Showing How Many: young children's written representation of number

Abstract This paper reports a simple experiment which explores young children's written representation of number. Previous research (e.g. Hughes, 1983; Sinclair, Siegrist & Sinclair, 1982) has shown that several factors may influence the extent to which children will spontaneously deploy their knowledge of numerals to represent numerosity, but the available evidence is insufficient to provide a clear account of the relative weight of these factors. The present experiment involved presenting five to six year‐old children with arrays of simple objects and manipulating the wording of the instructions. The results showed that the use of the term ‘how many’ led the vast majority of the children to show numerosity by using materials. In contrast, when asked to represent ‘what’ they could see, most children concerned themselves with depicting the nature of the objects in the array by drawing or writing. These findings suggest that the linguistic context of the task is important in determining the children's representational strategies. Furthermore, it is argued that children's understanding of number and their ability to use numerals is quite separable from their knowledge of when it is appropriate to deploy these skills.     

Developing scales to measure parental mediation of young children's internet use

With children using digital media at ever younger ages, media-education becomes a pressing issue for parents. As there is hardly any research on how parents guide the online activities of toddlers and young children an internet-survey was held among 792 Dutch parents of children aged between 2 and 12 years. Factor analysis revealed that for the internet, parents partly use the same strategies they also apply for television and video games: ‘co-use’, ‘active mediation’, and ‘restrictive mediation’. In addition, they also utilise new strategies: ‘supervision’ and ‘technical safety guidance’. Mediation was mainly predicted by the child's age and online behaviour (e.g., gaming, social networking), as well as by the number of computers in the home and the parents' gender, education and computer/internet skills. Finally, parents also use more mediation when they expect that the internet has a positive effect and particularly when they believe that it has a negative impact.     

From actors to agents to persons: the development of character representation in young children's narratives

This study addressed a puzzling discrepancy in existing research about when children achieve and manifest a mentalistic conception of the person. Narrative research suggests that children do not represent characters as mental agents until middle childhood, whereas social cognition research places this understanding at around 4 years. Using a theoretically informed typology, 617 stories were analyzed composed by 30 children participating in a storytelling and story-acting practice integrated into their preschool curriculum. Results indicated that children's representation of characters shifted from almost exclusively physical and external portrayals of "actors" at 3 to increasing inclusion of "agents" with rudimentary mental states at 4 and of "persons" with mental representational capacities by 5. The developmental trajectories of boys and girls differed somewhat.     

Foster children's attachment behavior and representation: Influence of children's pre-placement experiences and foster caregiver's sensitivity

Although the majority of foster children have been exposed to early adversity in their biological families and have experienced one or more disruptions of attachment relationships, most studies surprisingly found foster children to be as securely attached as children in low-risk samples. However, attention has been paid almost exclusively to attachment formation in young children up to two years of age, and the majority of studies solely investigated attachment behavior whereas few is known about foster children's representations about attachment relationships. To extend findings on attachment in foster children and its predictors, our study examined both attachment behavior and representations in foster children aged between 3 and 8 years. Diverse potential predictors including child variables, birth parents’ variables, pre-placement experiences, and foster caregiver's behavior were included in the analyses. Results revealed that foster children showed both lower attachment security and higher disorganization scores than children in low-risk samples. Attachment behavior and representation were found to be widely independent from each other. Different factors contributed to attachment behavior and representation: whereas foster children's attachment behavior was mainly influenced by foster parents’ behavior, pre-placement experiences did predict hyperactivation and disorganization on the representational level. The results indicate that, when intervening with foster families, it seems crucial to focus not exclusively on the promotion of secure attachment behavior but also to develop interventions enhancing secure and organized attachment representations.     

Assessing young children's social concept development

A number of questions regarding the nature of social concept development in young children were investigated in this study. In an earlier study, a social concept picture-sorting task was developed to obtain normative data on young children's social concept development. For this replication study, a larger more heterogeneous sample was used consisting of 64 kindergarten and 65 first grade public school students from lower to upper middle-class socioeconomic levels. Profile analysis was used to compare grades, sex, and racial groups. All three variables had a significant impact on performance. Significant differences in difficulty were found among the nine concepts measured. Three of the most difficult concepts (family-not family, those who protect us, and past-present) are commonly included in early childhood curriculum. These results suggest that the level of concept development needs to be considered in planning social studies curriculum and instruction for young children.     

Developing young children's multidigit number sense

Enrichment for mathematically gifted students in the elementary school needs to extend beyond puzzles or busywork and support the development of mathematical power through a differentiated curriculum. This article describes a series of enrichment experiences that were designed to develop young gifted children's understanding of large numbers, which was central to their investigation of space travel. Although large numbers are not traditionally included in the mathematics curriculum for young children, the children in this group responded enthusiastically to the enrichment experiences. These experiences provided the children with an opportunity to understand the large numbers they encountered in science resource material and to develop their mathematical power.     

