Measures Of Cognitive Development Research Articles

Relation of Ability to Conserve and Use of Specific Syntactic Features

The oral language of 31 conservers and 47 nonconservers was examined to assess the relations among ability to conserve, a measure of cognitive development, and use of specific syntactic structures. T-unit analyses were applied to children's individually rendered stories to determine mean numbers of words per T-unit, adjective clauses per T-unit, adverbial clauses per T-unit, dependent-noun clauses per T-unit, and total dependent clauses per T-unit. There were large ranges in use of all five syntactic structures among subjects within the same cognitive group, conserver or nonconserver. One-tailed t tests indicated a significant difference between conservers and nonconservers only in mean number of words per T-unit, not for the other four syntactic structures.

Adolescent egocentrism: The association among imaginary audience behavior, cognitive development, and parental support and rejection

Two theoretical perspectives have been advanced to account for heightened egocentrism during early adolescence. One perspective assumes that formal operational thought is associated with increased self-consciousness. The second perspective proposes that parental support and affection diminish egocentrism, while parental rejection enhances self-conscious reactions by young adolescents. Data analysis using responses from 251 early adolescents (131 males, 120 females) on measures of cognitive development and perceived parental support revealed that (a) formal operations diminished adolescent egocentrism, while (b) perceived parental relations were predictive of self-consciousness. Contrary to posttheoretical assumptions, seventh graders functioning at the level of concrete operations were higher in self-conscious egocentrism than were formal-operations youths. Further, perceived parental support was associated with diminished egocentrism, while perceived parental rejection was predictive of heightened self-consciousness.

Effects of computer programming on young children's cognition.

Computers will soon be an integral part of the classroom and home environment of children, yet there are unanswered questions concerning their effects on young children's cognition; Particularly salient are largely unsubstantiated claims concerning the cognitive benefits of computer programming. This study assessed the effects of computer programming on children's cognitive style (reflectivity, divergent thinking), metacognitive ability, cognitive development (operational competence, general cognitive measures), and ability to describe directions. Eighteen 6-year-old children were pretested to assess receptive vocabulary, impulsivity/reflectivity, and divergent-thinking abilities. The children were then randomly assigned to one of two treatments, computer programming or computer-assisted instruction (CAI), that lasted 12 weeks. Posttesting revealed that the programming group scored significantly higher on measures of reflectivity and on two measures of divergent thinking, whereas the CAI group showed no significant pre- to posttest differences. The programming group outperformed the CAI group on measures of metacognitive ability and ability to describe directions. No differences were found on measures of cognitive development. The increasing acceptance of the critical necessity for children to become computer literate is leading to an increased prominence of computers in the home and school environment. Yet there are unanswered questions regarding the effects of computer use on children's thinking. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of computer programming on 6-year:old children's cognitive style, metacognitive abilities, cognitive development, and ability to describe directions. Seymour Papert, one of the creators of the computer language Logo and a leading exponent of the use of computer programming to expand children's intellectual power, based his ideas on the theories of Piaget, with whom he studied. Papert (1980) has argued that the most beneficial is what he calls Piagetian learning, or learning without being taught. He has proposed that computer programming environments can create conditions under which intellectual models take root, conditions in which young children can master

Mathematics achievement, language and cognitive development: Classroom practices in Papua New Guinea

A case study was conducted of mathematics instruction at five sites in Papua New Guinea. Trial instructional materials were developed, teachers received inservice training and implementation was carefully monitored for a six-week period. English and mathematics achievement instruments and eight measures of cognitive development were administered to a sample of 201 students in grades two, four and six. Mathematics and language achievement varied significantly among the five sites. Students at all grade levels exhibited poor application of problem solving skills while showing computation, measurement and mathematical language abilities superior to results previously reported. English reading and measures of conservation and classification competence were highly correlated with mathematics achievement. Correlations between memory measures and mathematics achievement decreased from grade two to grade six while correlations between measures of language and cognitive development and mathematics achievement tended to increase. The results indicated that the non-consumable student textbooks ameliorated to some extent the problems associated with non-native language instruction for the students involved in the study. It was concluded that locally developed textbooks with an appropriate language load would enhance mathematics learning, particularly in remote-rural areas where current teaching conditions and lack of materials interact with poor English skills to create an imbalance in achievement.

