CHAPTER 9 - THE CHILD'S CONCEPTION OF THE EXPERIMENTER

WHITE, EDWARD; ELSOM, BILL; and PRAWAT, RICHARD. Children's Conceptions of Death. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 307-310. This study investigated children's conceptions of death from a developmental perspective. Kindergarten through fourth graders (N = 170) were tested for conservation and then interviewed following the presentation of a story about an elderly woman's death, in an attempt to assess children's understanding of 3 concepts: irrevocability, cessation of bodily processes, and universality. 2 story versions were used, 1 depicting the woman as a nice person, the other as an unkind person. In the major finding, understanding of universality, but not understanding of the irrevocability of death and cessation of bodily processes, was significantly related to the child's level of cognitive development. The variable relating to the attractiveness of the story character significantly affected children's responses regarding cause of death.

The study examines children's stage of cognitive development in relation to their patterns of health decision-making, including their cognitive capabilities in integrating the sequential stages of the decision-making process. A sample of 81 male (N=33) and female (N=48) students were drawn from two urban public schools in West Tennessee. All participants in the study were of African-American descent. The Centers for Disease Control Decision-Making Instrument was used to assess students' decision-making as well as their understanding of the decision-making process. The children's cognitive level was determined by their performance on three Piagetian conservation tasks. Findings revealed that both the preoperational and concrete operational children performed significantly below the formal operational children in terms of total correct responses to the decision-making scenarios. Error type analyses indicated that the preoperational children made more errors involving "skipped step" than did either the concrete or formal operational children. There were no significant differences between children's level of cognitive development and any other error type. Implications for health promotion and disease prevention programs among prevention practitioners who work regularly with children are discussed.

Literature in developmental psychology pays special attention to the difficulties met by preschool children when confronted with (universal vs. existential) quantified sentences. According to the pivotal Piagetian view, the difficulties exhibited in quantifier comprehension during the preoperational period (age 2-6) derive from the same limitations in logical reasoning that cause bad performance outcomes in class inclusion problems. Nevertheless, as far as we know, a direct comparison between the two tasks has never been produced. In this research we tested the logical hypotheses concerning the failure in quantifier comprehension of preschool children by administering a sentence-picture matching task to two groups of children (5-6 vs. 7-8years old). Pictures, obtained by partially pairing two entity sets, one of which outnumbers the other, were presented to participants. After each picture, children were asked to answer questions involving quantified versus class inclusion contents. Main findings showed that younger children performed the quantifier task worse than older children and their performance in that task was also worse with respect to the class inclusion task. This difference was not observed with older children who obtained better results than younger children in both tasks. These findings suggest that the specific abilities involved in solving the two problems evolve independently from each other during cognitive development. The results have been discussed in the light of the recent developmental theories.

Theory-of-mind, cognitive development, and children's interpretation of anxiety-related physical symptoms

ABSTRACTThis study focuses on children who go through a ‘silent’ period early in the course of second language development, during which they largely cease verbal communication with speakers of the second language (English). Video recordings with radio microphones under natural conditions revealed that most of these children engaged in extensive private speech, which they were found to use for a variety of intrapersonal learning strategies, including (1) repetition of others' utterances, (2) recall and practice, (3) creation of new linguistic forms, (4) paradigmatic substitution and syntagmatic expansion, and (5) rehearsal for overt social performance. Quantity and quality of private speech was related not only to the children's level of cognitive development and the difficulty of the learning task (confirming previous research), but also to the children's social orientation and learning style, and to the domain of knowledge (language) that was being acquired.

Studies of peer interaction among children have generally shown that this experience aids performance, or at the very least does not result in poorer performance in relation to control conditions. Furthermore, working with a more able partner has been found to be a particularly effective form of peer interaction. In contrast, a model proposed by Karmiloff‐Smith suggests that at certain phases of cognitive development children may ignore feedback and information from task activities. These two ideas were tested in a study where pairs of 6–7 year old children had to balance a beam on a fulcrum during a computer task. The performance on a post‐test did not support either viewpoint. Children who were working with a more able partner were found to perform significantly worse than other children. The findings of a second study suggested that this effect may have been due to the more able children having an incomplete understanding of the computer task and they may have dominated social interaction thereby restricting the progress of the less able pupil. The findings from these two studies indicate that peer interaction can result in poorer learning outcomes, and that Karmiloff‐Smith's model should include the possibility of peer interaction effects.

