Feedback Analysis of the Movement Mechanisms of Handwriting

To extend the feedback analysis of legibility in handwriting, a coordinate force transducer has been devised that makes possible the separate sensing of the right-left and near-far directions of writing motions and the converting of these movements to their electrical analogs. This method of transducing handwriting motions made possible systematic measurement of the effects of feedback displacement and delay of the visual feedback of writing movements and of analyzing the types of variation in legibility related to variable feedback factors. Results showed that differential directional defects and general disturbances in legibility and timing of writing movements occurred in relation to both visual feedback displacement and delay of writing motions. The findings give added support to the view that writing is not a form of discrete stimulus-response behavior or stimulus tracking, but consists of self-generated forms of response comparable to steering, in which accuracy, legibility, and learning are directly determined by feedback time factors and directional specificity of particular right-left and near-far coordinates of movement that dynamically control and project visual input in the writing act.     

Preservice teachers’ articulated noticing through pedagogies of practice

Elementary preservice teachers at six universities engaged in a task that provided them opportunities to articulate their professional noticing within video representations, written decompositions, and animated approximations of practice. The preservice teachers’ written accounts indicated that a majority attended to students or student thinking; however, when asked to illustrate their noticing through animation, focus shifted to the classroom teacher. Findings indicate the extent to which preservice teachers articulated specific mathematics concepts within and across pedagogies of practice and highlight the critical importance for selecting and utilizing multiple types of tasks to better understand preservice teacher noticing. Implications for eliciting and supporting preservice teacher noticing are discussed.     

Comparative Evaluations of Early Intervention Alternatives: A Response to Commentaries by Guralnick and Telzrow

This article responds to two commentaries by Guralnick (1993) and Telzrow (1993) published in the October 1993 issue of Early Education and Development. The commentaries addressed the six longitudinal, comparative studies from the Early Intervention Research Institute's (EIRI's) investigations of the effects and costs of early intervention for children with disabilities. In this response to their thoughtful critique, we clarify details of our research design and procedures that may have been unclear. We also discuss the specificity and consistency with contemporary developmental/ecological issues raised by Guralnick We contend that the interventions investigated address important questions about age at start, intensity, and parent involvement with which today's service providers contend. We give our opinion on how the results of these studies should be interpreted, and emphasize their implications for other second-generation early intervention research.     

The Effectiveness of Adding a Parent Involvement Component to an Existing Center-Based Program for Children with Disabilities and Their Families

The belief that parent involvement in early intervention programs increases developmental benefits for children with disabilities and their families is widely accepted. However, very few studies have directly investigated the effects of parent involvement on child and/or family outcomes in a comparative design. For the present study, children in an early intervention program were randomly assigned to either of two groups. One group continued to receive the center- based program, and the other received the center-based program plus a specific parent involvement program. The type of parent involvement most frequently reported in the literature (White,Taylor, & Moss, 1992) was implemented. Weekly parent meetings for 15 weeks focused on teaching parents how to implement intervention at home, provided information on other topics, and facilitated social support. Assessment of child and family functioning took place prior to and immediately after the parent involvement program, as well as longitudinally over a four-year period. No immediate or long-term benefits for the children or their families were found. Findings are compared with findings of other studies. The implications of the findings in evaluating the rationales for this type of parent involvement program are discussed.     

Some aspects of children's ability to solve mathematical problems

This survey presents the essentials of a study concerning problem solving ability in children aged 12–13. It forms part of a large project concerning the impact of calculators and computers in school mathematics and the consequences for certain basic abilities. The contents of the survey are in brief:

? definition of problem solving ability;

? test construction;

? interviews;

? supplementary investigations.

     

As Time Goes By: Children''s Early Understanding of Growth in Animals

Beliefs about naturally occurring transformations were examined in children aged 3 to 6 years in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 tested children's understanding that animals (but not artifacts) predictably get larger over time. Experiment 1a examined whether the results obtained in the first experiment could be attributed to an added memory component on the artifact task. Experiment 2 further examined beliefs about the aging of artifacts. In Experiment 3, color and shape (metamorphosis) changes of animals were investigated. At all ages, children appeared to understand that animals get larger and not smaller with age. While older children and adults allowed for rather dramatic changes in the size and shape of animals over the life span if the alternative involved decreasing in size with age, preschool children were less willing to accept these changes. Taken together, the results of these studies suggest that even young preschool children have 2 conceptual insights about natural transformations: that they are lawful and nonrandom, and that they are domain and mechanism specific. Further, children as young as age 3 are able to go beyond the perceptual appearance of animals in making judgments about transformations caused by growth. Implications for children's understanding of personal and species identity are discussed.