Origin and Truth: Young Children's Understanding of Imaginary Mental Representations

In 2 studies, we address young children's understanding of the origin and representational relations of imagination, a fictional mental state, and contrast this with their understanding of knowledge, an epistemic mental state. In the first study, 54 3- and 4-year-old children received 2 tasks to assess their understanding of origins, and 4 stories to assess their understanding of representational relations. Children of both ages understood that, whereas perception is necessary for knowledge, it is irrelevant for imagination. Results for children's understanding of representational relations revealed intriguing developmental differences. Although children understood that knowledge represents reality more truthfully than imagination, 3-year-olds often claimed that imagination reflected reality. The second study provided additional evidence that younger 3-year-olds judge that imaginary representations truthfully reflect reality. We propose that children's responses indicate an early understanding of the distinction between mental states and the world, but also a confusion regarding the extent to which mental contents represent the physical world.     

Transfer in Young Children's Understanding of Spatial Representations

The creative and flexible use of symbols is a unique human ability. In order to use a symbol, one must understand the basic relation between the symbol and what it represents. How do young children come to appreciate such relations? One possibility is that insight into one symbolic relation helps children appreciate different ones. The 3 studies presented here support this possibility. In Experiments 1 and 2, both 2.5- and 3.0-year-old children showed transfer from an easy task that required appreciation of a model-room symbolic relation to a more difficult one, one that children their age typically do not appreciate. In Experiment 3, 2.5-year-olds showed transfer between symbol types: Experience with a model-room relation helped them appreciate a map-room relation. These transfer effects are consistent with the claim that early experience with symbolic relations contributes to symbolic sensitivity, a basic readiness to recognize that one object or event may stand for another.     

Young Children's Understanding of Fictional versus Epistemic Mental Representations: Imagination and Belief

In 2 studies, 3- and 4-year-old children's ability to reason about the relation between mental representations and reality was examined. In the first study, children received parallel false belief and "false" imagination tasks. Results revealed that children performed better on imagination tasks than on belief tasks. The second study demonstrated that, when various alternative explanations for better performance on the imagination task were controlled for, children still performed significantly better when reasoning about another person's imagination than when reasoning about another person's belief. These findings suggest that children's understanding that mental representations can differ from reality may emerge first with respect to representations that do not purport to represent reality truthfully.     

Children's Narrative Representations of Mothers: Their Development and Associations with Child and Mother Adaptation

We investigated associations between children's representations of mothers in their play narratives and measures of children's and mother socioemotional adaptation, and explored the development of these representations between the ages of 4 and 5 years. Fifty-one children were interviewed using the MacArthur Story-Stem Battery to obtain their narrative representations of mothers. Positive, Negative, and Disciplinary representation composites were generated. Children who had more Positive and Disciplinary representations and fewer Negative representations had fewer behavior problems and their mothers reported less psychological distress. In addition, 5-year-olds had more Positive and Disciplinary representations and fewer Negative representations did 4-year-olds, and there was moderate stability in individual differences in children's representations of mothers across the 2 ages. The results add an important dimension to research on parent-child relationships—that of children's perspectives on these relationships.     

Book Review: Exploring the Role of Narrative and Play in Young Children's Development and Education

The work that emerged in sociocultural approach during the last decade has contributed to our conceptualization of young children's development and education in important ways. Many scholars who adopted this framework converged on the point that both children's development and our characterizations of it are influenced by the social and cultural contexts within which children's and researchers' development takes place. Illustrations of this claim justified our search for culture-specific as well as universal features of children's development. However, our efforts to describe the processes by which children's development and education are formed by their cultural contexts are still in a state of evolution. As part of a search for local theories and research methods that enable the examination of children's development and education in relation to their cultural context, Narratives of Childhood is a welcome addition.     

Family Instability and Young Children's School Adjustment: Callousness and Negative Internal Representations as Mediators

This study examined the mediating roles of children's callousness and negative internal representations of family relationships in associations between family instability and children's adjustment to school in early childhood. Participants in this multimethod (i.e., survey, observations), multiinformant (i.e., parent, teacher, observer), longitudinal study included 243 preschool children (M_age = 4.60 years) and their families. Findings from the lagged, autoregressive tests of the mediational paths indicated that both children's callousness and negative internal representations of family relationships mediated longitudinal associations between family instability and children's school adjustment problems over a 2‐year period (i.e., the transition from preschool to first grade). Findings are discussed in relation to the attenuation hypothesis (E. J. Susman, 2006) and emotional security theory (EST; P. T. Davies, M. A. Winter, & D. Cicchetti, 2006).     