Psychosocial Aspects of Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis

Narrative is acknowledged to be a primary means by which children develop the voice of their own culture. In recent years, and as a result of the increased interest in story grammar research, retellings have also become a useful tool for assessing children's understanding of stories and teaching comprehension. The assumption across most previous studies is that narrative, especially folktales, provides the same story-schema support, no matter what the culture of the child may be. This cross-cultural study examines the relative effects of literacy and culture on the narrative form of written story retellings. Empirical findings confirm the hypothesis that two disparate populations, otherwise equated for levels of literacy, western-style schooling, and cognitive development, differ significantly in the structural components of their written story retellings. The story grammar of Mandler and Johnson (1977) was evaluated for discrimina-tory power. Categorizations of specific components of the story grammar showed qualitative differences from culture to culture. Results support culture-specific theories of story schema. (Sociolinguistics, Education)

Cognitive functions play a crucial role in children's lives. This role is especially important during the transition from preschool to elementary school, as it assists children adapt to the new educational setting. Understanding factors that may exacerbate the development of cognitive functions during this transition can contribute to a successful transition to school. It also helps explain how the observed individual differences among children in schools are associated with varying levels of cognitive functions development. The first aim of this study is to monitor changes in children's cognitive functions over two consecutive years. The second aim is to examine the contributions of gender, sibling position, and family composition to the development of these cognitive functions over time. We sampled a group of children (n = 333) from preschool and monitored them until the end of their first year of elementary school. The results of a paired-samples t-test suggested that there is a significant difference in cognitive functions between preschool and school ages. Also, repeated measure analysis revealed that gender interacts with verbal working memory, indicating that boys exhibit greater increase in verbal working memory compared to girls. The same analysis suggested that sibling position interacts with visual working memory, with the oldest child showing greater overall growth in visual working memory than siblings in other positions. The findings provide evidence that not only time is a key factor in the overall growth of cognitive functions from preschool to the school period, but depending on the type of cognitive function, gender, and sibling position can also amplify or accelerate this growth over time.

This chapter offers a theoretical perspective on social and moral development, relevant to discussions of youth conflict and violence. Rejecting the idea that cultures have singular integrated patterns of moral functioning, it explains that a major source of conflict is social hierarchy characterized by dominant and subordinate positions, such as the positions of women and ethnic minority groups across many societies. The chapter reviews research examining conflicts across social developmental domains, in terms of the development of understandings of morality (harm, justice, and rights), social conventions, and personal prerogatives or entitlements. These categories of moral judgment are psycho-social practices that occur across cultures as sources of conflict, disagreement, and struggle. An example of the utility of this theory is its explanation, for example, of why children who are identified as aggressive make moral judgments similar to those of other children but differ in their justifications about retaliation. Examples of group conflicts are also considered, including acts of violence stemming from social hierarchies and cultural practices, such as acts of conflict and resistance by women in contexts in India and Iran where women's freedom of movement and self-determination are much more restricted than men's.

The paper addresses the important question of cognitive development of young children depending on the birth method. Results of the comparative study on the level of cognitive development in children born operationally and in children born naturally are presented. The total number of children examined was 126 and 112 mothers. Data collection was conducted at children’s health and pre-school educational institutions using valid and reliable diagnostic techniques for cognitive development and the use of mothers’ questionnaires. The study identified common trends in early childhood development regardless of birth method, showing that girls have higher cognitive performance than boys. Also, specific features of cognitive development of children born in an operative and natural way were found. These differences are manifested in that children born operationally at the early stages of age have lower results in sensory development, expressive speech development, as opposed to physiological children.

