e.g., false belief). In general, children's performance on false-belief and "false-convention" tasks did not differ, which suggests that conventions were understood as involving truth claims (as akin to beliefs about physical reality). Children's difficulties with the idea of conventional truth seems consistent with current accounts of developing theories of mind.     

Components of young children's trait understanding: behavior-to-trait inferences and trait-to-behavior predictions

Trait attribution is central to people's na?ve theories of people and their actions. Previous developmental research indicates that young children are poor at predicting behaviors from past trait-relevant behaviors. We propose that the cognitive process of behavior-to-behavior predictions consists of two component processes: (1) behavior-to-trait inferences and (2) trait-to-behavior predictions. Experiment 1 demonstrates that 4-, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds can infer trait labels from behaviors. Experiment 2 demonstrates that 4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds can predict behaviors from trait labels but not from past behaviors. Experiment 3 demonstrates that 4- and 5-year-olds understand traits as predictive and stable over time. Taken together, these three studies show that young children, in possessing component trait-reasoning processes, have a nascent understanding of traits.     

An investigation of young children's academic arithmetic contexts

Research findings concerning students' interpretations of the equals sign appear to conflict with three recently developed models of early number development. It was hypothesized that the two groups of researchers investigated students' arithmetical understandings in situations that are, for most children, different contexts. Analysis of video-taped interviews conducted with 34 ending first grade children, drawn from five classrooms, supported this hypothesis. Interviews were conducted with the five classroom teachers and it was possible to relate the students' interpretations of the equals sign to social interaction patterns that typified classroom life during arithmetic instruction.     

Mother- and father-reported reactions to children's negative emotions: relations to young children's emotional understanding and friendship quality

Mother- and father-reported reactions to children's negative emotions were examined as correlates of emotional understanding (Study 1, N = 55, 5- to 6-year-olds) and friendship quality (Study 2, N = 49, 3- to 5-year-olds). Mothers' and fathers' supportive reactions together contributed to greater child-friend coordinated play during a sharing task. Further, when one parent reported low support, greater support by the other parent was related to better understanding of emotions and less intense conflict with friends (for boys only). When one parent reported high support, however, greater support by the other parent was associated with less optimal functioning on these outcomes. Results partially support the notion that children benefit when parents differ in their reactions to children's emotions.     

Genetic epistemological notes on recent research into children's understanding of light

This paper reports a new analysis of data on children's ideas about seeing and light. The analysis is theoretically informed by Piagetian stage theory of genetic epistemology. Data produced by other researchers have been recoded to enable quantitative comparisons to be made with the survey data reported by Shayer and Adey (1981). The patterns in the data exposed by genetic epistemological analysis suggest that: (a) the qualitative nature of schemata depends on the content and context of learning opportunities, (b) the stage of genetic epistemological processing marks a ceiling on performance and (c) the ontogenesis of schema in the cognitive development of the individual is still best described in genetic epistemological terms.     

A framework for designing interactive multimedia to scaffold young children's understanding of historical chronology

Young children's understanding of thehistorical past is often characterised by alack of temporal differentiation and a sense oftotal discontinuity with the present. Researchhas suggested that this situation may be causedin part by their formation of inappropriaterepresentations when solving problems ofchronology. To help children construct moreappropriate external representations forparticular tasks and reason more effectivelywith them about chronological concepts, weinvestigated the role that interactivemultimedia might play in scaffoldingteacher-led activities in the classroom. Inthis paper we report on our conceptual designand pedagogical approach to developingeffective dynamic, interactive representationsand activities at the computer interface, aimedat bridging the conceptual gap between concreteexperience and abstract concepts. Evaluationsof the software built using this frameworkshowed that the program was well received bychildren and teachers alike, and that it wasable to facilitate children's understanding of,and ability to reason about, chronology.     

Economic aspects of citizenship education: an investigation of students' understanding

In 2002 education for citizenship will become a statutory requirement in English secondary schools for the first time. Broad guidelines which have been issued to schools include some elements of economic understanding, although this aspect of citizenship has attracted little attention in public debate. Moreover, relatively little is known about students' current thinking on these aspects of citizenship. Our article addresses this gap in current knowledge through reporting results from a large-scale (over 1000 responses) survey of 15- and 17-year-old students. A draft survey was trialled in May 2000 and revised in the light of students' responses and discussion at a research seminar in July 2000. The questionnaire focuses on students' understanding of, and attitude towards, aspects of taxation, government spending, employment and inflation. These results may usefully inform planning for programmes of citizenship education and they can also provide a point of reference for subsequent evaluation of those programmes.     