Validity Analyses for the School Attitude Measures at Three Grade Levels

Concurrent validity studies are reported for the School Attitude Measures (SAM), a recently developed school affective assessment procedure. The SAM has five subscales (School Motivation, Academic Self Concept-Performance Based, Academic Self Concept-Referenced Based, Student Control over Performance, Student Instructional Mastery). The studies were conducted at three grade levels (5th, 8th, llth) with a total sample of 153 subjects. Four types of validity analyses were conducted. First the SAM was linked to measures of cognitive development (relative standing in class, standardized achievement, ability). Second, ratings from the students' significant others (teacher, parent, academic peers) were investigated. Third, an index of within class academic engagement was tested. Finally, the SAM subscales were correlated with a measure of general self-esteem. The results indicated that the SAM shows promising concurrent validity related to the criterion measures investigated.

Conservation studies in Papua New Guinea: A review

Among the most widely used measures of cognitive development are Piaget's tests of conservation. In general, children in Western cultures achieve conservation between the ages of about 7 and 11 years. In recent years considerable attention has been focussed on the performance of non‐Western children. In Papua New Guinea the education system is based on the Western pattern and the assumptions underlying Western education have been adopted. These assumptions include many about the level of cognitive development achieved at various ages. The published research on conservation in Papua New Guinea is reviewed, and it is concluded that the performance of children in P.N.G. on conservation tasks is well below that of Europeans of the same age. Suggestions are presented for the development of more adequate standardised procedures for cross‐cultural research in the area.

The Relationship among Measures of Cognitive Development, Learning Proficiency; Academic Achievement, and IQ for Seventh Grade, Low Socioeconomic Status Black Males

The degree of relationship among measures of learning proficiency, cognitive development (following Piaget), school achievement in reading, mathematics, and spelling, and IQ among 79 low socioeconomic status black males attending the seventh grade in an innercity school was examined. The following hypotheses were tested: (1) There would be a positive and significant relationship between measures of learning proficiency or cognitive growth and school achievement; (2) learning and cognitive variables would fall into a common factorial domain; and (3) the latter two variables would hold a reciprocal relationship within that domain. Hypothesis one was not supported, while two and three were supported. The latter two results supported Jensen’s two-level theory of learning. These findings and between-pupil differences in cognitive development were discussed.

Piagetian measures of cognitive development for children up to age two

This paper proposes a measure of cognitive development which is based primarily on Piaget's concepts. The choice of the particular items was determined by their assumed relation to general representational ability, including linguistic and nonverbal communication abilities. The present approach is distinguished from those of some linguists who suggest that a child's early linguistic development is not compatible with his cognitive skills and, thus, that a child's grammatical competence implies the existence of some innate set of principles for the generation of language. In contrast, the present approach hypothesizes that a child's cognitive skills during the first 2 years, particularly nonverbal representational abilities, not only precede but enhance his subsequent acquisition of language. The assumption that the items of the proposed scale together test a common ability was supported by a multidimensional homogeneity analysis of the scale, which indicated that it defines an essentially unitary ability dimension and also has strong ordinal characteristics.

SIBLING CONSTELLATION, CREATIVITY, IQ, AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

Sibling constellation factors were related to measures of creativity (Minnesota Tests of Creative Thinking), IQ, reading, arithmetic, and language achievement in a sixth-grade population using analysis of variance. In the first portion of the study, family size was found to be unrelated to ability and achievement (N = 140). The main portion of the study investigated birth order, sex, sex of sibling, and age difference in the 2-child family (N = 80), and found that verbal creative abilities, reading, and arithmetic achievement were enhanced for Ss with siblings of like sex close in age. In the final portion of the study, birth order was found to be unrelated to ability and achievement in 3- and 4-child families (N = 144), and sibling sex was found to be important in the 3-child family where Ss with 2 brothers had poorer IQ and reading scores than Ss with at least one sister (N = 96). Students of child development have long been interested in the implications which a child's position among his siblings has for his subsequent intellectual and personality development. It is the purpose of this paper to explore the relations which may exist between measures of cognitive development such as IQ, creative abilities, and academic achievement, and children's sibling constellations as represented by family size, birth order, sibling sex, and age difference between siblings.