Things are not Always as they Seem: the appearance‐reality distinction and conservation

Abstract Two experiments were performed in order to test predictions derived from the ‘appearance‐reality’ hypothesis: (1) that encouraging children to regard conservation questions as questions about reality rather than about appearance should improve performance and (2) that giving realist interpretations of visual illusions should correlate with conservation ability. Both experiments demonstrated that presenting conservation problems as appearance‐reality problems does evoke higher levels of performance and that this improvement is not an artefact produced by the repetition of the post‐transformation question. The second experiment showed that there is a general association between appearance‐reality abilities as expressed in the interpretation of visual illusions and as expressed in conservation. However, giving realist interpretations of ‘neutral’ illusion questions (e.g. “Is the stick bent?") correlated with conservation ability only at age five.     

Children's understanding of the distinction between intentions and desires

Much of the previous research on children's understanding of intentions confounded intentions with desires. Intentions and desires are different, in that a desire can be satisfied in a number of ways, but an intention must be satisfied by carrying out the intended action. Children 3 through 7 years of age and adults were presented with situations in which intentions were satisfied but desires were not, or vice versa, in a story-comprehension task (N = 71) and a target-hitting game (N = 45). Although 3- and 4-year-olds were unable to differentiate desires and intentions consistently, 5- and 7-year-olds often matched the adult pattern. Younger children's difficulties in understanding intentions are discussed in terms of their use of a desire-outcome matching strategy and the representational complexities of intentions.     

Children's understanding of the distinction between real and apparent emotion

2 experiments examined children's understanding of the distinction between real and apparent emotion. In Experiment 1, 6- and 10-year-old children listened to stories in which it would be appropriate for the story protagonist to feel either a positive or negative emotion but to hide that emotion. Subjects were asked to say both how the protagonist would look and how the protagonist would really feel, and to justify their claims. The results indicated that 6- and 10-year-olds alike could distinguish quite accurately between real and apparent emotion, although 10-year-olds were somewhat better at justifying this distinction. In Experiment 2, a slightly modified procedure was used to test 4- and 6-year-olds. Again, 6-year-olds demonstrated their grasp of the difference between real and apparent emotion, and even 4-year-olds showed a limited grasp of the distinction. The findings are discussed in relation to recent research concerning children's concept of mind, their grasp of the appearance-reality distinction, their ability to produce complex, embedded justifications, and their ideas about emotion.     

Seeing is believing: the role of videoconferencing in distance learning

The potential of videoconferencing to enrich distance learning needs to be widely recognised as well as the technology embedded in curriculum delivery and in distance learning programmes. The argument is supported by reference to a wide range of case studies from the author's experiences over a period of six years as International Officer with the Western Education and Library Board in Northern Ireland, and to exemplars of good practice from other sources in different parts of the world. As videoconferencing becomes more widely available in schools and in public libraries, it is important that there is a new awareness of its vast potential in order to ensure that this technology is fully exploited for the benefit of learning communities.     

Seeing is believing: using videopapers to transform teachers' professional knowledge and practice

Gaps, barriers, boundaries and walls are words often used to describe the separation between educational research and practice. They account for the differences that are said to exist between the ‘two cultures’; the members of which appear to occupy different worlds, have different mindsets and express themselves in different discourses. The purpose of this paper is to suggest ways of overcoming this divide by presenting a new genre of publication, videopaper, that integrates and synchronizes different forms of representation, such as text, video and images, in one cohesive document. We argue that this has the potential to end the elision in the educational community which sees researchers as knowledge generators and teachers as knowledge translators. We contend that videopaper has a range of affordances that may help the professional and academic communities to find new ways of seeing, creating and using educational research.     

