Young Children's Understanding of Addition Concepts

Children's knowledge of concrete versions of additive composition, commutativity and associativity was investigated in two studies. In Study 1, 24 four- to five-year-olds and 25 five- to six-year-olds judged the equivalence of conceptually related addition problems presented using groups of objects. In Study 2, 45 five- to six-year-olds judged related problems and solved addition problems. Both studies indicated that concrete versions of principles were salient to most children although associativity was more difficult than commutativity and there were considerable individual differences in children's understanding. Study 1 results indicated that schoolchildren were more accurate at recognising additive composition than preschoolers and Study 2 results suggested that commutativity knowledge was related to using advanced counting strategies for solving addition problems. Overall, the research supports the claim that examining early knowledge of addition principles provides important insights into children's emerging part-whole knowledge and mathematical development.     

儿童对人的行为进行归纳推理的多样性效应

儿童在对人的行为进行归纳推理时是否遵循多样性原则,是否受到了其他认知因素的影响？本研究采用归纳推理多样性效应的范式,分析了4-5岁、6-7岁、8岁、9岁儿童和成人在对人的行为进行推理时表现出多样性效应的发展趋势。结果表明,6-7岁、8岁、9岁和成人表现出了多样性效应,并且9岁儿童运用多样性信息的能力已达到成人水平。但6-7岁和8岁儿童的多样性表现与成人仍有显著差别。从发展趋势上,对年龄、属性特征外显性和人格特质理解等因素的影响进行了初步探讨。     

Theory-based Correlations and Their Role in Children's Concepts

Recent accounts of conceptual development have emphasized the important role intuitive theories play in concept formation; however, it is still not clear exactly how these theories exert their influence. We present evidence that elementary school age children use theories to link together specific features associated with individual concepts. The results of our first experiment indicate that theory-based correlations play a prominent role in typicality judgments and in decisions about category membership. In a second experiment, we demonstrate that children's theories play an important role in determining which attributes will be considered most central to the concept. The results of these studies suggest that feature correlations can serve to link children's concepts with their intuitive theories of the world.     

Preschool Children's Concepts of Disability in Their Peers

Although mainstream preschool programs have been in existence since the 1970s, little is known about the ways in which typical children attempt to understand what it means for a peer to have a disability. In this study, 4-year-old children without disabilities who were enrolled in a mainstream preschool class explained their peers' disabilities by referring to concepts of immaturity, accident, or adaptive equipment to account for the behavioral differences that they observed. The implications of these cognitions for children's developing attitudes and behaviors toward peers with disabilities are discussed.     

Primary Children's Understanding of Early Modern Artists' Concepts

This paper reports on the first three weeks of a piece of classroom action research that took place over a period of eight weeks. It involved three primary classes: 5 year olds, 7/8 year olds and 11 year olds. The research was carried out in two contrasting settings: inner city Toxteth, Liverpool, with two classes of 5 and 11 year olds, and a leafy suburban setting in Cheshire, with one class of 7/8 year olds. The research sought answers to the following questions: Can young children understand some aspects of the concepts that inform modern art? Could that understanding be used to bring about cognitive development in their artwork? How are the developmental differences between 5, 7/8, and 11 year olds demonstrated? Do inner-city children perform less well than suburban children in art? Could each child's learning be assessed in art? For reasons of brevity this paper gives evidence of the 5 and 11 year old children's work and reports on the 7/8 year olds response in the conclusion.     

幼儿园教师关于创造性儿童画特征的内隐观

幼儿园教师所持有的创造性儿童画特征的内隐观对他们在绘画教学中如何培养儿童的创造性有着直接的影响.本研究采用社会效度的方法,调查了125名幼儿园教师关于创造性儿童画特征的内隐观,结果表明:(1)幼儿园教师对创造性儿童画认同的最重要的前10个特征依次是:想像力、反映孩子的个性、表达孩子对事物的理解和情感、构思大胆、幼儿能根据画解释丰富的意思、内容丰富且生动、让看画的人有很多的遐想空间、以儿童的日常生活为主延伸进行创作、反映孩子真实的内心世界、敢于探索等;(2)幼儿园教师有关创造性儿童画特征的内隐观结构表现为:独立自主创作且内涵丰富、具有明显的年龄特征、表现方式独特、技巧相对成熟;(3)个体变量对幼儿园教师有关创造性儿童画特征的内隐观没有显著影响.     