Almost thinking counterfactually: children's understanding of close counterfactuals

Saying something "almost happened" indicates that one is considering a close counterfactual world. Previous evidence suggested that children start to consider these close counterfactuals at around 2 years of age (P. L. Harris, 1997), substantially earlier than they pass other tests of counterfactual thinking. However, this success appears to result from false positives. In Experiment 1 (N = 41), 3- and 4-year-olds could identify a character who almost completed an action when the comparison did not complete it. However, in Experiments 1 and 2 (N = 98), children performed poorly when the comparison character completed the action. In Experiment 3 (N = 28), 5- and 6-year-olds consistently passed the task, indicating that they made appropriate counterfactual interpretations of the "almost" statements. This understanding of close counterfactuals proved more difficult than standard counterfactuals.     

An investigation into children's developing awareness of time and chronology in story

This study explores how children in English primary schools perceive time and chronology in storybooks-whether the children are aware of the devices used in stories to manipulate time and chronological sequence, and whether their responses demonstrate their own ability to use these devices. Children aged between 3-9 years were involved in conversation about storybooks through the use of open-ended questions. Responses were analysed according to features of the talk that reflected the children's awareness of the time dimension within the stories. The data suggest that children are able to use temporal terms and perceive chronological sequence, or lack of it, at very early ages. If exposed to ideas about time within a meaningful context, young children are capable of surprisingly sophisticated ideas. The implications of this finding for teaching chronology and for the history curriculum are discussed.     

An investigation into the role of gesture in enhancing children's vocabulary command

The primary aim of the current study was to explore whether non-linguistic conventions, especially gesture, have a significant impact on children's vocabulary learning. Fifty male and female Iranian children aged between 3 and 6 years of age (mean age?=?3.5) from two classes of a language institute were taught a set of lexical items using two different teaching procedures: one employing linguistic conventions only, without gesture, and the other through a combination of linguistic and non-linguistic approaches. The data analysis revealed that non-linguistic conventions, including gesture, significantly influence children's learning of vocabulary items. The study contributes to the literature examining vocabulary and gesture and may inform early years practitioners' approaches to vocabulary teaching.     

Birds, frogs, blue skies and sheep: an investigation into the cultural notion of affordance in children's meaning making

This article draws on an ethnographic research study of children's text making in the home, as well as interviews with visual artists in South Yorkshire, to explore the idea of affordance as cultural (Kress 1997; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). The article draws on Kress and van Leeuwen's concept of the affordance of a mode, and argues that in the case of children's meaning making, affordance has to be seen as being shaped by culture. This means attending to children's cultural and physical spaces, their worlds, in order to trace back and understand meanings inside their texts. The article takes particular instances of practice and then traces back their meaning, in order to show how cultural meanings sediment into texts. The article argues that English teachers can use this lens of texts as traces of practice to make sense of the multimodal texts children produce in classrooms.     

Benefits of practicing 4 = 2 + 2: nontraditional problem formats facilitate children's understanding of mathematical equivalence

This study examined whether practice with arithmetic problems presented in a nontraditional problem format improves understanding of mathematical equivalence. Children (M age = 8;0; N = 90) were randomly assigned to practice addition in one of three conditions: (a) traditional, in which problems were presented in the traditional "operations on left side" format (e.g., 9 + 8 = 17); (b) nontraditional, in which problems were presented in a nontraditional format (e.g., 17 = 9 + 8); or (c) no extra practice. Children developed a better understanding of mathematical equivalence after receiving nontraditional practice than after receiving traditional practice or no extra practice. Results suggest that minor differences in early input can yield substantial differences in children's understanding of fundamental concepts.     

When you shouldn't do what you want to do: young children's understanding of desires, rules, and emotions

This research investigated 4- through 7-year-olds' and adults' (n = 64) concepts about the emotional consequences of desire fulfillment versus desire inhibition in situations where people's desires conflict with prohibitive rules. Results revealed developmental increases in attributing positive or mixed emotions to story characters that make willpower decisions and negative or mixed emotions to characters that transgress. These developmental changes in emotion predictions were accompanied by age-related differences in emotion explanations. Whereas 4- and 5-year-olds largely explained emotions in relation to the characters' goals, 7-year-olds and adults further explained how rules and future consequences influence emotions. Results are discussed in relation to connections among children's psychological, deontic, and future-oriented reasoning about emotions as well as the development of self-control.     

Progression in primary school children's conceptions of burning: Toward an understanding of the concept of substance

Children's conceptions of burning were explored through observation and discussion or a number of challenging phenomena. Analysis of written responses showed that children's conceptions are both specific and contextually based, and that there is little coherence in the use of any one conception across phenomena. Progression across the primary school years can be described, however, in terms of children's growing confidence with the idea of transformation of substances and the analysis relates this to a model based on changing commitments to the notion of substance defined by properties, rather than history. The conceptual trajectories described in the study are broadly consistent with previous studies of secondary school children.