Across the great divide: bridging the gap between understanding of toddlers' and older children's thinking

Research on very young children's cognitive development differs greatly from research on cognitive development in older children. The differences include the questions that are asked, the methods that are used to address them, the measures that are employed to provide relevant evidence, and the level of detail at which children's knowledge is represented. The research approaches are so different that they create an impression that infants' and toddlers' thinking differs qualitatively from that of preschoolers and older children. This impression, however, may reflect differences in research approaches rather than differences in children's thinking. In the present study, we attempted to bridge this gap by applying to toddlers a type of process analysis that has proved fruitful in studies of older children. Overlapping waves theory, trial-by-trial strategy assessments, and microgenetic methods were used to analyze 1.5- and 2.5-year-olds' problem solving and learning. The results demonstrated that changes in toddlers' strategies could be assessed reliably on a trial-by-trial basis, that the changes followed the basic form predicted by the overlapping waves model, and that analyses of toddlers' strategies could tell us a great deal about both qualitative and quantitative aspects of their learning. A componential analysis of learning that previously had been applied to older children also proved useful for understanding toddlers' learning. The analysis specified that cognitive change frequently involves five components: acquisition of new strategies; strengthening of the strategies in their original context; improved mapping of strategies onto novel problems; increasingly refined choices among variants of the strategies; and increasingly skillful execution of the strategies. Independent measures of these components indicated that strategic development in toddlers involves improvements in all five components. Analyses of individual differences in learning showed that the effects of distal variables, such as age and sex, could be partially explained in terms of their influence on mastery of the components, but that the distal variables exercised additional direct effects as well. The process of learning in toddlers closely resembled that of older children in other ways as well. Like older children, toddlers use multiple strategies over the course of learning; their choices among strategies are quite adaptive from early on; their choices become progressively more adaptive as they gain experience with the task; they switch strategies not only from trial to trial but within a single trial; their transfer of learning from one problem to the next is primarily influenced by structural relations between problems but also is influenced by superficial features; they show utilization deficiencies early in learning that they gradually overcome; and they show individual differences in learning that fall into a few qualitatively distinct categories. Perhaps most striking, the 1.5- and 2.5-year-olds emerged as active learners, who continued to work out the lessons of previous instruction in the absence of further instruction. That is, they integrated the lessons of their own problem-solving efforts with the previous instruction in ways that magnified the initial effects of the instruction. Overall, the findings indicated that the gap can be bridged; that theories, methods, measures, and representations of knowledge typically used with older children can improve our understanding of toddlers' problem solving and learning as well.     

Children's understanding of representational change and its relation to the understanding of false belief and the appearance-reality distinction

This research concerns the development of children's understanding of representational change and its relation to other cognitive developments. Children were shown deceptive objects, and the true nature of the objects was then revealed. Children were then asked what they thought the object was when they first saw it, testing their understanding of representational change; what another child would think the object was, testing their understanding of false belief; and what the object looked like and really was, testing their understanding of the appearance-reality distinction. Most 3-year-olds answered the representational change question incorrectly. Most 5-year-olds did not make this error. Children's performance on the representational change question was poorer than their performance on the false-belief question. There were correlations between performance on all 3 tasks. Apparently children begin to be able to consider alternative representations of the same object at about age 4.     

Deaf children's understanding of beliefs and desires

Twenty-two children (5-12 year old) who were profoundly, prelingually deaf were given two tests designed to tap their 'theory of mind', that is, their ability to attribute independent mental states to other people. The tests were versions of Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith's Sally-Anne task and of Baron-Cohen's breakfast task. Seventy percent of the children were successful on all questions requiring belief attribution, a considerably and significantly larger percentage than the 29% obtained by Peterson and Siegal for a similar sample, though it is still lower than would be expected on the basis on chronological age. Children were universally successful on questions requiring the attribution of desire. We discuss implications of the findings.     

Young children's understanding of counting and cardinality

4-year-old's knowledge of counting and cardinality--the last count word reached represents the numerosity of the set--was tested in 2 experiments. Experiment 1 investigated the nature of early cardinality responses by presenting different forms of the cardinality question before, after, and before and after the child counted. Both type and time of question has large effects. Experiment 2 examined whether children of this age could recognize errors in 4 counting procedures and whether they would reject a cardinality response arrived at through a mistaken counting procedure. The children were very good at recognizing a standard counting procedure as correct. They had only limited success at treating procedures that violated the stable order of count words or violated the one-one correspondence between count word and object as incorrect. They lacked an understanding of the order irrelevance in that they judged valid, nonstandard counting orders as incorrect. The children did not seem to link their evaluation of a cardinality response with their evaluation of the counting procedure used to reach that response. The results do not indicate that counting principles initially govern the child's acquisition of counting knowledge. They are consistent with the suggestion that early cardinality responses are last-word responses.     

