Effect of Variety on the Learning of a Social Studies Concept by Preschool Children

Abstract

Differential effects of variety versus repetition in the development of categorization skills were studied with fifty-four 5-year-old Head Start children, using a sequence of programmed booklets to teach a social studies unit on workers.It was hypothesized that children receiving Intermediate Variety (two categories, twelve instances, presented once) would demonstrate superior performance on transfer to new instances of the trained categories when compared to those trained with Low Variety (two categories, six instances, presented twice). Secondary hypotheses were that children trained with Low Variety would demonstrate superior performance on a mastery test when compared to children receiving Intermediate Variety, and that High Variety (four categories, six instances) would be superior to both Low and Intermediate Variety in transfer to new categories.By analysis of covariance, scores of the Intermediate Variety treatment were significantly higher (p<.05) on Near Transfer, supporting the hypothesis that children receiving an Intermediate Variety will demonstrate superior performance on the transfer to new instances when compared with those trained on Low Variety. The secondary hypotheses could be neither supported nor rejected on the basis of the data.