Home environments and young Latino children's school readiness

This exploratory study examined the relations among characteristics of children's home environments and two school readiness skills: their oral language and social functioning. Low SES Latino mothers of 122 (65 girls; 57 boys) preschoolers (39–49 months (M = 45.00; S.D. = 5.40) completed questionnaires about their family demography, their home environments, and their perceived parenting stress. Preschool teachers rated children's social functioning, and children were administered the PPVT-R (or the TVIP). Results of path analyses showed that when controlling for children's age and factors that potentially influence children's opportunities for learning, the relation between parents’ literacy involvement and children's PPVT-R/TVIP scores and social functioning was mediated by children's interest in literacy. In addition, mothers’ perceived parenting stress was directly associated with children's PPVT-R/TVIP scores and social functioning. The findings highlight within-group variations in the home literacy environments of low SES Latino families.     

Social justice storytelling and young children's active citizenship

This paper examines empirical data with regard to recent theorizing and conceptualizing of children's citizenship. It draws on a doctoral study where the author told social justice stories to one class of children aged five to six years to investigate the active citizenship that the stories set in motion. By imagining this action research study rhizomatically, organic and tangent pathways were mapped of what the stories set in motion. Analysis was informed by poststructuralist discourse theory and critical theory on political action, which enabled identification of enablers and constrainers of young children's actual practice of citizenship. A case is argued for acknowledgement of young children's political identities and capacity to act as communitarian citizens.     

Explanation and generalization in young children's strategy learning

Children often learn new problem-solving strategies by observing examples of other people's problem-solving. When children learn a new strategy through observation and also explain the new strategy to themselves, they generalize the strategy more widely than children who learn a new strategy but do not explain. We tested three hypothesized mechanisms through which explanations might facilitate strategy generalization: more accurate recall of the new strategy's procedures; increased selection of the new strategy over competing strategies; or more effective management of the new strategy's goal structure. Findings supported the third mechanism: Explanations facilitated generalization through the creation of novel goal structures that enabled children to persist in use of the new strategy despite potential interference from competing strategies. The facilitative effect of explanation did vary with children's age and did not vary between explanations children created by themselves versus explanations they learned from the experimenter.     

Gender and sexuality in young children's perspectives of AIDS

Abstract

Responses to AIDS have often neglected children. Drawing on a qualitative study of young children aged 7–9 years, this paper draws attention to their understandings of HIV and AIDS. It is argued that young children are able to give meaning to the disease in ways that link to their social contexts, where gender inequalities and sexual violence are common. Sexuality is a key dimension through which they express knowledge of the disease. Young children do know the links between sex and AIDS, and connect vulnerability to the disease in gendered ways. To address the missing voices of young children requires coordinated efforts, requiring systemic responses which support teachers in initiatives to address taboo subjects like sexuality, as well as the pervasive poverty in which the children in our study are located.     

Memory demands and the development of young children's memory

The primary purposes of this study were to determine the nature of and changes in early memory demands and to assess the relationship between memory demands and memory performance. 10 children at each of 2 ages--30 and 42 months--were observed in their homes for 4 2-hour sessions. Conversations between mothers and children were recorded and mother's memory-demand questions were coded for form and content from these conversations. Question form referred to whether recall or recognition was required and question content to the type of information requested--event or knowledge. Children also participated in 2 long-term memory tasks--production and verification. They were shown a dollhouse and asked to produce the names of objects that would belong in 2 rooms of the house and to verify whether particular miniature replicas of household objects belonged in the rooms. Although memory demands were frequently made, there were few changes between age 2 and 3 in the incidence or types of questions children were asked. At age 3, positive correlations were found between children's production and verification performance and content rather than form of mothers' memory-demand questions. At age 2 no overall relationships were found. Children were retested a year later on memory tasks, and for both age groups memory demands and performance were positively correlated even when initial memory-performance level was controlled. These results, along with other patterns in the data, suggested that mothers' memory demands have an impact on children's memory performance that provides at least partial support for Vygotsky's sociohistorical model of memory development.     

Inner speech in young French children's reading

The role of speech and inner speech in reading is contentious and the study of inner speech in reading is fraught with methodological problems. An approach sometimes used is the ‘e-cancelling’ method, where subjects are instructed to mark all incidences of the letter ‘e’ in a text so that inferences can be made from underlining ‘e's that would be silent versus those that would be sounded in speech. However, this method does not work well in the French language and, in attempting to use letter cancelling approaches with French children aged 7–8 years, we have used other vowels as targets. In this paper we present some results about the effects on rate of reading and comprehension of various tasks intended to induce attention to the sound of parts of the text. Our conclusion, in line with that of Liva (1987) and other researchers, is that, at this early stage of reading development, reference to the sound of text does not inhibit comprehension.     