This study examined the relation between developmental suggestibility effects and preschoolers' emerging ability to reason about conflicting mental representations (CMRs). Three- to 5-year-olds listened to a story accompanied by pictures. Following a 4-min delay, children answered straightforward and misleading questions about the story. One week later, their memory for the story was assessed. Children also completed tasks indexing their ability to reason about CMRs. Stepwise regression analyses revealed that suggestibility was negatively related to performance on CMR tasks. This finding remained significant after controlling for age, children's level of initial encoding of the event, and their ability to retrieve event details when not misled. An integration is proposed between children's theory of mind and source monitoring that may help to explain early developmental changes in suggestibility.

This participant observation study examined the impact of family group interaction on children's understanding of television advertising. The observations, grounded in naturalistic family viewing settings, suggest that a child's level of understanding is a product of family group interaction concerning consumer-related skills and other social experiences that the child carries to viewing situations.

We investigated 5- to 10-year-old children's understanding of the conditions under which a person becomes committed to carrying out an intended action in a series of three experiments. We asked subjects to pass moral judgment on story protagonists for not carrying out an action that, if it were carried out, would have prevented a friend's misfortune. In a commitment story the protagonist agreed to act, whereas in a no-commitment story the protagonist only predicted that he would act without understanding that his friend would later rely on this action. Up to the age of 9 years children thought both protagonists equally reprehensible for not acting. By varying the no-commitment story, a developmental sequence emerged in the understanding of when failure to act need not be reprehensible. Even the youngest children did not blame the protagonist if he never had the intention to act or if he was prevented from acting by external force. By the age of 7 years, they did blame the protagonist if he kept his intention to act a secret. Although children from a very early age have the concept of commitment, the understanding of the interpersonal conditions for becoming committed develops later. The idea of committing oneself by entering into an agreement or contract or by making a is a very powerful concept in our society and it has been the subject of much discussion in the fields of law (Atiyah, 1981), political science, philosophy (Robins, 1984), and linguistics (Searle, 1969). It is surprising, therefore, that the concept of commitment has received such scant attention from psychology and that its development in children has scarcely been investigated. In asking about children's understanding of commitment we are asking, in effect, a broader question about young children's understanding of the moral implications of social conventions such as giving one's word. In this respect, our theoretical standpoint continues the Piagetian tradition of looking at children's moral judgments from a social-cogniti ve perspective. Indeed, the concept of commitment may illustrate the two moralities that Piaget believed to coexist during childhood (Piaget, 1932/ 1965). Understanding of the formal expression of I promise may exemplify the heteronomous stage, derived from respect for rules emanating from parental authority (i.e., If you something you always have to do it!), whereas a more sophisticated understanding of commitment may spring from the mutual respect and cooperation between peers in the autonomous stage.

Few studies have explored young children's understanding of cancer and health-related behaviours yet this is essential to develop health promotion initiatives that build on young children's current knowledge levels and awareness. An exploratory descriptive design using the 'draw and write' technique was used to investigate children's views of cancer and health behaviours. The sample included 195 children aged eight to 11 years from five schools in deprived, affluent and rural locations in Scotland. When asked about cancer children demonstrated a good level of awareness by responding with text and drawings about the what they understood cancer to be; types of cancer; causes of cancer; what happens to people who have cancer; their personal experience of cancer and the emotions they associated with cancer. Older children, and children attending affluent schools, have more defined ideas about the causes of cancer and awareness of broader issues such as the risk of passive smoking or the potential impact on the family. Factors such as alcohol and illegal drugs were only reported by children attending schools in deprived locations. Children demonstrated considerable knowledge about healthy and unhealthy lifestyle behaviours; however, it is not clear whether this knowledge translates into their behaviours or the choices offered within their home environment. Children view cancer in a negative way from an early age, even without personal experience. There is a need to demystify cancer in terms of its causes, how to recognize it, how it is treated and to publicize improved survival rates. There is a need for targeted and developmentally appropriate approaches to be taken to health education in schools, with an awareness of the influence of the media on children's information. Strategies should take into consideration the socio-economic and cultural contexts of children's lives which influence their choices and behaviours.