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.     

Exploring children's understanding of death concepts

This study is an investigation of the effects of death education on children and their understanding of death. The participants of this study were eighty 5- and 6-year-olds who were enrolled in a suburban kindergarten in Korea. To examine the level of children's understanding of death, researchers interviewed each child in both the control and experimental groups. After the interview, researchers provided an intervention (11 educational activities) to the experimental group. No educational intervention was provided to the control group. Researchers re-interviewed children in both groups after the treatment. The overall mean score of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group on all five categories of the death concept: causality, old age, irreversibility, finality, and inevitability. Implications regarding how death education can be approached in early childhood settings are also discussed.     

Young children's understanding of random phenomena

2 experiments on the development of the understanding of random phenomena are reported. Of interest was whether children understand the characteristic uncertainty in the physical nature of random phenomena as well as the unpredictability of outcomes. Children were asked, for both a random and a determined phenomenon, whether they knew what its next outcome would be and why. In Experiment 1, 4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds correctly differentiated their responses to the question of outcome predictability; the 2 older groups also mentioned appropriate characteristics of the random mechanism in explaining why they did not know what its outcome would be. Although 3-year-olds did not differentiate the random and determined phenomena, neither did they treat both phenomena as predictable. This latter result is inconsistent with Piaget and Inhelder's characterization of an early stage of development. Experiment 2 was designed to control for the possibility that children in Experiment 1 learned how to respond on the basis of pretest experience with the 2 different phenomena. 5- and 7-year-olds performed at a comparable level to the same-aged children in Experiment 1. Results suggest an earlier understanding of random phenomena than previously has been reported and support results in the literature indicating an early understanding of causality.     

Science, religion, and constructivism: constructing and understanding reality

There have been debates about the place of religion in science and in what ways knowledge that is produced through religion can aid in the learning and teaching of science. The discord between science and religion is mainly focused on whose knowledge is better in describing and explaining the reality. Constructivist epistemology seems to give some scholars hope in the possibility that the discord between science and religion can be ameliorated and that their expressions of reality can co-exist. In this forum contribution I present some Hindu perspectives to re-interpret how science and Hinduism explain reality. I have used only few Hindu perspectives based on selected Hindu writings, particularly Vedanta, to expand on objectivity and reality. Finally, I recommend that social constructivism may be a better framework in keeping science and religion discord at bay.     

Graphic symbols as "the mind on paper": links between children's interpretive theory of mind and symbol understanding

Children gradually develop interpretive theory of mind (iToM)—the understanding that different people may interpret identical events or stimuli differently. The present study tested whether more advanced iToM underlies children’s recognition that map symbols’ meanings must be communicated to others when symbols are iconic (resemble their referents). Children (6–9 years; N = 80) made maps using either iconic or abstract symbols. After accounting for age, intelligence, vocabulary, and memory, iToM predicted children’s success in communicating symbols’ meaning to a naïve map‐user when mapping tasks involved iconic (but not abstract) symbols. Findings suggest children’s growing appreciation of alternative representations and of the intentional assignment of meaning, and support the contention that ToM progresses beyond mastery of false belief.     

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.     

Remembering and understanding: the effects of changes in underlying knowledge on children's recollections

This study was designed to explore the influence of changes in children's knowledge on earlier constructed memories. Kindergartners' (N = 102) recall of a series of stories was examined as a function of their interpersonal knowledge about the main story character. Children's knowledge about the protagonist was manipulated prior to presentation of the stories, and the effects of their impressions on story recall were examined. A change in some of the children's impressions was then promoted, and the impact of this second knowledge manipulation on recall of previously heard stories was assessed. The results indicated that children's story recall was affected by their prior impressions. Moreover, following the second knowledge manipulation, children revised their story reports in ways that were consistent with their newly acquired impressions, which suggests that they had reconstructed their memories of previously heard stories. These findings provide evidence for both prospective and retrospective effects of knowledge on memory.     

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.