幼儿对心理健康相关概念的认知

本研究主要采用访谈法,考察了300名45～80个月的幼儿对10个心理健康相关概念的认知。研究发现,幼儿主要依据事物的具体实例、可直接感知的外部特征掌握概念,并表现出了一定的年龄差异与园所差异,但没有表现出性别差异。幼儿园心理健康教育应当加强教育的质量与频率,关注幼儿的个体差异与年龄特征,并与家长合作,共同促进幼儿健康认知水平与心理健康素质的提高。     

Mothers' Concepts of Young Children's Areas of Personal Freedom

White suburban working- to upper-middle-class mothers ( N = 40) of children ages 5 and 7 were interviewed regarding their concepts of children's areas of personal discretion, autonomy, and individuality. Mothers treated standardized moral, conventional, and prudential items as issues that mothers should control, while standardized personal items were treated as up to the child. In open-ended interviews, mothers reported setting limits around issues of safety, family conventions, and daily routines but permitted children to make decisions about food, recreational activities, clothes, and playmates. Mothers viewed mother-child conflict as occurring over these same issues and viewed children's choices as helping them to develop autonomy and competence. Mothers viewed their roles as educators and nurturers and valued the development of individuality in their children, which was thought to emerge in infancy or toddlerhood. Few age differences were observed, but gender differences were found in the ways mothers characterized boys and girls' resistances to parental authority and in the content of mother-child disputes. Results were interpreted in terms of the emergence of the personal domain in children.     

Parents' Use of Inductive Discipline: Relations to Children's Empathy and Prosocial Behavior

Relations between parents' discipline, children's empathic responses, and children's prosocial behavior were examined in order to evaluate Martin Hoffman's claim that children's empathy and empathy-based guilt mediate the socialization of children's prosocial behavior. 78 sixth and seventh graders (138–172 months in age), their mothers, and teachers completed multiple measures of Hoffman's constructs. Results were largely consistent with theory. Parents' use of inductive as opposed to power-assertive discipline was related to children's prosocial behavior. Children of inductive parents were more empathic; and more empathic children were more prosocial. Moreover, children's empathy was found to mediate the relation between parents' discipline and children's prosocial behavior. Few relations were obtained for children's guilt indices, but post hoc analyses yielded theoretically consistent results. Contrary to expectations, parents' use of statements of disappointment was the component of the inductive discipline score which was most strongly related to children's prosocial behavior.     

Early Maternal Employment and Children's Vocabulary and Inductive Reasoning Ability: A Dynamic Approach

This study investigates the relationship between early maternal employment history and children's vocabulary and inductive reasoning ability at age 5, drawing on longitudinal information on 2,200 children from the Growing Up in Scotland data. Prior research rarely addresses dynamics in maternal employment and the methodological ramifications of time‐variant confounding. The present study proposes various measures to capture duration, timing, and stability of early maternal employment and uses inverse probability of treatment weighting to control for time‐variant confounders that may partially mediate the effect of maternal employment on cognitive scores. The findings suggest only modest differences in the above ability measures between children who have been exposed to very different patterns of eary maternal employment, but with similar observed covariate history.     

儿童早期空间测量学习中的核心概念与能力

测量是数学的主题之一,测量能力的发展对儿童数学认知能力的发展有重要影响.儿童获得空间测量能力必须掌握单位、空间概念和数概念等核心概念;儿童熟练进行空间测量活动必须具备传递性推理、选择适当测量策略等核心能力.具体而言,儿童最早掌握的是一维空间的概念.在一维空间测量中,儿童较早掌握的核心概念是端点,同时必须能够准确找到表征测量对象量的特征的具体知觉特征.儿童二维和三维空间概念的形成要经历从不理解到理解、从不稳定到稳定的复杂发展过程,因此相当一部分3～6岁儿童认识的二维和三维空间实质都是一维的.关于单位概念,儿童必须明白作为测量单位的量须与待测定的量是同类量、测量单位的大小与数量之间存在反函数关系、测量单位须大小相等等内容.在测量活动中,儿童掌握关于数的概念实质是学会对连续量进行离散化的心理加工,这能有效巩固和扩展儿童对数概念的理解,使其对数的实际意义有更广泛和深入的认识.传递性推理能力是儿童准确测量的基础,它的形成标志着儿童能够借助中介物进行两个物体的空间比较.选择适当的测量策略是保证儿童有效测量的前提.儿童在空间测量活动中使用的策略主要有目测、并列或重叠比较、使用非标准单位测量、使用标准工具测量等.在当前儿童数学教育实践中,教师因为不清楚上述核心概念与核心能力,往往只是把测量看作一种操作性的活动,只重视教给儿童一组关于测量的程序性知识,是不利于儿童数学思维能力与素质的发展、数学问题解决能力的提高的.     

The Impact of Omitting Random Interaction Effects in Cross-Classified Random Effect Modeling

The present study examines bias in parameter estimates and standard error in cross-classified random effect modeling (CCREM) caused by omitting the random interaction effects of the cross-classified factors, focusing on the effect of a sample size within cells and ratio of a small cell. A Monte Carlo simulation study was conducted to compare the correctly specified and the misspecified CCREM. While there was negligible bias in fixed effects, substantial biases were found in the random effects of the misspecified model depending on the number of samples within a cell and the proportion of small cells. However, in the case of the correctly specified model, no bias occurred. The present study suggests considering the random interaction effects when conducting CCREM to avoid overestimation of variance components and to calculate an accurate value of estimation. The implications of this study are to illuminate the conditions of cross-classification ratio and to provide a meaningful reference for applied researchers using CCREM.     