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.     

Celebrating young Indigenous Australian children's speech and language competence

World-wide it is important to recognize Indigenous children's speech and language competence and their language learning environments. Indigenous Australian children participated in the child cohort of Footprints in Time: Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children, a national study supported by Indigenous Australians and the Australian Government collected annually (in waves). There were 692 3–5-year-old children in wave 1, and two years later, 570 5–7-year-old children were in wave 3 (77.0% of children in wave 1 were also in wave 3). Data were obtained via parent interviews and direct assessment. The children spoke between one and eight languages including: English (wave 1: 91.2%, wave 3: 99.6%), Indigenous languages (wave 1: 24.4%, wave 3: 26.8%), creoles (wave 1: 11.5%, wave 3: 13.7%), foreign languages (non-Indigenous languages other than English) (wave 1: 2.0%, wave 3: 5.1%), and sign languages (wave 1: 0.6%, wave 3: 0.4%). Children who spoke an Indigenous language were more likely to live in moderate to extreme isolation than their English-speaking counterparts. Parental concern about speech and language skills was similar to data for non-Indigenous children with approximately one quarter of parents expressing concern (wave 1: yes = 13.9%, a little = 10.4%). Children's language environments were rich, with many family members and friends telling oral stories, reading books, and listening to the children read. Almost a third of families wanted to pass on their cultural language, and many indicated that they would like their child to learn an Indigenous language at school. Overall, Indigenous Australian children have rich cultural and linguistic traditions and their speech and language competence is promoted through family, community, and educational experiences.     

Young children's use of spatial coordinates

4-6-year-old children were given problems in which they had to decide which 1 of an array of points was in line with 2 coordinate markers. The simplest problems had 4 points to choose between and markers perpendicular to the horizontal and vertical axes. Children of all ages were able to extrapolate lines from both coordinates to solve these problems. The older children were also given more complex problems. In some of these, 1 marker was at 45 degrees to an axis, the other perpendicular: in others the array was increased to 16 points and presented sometimes in a regular, sometimes in an irregular pattern. There were developmental improvements in performance, and the complex problems were more difficult than the simpler ones. However, 5- and 6-year-olds did extremely well even on the complex problems. The results establish that young children's grasp of Euclidean spatial relationships is more adequate than has often been suggested.     

The effects of documentation on young children's memory

A central aspect of the Reggio approach to early childhood education is documentation, in which educators observe, record, and display children's work. Educational anecdotes and developmental theory suggest that documentation may facilitate children's memory; the current study explored this possibility empirically. Sixty-three preschool/kindergarten children experienced a novel learning event. Two days later, children were reminded with either documentation or worksheets of event details and the factual information that had been presented, or they were not reminded. Three weeks later, children completed a memory interview that included episodic and semantic measures. Children in the documentation and worksheet conditions remembered more factual information than those in the no-reminder condition. Children in the documentation condition produced more on-topic speech than those in the worksheet condition during reminding and a subsequent learning session. Potential benefits of documentation for classroom performance are discussed.     

Drug use and personality in adolescence and young adulthood: structural models with nonnormal variables

An introduction to structural modeling with nonnormal continuous variables is provided using the equations language of the micro-mainframe program EQS in the context of a longitudinal study of adolescent development that followed about 700 adolescents across an 8-year span into young adulthood. 2 models relating drug use and personality are developed to assess the influence of drug use on personality, and personality on drug use. A high level of self-acceptance is shown to have a small but significant inoculating effect against subsequent cannabis use in both early and late adolescence, while a small positive effect of cannabis use on subsequent self-acceptance occurs only during early adolescence. Substantial stability of self-derogation, cannabis use, and law abidance are demonstrated, with self-derogation during adolescence leading to increased law abidance during young adulthood.     

Primary school children's use of ICT

This article reports on a study of 267 primary children (Year 2 and 6) in five schools in South and Mid Wales. It examines their use of information and communications technology (ICT) both in school and at home using a combination of interview and questionnaire data. These data reveal that although the vast majority of children are making some use of computers in school, patterns of sustained and varied engagement with ICT are rare; with educational use of computers curtailed by a variety of classroom factors. Moreover, although many children could be considered to be sophisticated and knowledgeable consumers of ICT, their outside-of-school access to technology is varied. The findings raise questions about the nature of ICT use in primary classrooms and the need to ensure meaningful and regular access to technology in school for all children.