Can an early mathematical intervention boost the progress of children in kindergarten? A field experiment

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Socioeconomic status (SES) has been shown to be associated with children’s arithmetic knowledge as early as kindergarten, which is an important...     

La representación cognitiva de los verbos. Aproximación descriptiva y evolutiva

Resumen

Con el objeto de tener un mayor conocimiento del funcionamiento de las formas verbales en castellano, este trabajo aporta datos empíricos relativos a la manera cómo se representan las características del proceso (Aktionsart) descritas por el verbo. Tres son los factores estudiados: la duratividad, la resultatividad y la iteratividad o continuidad del proceso. Utilizando una metodología de representación gráfica se han recogido datos de una población de 42 adultos y 72 niños distribuidos en 4 grupos correspondientes a los cursos 2°, 4°, 6° y 8°

Los resultados obtenidos con los nueve verbos estudiados demuestran, por un lado, la validez del método ya que hace aparecer una neta dicotomía que opone los procesos resultativos no durativos a los no resultativos durativos, y por otro, que la duratividad y la resultatividad del proceso son captados de manera muy semejante por los adultos y por los niños de 4°, 6.° y 8.°, si bien los de 2.° denotan un menor acuerdo interindividual. Por último, el factor duratividad o iteratividad no constituye en esta prueba una dimensión discriminante.     

From declarative and procedural knowledge to the management of declarative and procedural knowledge

Research on domain-specific knowledge and general knowledge such as strategies has shown that information can indeed be available to a subject and still not be used. Several hypothesis have been set forth to explain this phenomenon; they as briefly exposed. An alternative, complementary hypothesis is then presented. It is assumed that most activities have several components organized in the form of a complex hierarchy. These interdependent components require monitoring because, at certain times, they are competing with one another for resources. Competition for resources and problems in component coordination may lead to a drop in performance. Several studies dealing with diverse knowledge domains are reviewed, which provide evidence for such resource problems. The same theoretical framework is then applied to explain several facts concerning teaching and learning: the impact of advance organizers; the instability of performance across repeated executions; some effects of social variables; the efficiency of tutoring and of taking into account the ‘proximal zone of development’. The limited cognitive capacity construct proves extremely useful in interpreting a large number of phenomena in a wide variety of domains.     

Is graphic activity cognitively costly? A developmental approach

The present experiment was carried out to test the hypothesis that the use of the written mode increases the working memory load. Second and fourth graders were orally presented with series of unrelated words which they were required to recall in sequence. Each subject had to recall five different lists in the following conditions: oral alone, written, oral with a concurrent task (tapping, categorization, drawing). Participants recalled more words in the oral condition than in either the written mode or the `oral and categorization' conditions. Moreover, second graders performed better in the oral mode than in the `oral and drawing condition'. This trend was not significant with older children. Finally, the tapping task did not affect children's performance. The results are consistent with our cognitive load hypothesis.     

Ponctuation et Connecteurs: Une Approche Textuelle et Génétique

Two experiments were carried out in order to study the development of textual punctuation use in children from 7 to 13. Four unpunctuated stories (following Mandler & Johnson’s narrative grammars 1977) involving or not a connective (et/alors/après) at different places were submitted to subjects who had to write them down in adding punctuation marks. The results show a strong textual impact on the frequency of punctuation which is higher at the beginning and at the end of the stories. We found also a strong impact of connectedness: the frequencies and types of punctuation marks varied in relation to connectives:et was rarely punctuated;alors was mainly associated with commas whereasaprès was more often associated whith periods. These effects were significant mainly from 11 years of age on, except for the impact ofet already observed at 7 years of age.     

The effect of the number of syllables on handwriting production

Four experiments examined whether motor programming in handwriting production can be modulated by the syllable structure of the word to be written. This study manipulated the number of syllables. The items, words and pseudo-words, had 2, 3 or 4 syllables. French adults copied them three times. We measured the latencies between the visual presentation and the first production (L1), the first and second production (L2), and the second and third production (L3). The results show an effect of the number of syllables in L1 for pseudo-words but not for words and on L2 and L3 for all the items (Experiments 1 and 2). Experiment 3 ruled out an interpretation of the latencies for pseudo-words in terms of reading time with a delayed copying task. Experiment 4 replicated the previous results and assessed the effect of varying the temporal interval between the second and third trials. The results of the four experiments confirm the role of the syllable in word writing. The number of syllables of a word modulates the time course of handwriting production.