Children's Concepts of the Shape and Size of the Earth,Sun and Moon

Children's understandings of the shape and relative sizes of the Earth, Sun and Moon have been extensively researched and in a variety of ways. Much is known about the confusions which arise as young people try to grasp ideas about the world and our neighbouring celestial bodies. Despite this, there remain uncertainties about the conceptual models which young people use and how they theorise in the process of acquiring more scientific conceptions. In this article, the relevant published research is reviewed critically and in-depth in order to frame a series of investigations using semi-structured interviews carried out with 248 participants aged 3–18 years from China and New Zealand. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data concerning the reasoning of these subjects (involving cognitive categorisations and their rank ordering) confirmed that (a) concepts of Earth shape and size are embedded in a ‘super-concept’ or ‘Earth notion’ embracing ideas of physical shape, ‘ground’ and ‘sky’, habitation of and identity with Earth; (b) conceptual development is similar in cultures where teachers hold a scientific world view and (c) children's concepts of shape and size of the Earth, Sun and Moon can be usefully explored within an ethnological approach using multi-media interviews combined with observational astronomy. For these young people, concepts of the shape and size of the Moon and Sun were closely correlated with their Earth notion concepts and there were few differences between the cultures despite their contrasts. Analysis of the statistical data used Kolmogorov–Smirnov Two-Sample Tests with hypotheses confirmed at K–S alpha level 0.05; r_s : p?<?0.01.     

归纳法不等于归纳推理

在归纳逻辑中归纳法和归纳推理始终没有明确的界限 ,有人把两者看成是同一关系的概念 ,有人把两者看成是包含关系的概念。本文的观点是归纳法不等于归纳推理     

Young Children's God Concepts: Influences of Attachment and Religious Socialization in a Family and School Context

This contribution offers an overview of two studies testing two attachment theoretical correspondence hypotheses in the prediction of individual differences in young children's God concepts. The correspondence hypothesis supposes that people's view on God parallels their images of their early caregiver–child relationship. The revised correspondence hypothesis incorporates caregiver religiosity and socialization. In the first study support was found for the correspondence hypothesis in the school context examining 72 preschoolers. In the second study the revised correspondence hypothesis was partly confirmed among 198 kindergarteners. Children cognitively learn about a powerful and comforting, helping God in their homes and schools, even when all relationships with their caregivers are experienced as negative. However, in such a surrounding they do not emotionally learn about an intimate, personal bond with God.     

Young Children's Self‐Concepts Include Representations of Abstract Traits and the Global Self

There is debate about the abstractness of young children's self‐concepts—specifically, whether they include representations of (a) general traits and abilities and (b) the global self. Four studies (N = 176 children aged 4–7) suggested these representations are indeed part of early self‐concepts. Studies 1 and 2 reexamined prior evidence that young children cannot represent traits and abilities. The results suggested that children's seemingly immature judgments in previous studies were due to peculiarities of the task context not the inadequacy of children's self‐concepts. Similarly, Studies 3 and 4 revealed that, contrary to claims of immaturity in reasoning about the global self, young children update their global self‐evaluations in flexible, context‐sensitive ways. This evidence suggests continuity in the structure of self‐concepts across childhood.     

God's Word, Religious Rules, and Their Relation to Christian and Jewish Children's Concepts of Morality

2 studies were conducted of children's concepts of moral and nonmoral religious rules. In Study 1, 64 Amish-Mennonite children (ages 10, 12, 14, 16) were asked to evaluate 4 moral and 7 nonmoral religious rules as to rule alterability, generalizability, and whether the status of the acts was contingent on the word of God. As a second aspect of Study 1, 64 Dutch Reform Calvinist children were asked to determine whether God's commands could make a harmful act morally right. Study 2 replicated the basic design of Study 1 with 64 Conservative and 32 Orthodox Jewish children. Findings were that subjects differentiated between moral and nonmoral religious issues. Moral rules and some nonmoral rules were seen as nonalterable by religious authorities. The status of moral (but not nonmoral) acts was generalized to members outside the religion and was not viewed as contingent on the existence of statements from God. Judgments regarding moral issues were justified in terms of justice and human welfare considerations; nonmoral issues were evaluated in terms of their normative status. Some denominational and age effects were found. Findings supported the proposition that social knowledge is constructed within conceptual systems that represent fundamental categories of social experience.     

烷基的斥电子诱导效应和吸电子诱导效应

阐述了烷基的吸电子诱导效应,因此解释了一些物质的酸性变化顺序。