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.     

Young Children's Spatial Representations Developed through Exploration of a Desktop Virtual Reality Scene

Virtual Reality (VR) technology seems to offer the opportunity of designing 3D worlds and navigation activities which provide settings that are close to children's everyday experiences, capitalising on their enthusiasm for videogame-like technologies.This paper describes how different types of exploration of a VR scene by 6[emsp4 ]y-old children affected their performance in a series of spatial tasks. Individual children explored a desktop virtual world where we varied both the visual perspective on the VR scene (route vs. survey view) and the level of exploration control (active vs. passive movement). We measured children's knowledge of the spatial layout of the environment through their memory of objects' location in the virtual scene and through the analysis of their wayfinding abilities within the scene.The results indicate that children were able to develop and display different levels of allocentric knowledge about the virtual world depending on the way they had familiarized with it and on the characteristics of the task demands. This finding contributes to inform the design of VR technologies aimed at supporting or evaluating spatial abilities in children of this age.     

3～6岁幼儿数守恒和长度守恒的发展特点

不同年龄阶段的幼儿在数守恒和长度守恒方面具有不同的发展水平。小班幼儿极易受物体排列形式的影响,部分中班幼儿仍摆脱不了物体排列形式的影响,大班幼儿初步形成了数的守恒。幼儿长度守恒的发展落后于数守恒的发展,其发展顺序与皮亚杰的研究结果一致,但形成年龄略微提前。     

论《小伙子古德蒙·布朗》的叙事伦理——以詹姆斯·费伦叙事伦理理论为视角

以詹姆斯·费伦的叙事伦理理论为视角,探讨霍桑《小伙子古德蒙·布朗》的故事伦理建构及其重构的效果:实际的读者跟随叙述者和布朗,进入森林的午夜约会,也逐渐进入“作者的读者”角色.一开始,“作者的读者”处于限知的程度,随着叙事进程推进,全知的隐合作者提醒“作者的读者”对不可靠的叙述作出正确判断.故事终了,“作者的读者”明白了布朗夫妻相互欺瞒的秘密,看到了伪善、罪恶对人精神信仰的摧毁,品味隐合作者的讽刺之音.在《小伙子古德蒙·布朗》中,叙述者与受述者、隐合作者与“作者的读者”、作者与读者这3组关系对应着小说故事中特殊的“伦理位置”,它们既内部交流,又或平行或交叉地互动,使小说形成了极有复合性的叙事伦理.读者对小说故事进行伦理取位,回应作者的“文本设计”,小说的叙事生命因此彰显.     

叙事研究与案例研究的性质和应用

叙事研究与案例研究有共同的理论背景,但仍有研究方法与手段上的差异。现代与后现代的矛盾和困惑,使得叙事研究和案例研究看似简单却不易把握。要把握和运用好叙事研究和案例研究,就需要着重分析研究过程中大叙述与小叙述、私密性与公开化、共时性与历时性的关系,并探讨中小学教师在参与研究时面临的问题和值得注意的经验。     

A Comparison of Young Children's Understanding of Contradictory Representations in Pretense, Memory, and Belief

The present study examined the nature of young children's understanding of various mental representations. 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with story protagonists who held mental representations (beliefs, pretenses, and memories) that contradicted reality. Subjects chose 1 of 2 alternate " thought pictures " (depicting either the mental representation or reality) that reflected the mental state. While 4-year-olds performed relatively well on all scenario types, 3-year-olds chose the correct thought picture significantly more often for pretense and memory scenarios than for false belief scenarios. These results suggest that young children conceptualize pretense as involving mental representations, and that they have more difficulty understanding contradictory mental representations that purport to correspond to reality.     

