What children do and what children know: looking beyond success using Karmiloff–Smith’s RR framework

Abstract

The two studies that are reported in this paper challenge traditional notions about task success and failure by locating children’s performance on a balance task within a model proposed by Karmiloff-Smith. The first study seeks to validate the levels of explicitness outlined in the model by assessing the representations of 168 children, aged 4–9, on a balance beam task. It was found that children’s success can be either implicit (without any conceptual understanding) or explicit (accompanied by understanding) and that these two representational levels are markedly different, even though both involve “success” with the task. Almost half the children were also found to have a naive theory about balance which made them less successful, this is described by Karmiloff-Smith as Level E1 in the RR model. The second study, involving a further 58 children aged 6 and 7 yr, showed that the ability to explain successful performance on the task was not related to the language age of the children as measured by the BPVS. The study also confirmed that children can have representations of the task which differ in explicitness. Together these studies address important issues regarding the assessment of children, when only success or failure is measured, and the findings about the accessibility of knowledge has implications for teaching which is designed to change children’s representations.