The Narrative Construction of Differing Conceptions of the Person in the Development of Young Children's Social Understanding

The study reported here used a systematic interpretive analysis of young children's spontaneous narratives to investigate the development of their conceptions of the person. We argue that currently predominant approaches to this subject in social cognition research are insufficiently sociocultural and need to be broadened and reoriented (a) to capture the social (rather than purely mentalistic) dimension inherent in any conception of the person, (b) to examine how the development of children's conception of the person involves the selective appropriation of culturally elaborated models of personhood, and therefore (c) to recognize that children develop and employ different conceptions of the person, in ways that are socioculturally patterned. The study examined a body of 598 stories generated by 30 preschool children (5 girls and 5 boys in 3 age cohorts: 3s, 4s, and 5s) through a storytelling and story-acting practice that was a regular (but voluntary) part of their classroom activities for the entire school year. Analyses indicated that in their narratives the girls and boys constructed and elaborated two distinctive gender-related conceptions of the person: girls a socially embedded and interdependent person, who becomes increasingly individuated and self-consciously responsible; boys a separate and agonistic person, who increasingly becomes a stable, autonomous, and self-conscious mental agent. Typologies are presented to delineate and compare the developmental pathways of these two gender-related models of personhood. Some implications for early childhood education are also discussed.     

The 'Simple View' of Reading: Some evidence and possible implications

This article explores components of reading accuracy and comprehension in 14 teenagers. The study contrasted the explanatory power of decoding and listening comprehension subskills (the 'simple view of reading'; Gough & Tunmer, 1990), and 'verbal cognitive ability' (a more traditional psychometric model). Research also investigated teenagers' literacy self-percepts. Listening comprehension was the best predictor of reading comprehension, although reading accuracy was an additional predictor. Decoding skills best predicted reading accuracy. Reading self-percepts correlated with decoding but not comprehension skills. Possible uses of 'the simple view of reading' for conceptualisations of literacy problems, interventions and effective professional roles are considered.     

从汉乐府叙事诗看中国叙事诗情节的独特性

中国叙事诗在情节上有不同于西方史诗的独特性质。文章从叙事诗的概念入手,比照中西方叙事理论,通过对汉乐府叙事诗的分类研究,探索以汉乐府叙事诗为代表的中国叙事诗在情节上的独特性质,并从诗歌的社会功用、语言表现形式和流传方式等方面分析了中国叙事诗具有如此独特性的原因。这对于深刻认识中国叙事诗的独特性,从而正确评价中国叙事诗有重要意义。     

Narrative research: Political issues and implications

The conduct of narrative research gives rise to a range of political issues which include the validation of narrative knowledge, the relationships of power and authority among research participants, and the distinction between the public and private domains. In this article three issues will be examined: The politics of research in a “narrative” mode which challenges traditional research; issues of power that arise in collaborative research relationships; and the political implications of studying the private domain of life story and autobiography.     

试论幼儿园概念转变教学的现实必要性

当前幼儿园教学实践中存在的＂知识虚化＂现象凸显着幼儿园概念转变教学的必要性。关注幼儿在日常生活中形成的用以认识和解释世界的前概念,并采用适宜的策略促进其向科学概念转变,能在一定程度上克服幼儿园教学脱离知识的传授和学习,片面强调态度、情感和价值观的培养,片面强调教学方式的改革的弊端。     

文化与天性——儿童游戏性质的双重规定

儿童游戏的性质是由天性与文化两方面来规定的.作为天性,游戏象征着和谐、自由,是人之为人的标志,教育应该建立在儿童游戏活动的基础之上.作为文化,游戏又有着丰富而具体的内涵,是社会生活的一部分,随着时代、社会的变迁而变迁.这一问题的辨析有着重大的教育学意义,它使我们在肯定教育顺应天性的同时,也要考察游戏活动的具体形态,并对儿童生活的现实进行分析和反思.     

Supporting the Narrative Development of Young Children

This article presents the developmental continuum of children’s storytelling skills and provides examples at each of five levels: labeling, listing, connecting, sequencing and narrating. The authors connect these developing narrative skills to communication, literacy and cognition. Strategies to facilitate development from one level to another are described.     

Children's constitutional rights: Interpretations and implications

Constitutional law, as it applies to children, is a new and evolving area. It is essential that school psychologists, educators, and others professionally involved with children have an understanding of children's developing legal rights. While school psychology is shaped by both education and psychology, in greater part its parameters are described in law. Thus, school psychologists, as consultants to education and advocates for children, require a working knowledge of law. This paper discusses a brief historical overview; children's constitutional rights as delineated in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments; and implications for the role of the school psychologist.