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The present research examined whether children's awareness of phonological similarities between words with respect to rhyme and consonantal word onset is of the same importance for learning to read German as it was found to be for learning to read English. In two longitudinal studies differences in phonological sensitivity among children before learning to read (at age 6 to 7) were tested with versions of Bradley & Bryant's (1985) oddity detection task. Children's reading and spelling achievements were tested about one year later at the end of grade one, and again at around the age of 10. The main finding was a developmental change in the predictive relationship of rhyme and word-onset awareness. Rhyme awareness was only minimally predictive for reading and spelling achievement at the end of grade one, but gained substantially in predictive importance for reading and spelling achievement in grades three and four. No such predictive improvement was observed for word-onset awareness. It is proposed that rhyme awareness is initially of little importance, because in the first phase of learning to read German children rely heavily on indirect word recognition via grapheme--phoneme translation and blending. The gain in the predictive importance of rhyme awareness is explained by its helpful effect on the establishment of mental representations of written words. Such mental representations allow fast, direct word recognition and orthographically correct spellings. A wareness of larger phonological units is helpful for the efficient establishment of such representations, by allowing connections of recurring grapheme clusters in written words with phonology.
Educational psychology
(1979)
This is a report on the more recent developments and the present state of research into educational psychology in German speaking countries. Particular emphasis is given to research on: parental upbringing and its effects on child development; the examination of socialization effects within and across different scbool systems; studies on teaching-leaming processes and on social interaction in the classroom; the systematic promotion of the development of cognitive abilities and motives in students; and, finally, the design of improved instruments in methods of describing, explaining and predicting school success. Subsequently, the report will look into problems in tbe practical application of research findings in educational psychology. Finally, there follows a sbort discussion of various metatheoretical positions in educational psycbology in German speaking countries and their possible effects on the future development of the field.
Gifted underachievers perform worse in school than would be expected based on their high intelligence. Possible causes for underachievement are low motivational dispositions (need for cognition) and metacognitive competences. This study tested the interplay of these variables longitudinally with gifted and non-gifted students from Germany (N = 341, 137 females) in Grades 6 (M = 12.02 years at t1) and 8 (M = 14.07 years). Declarative and procedural metacognitive competences were assessed in the domain of reading comprehension. Path analyses showed incremental effects of procedural metacognition over and above intelligence on the development of school achievement in gifted students (β = .139). Moreover, declarative metacognition and need for cognition interactively predicted procedural metacognition (β = .169), which mediated their effect on school achievement.
Thirty-two 4-year-olds and thirty-two 6-year-olds were tested for free and cued recall following either play-and-remember or sort-and-remember instructions and assessed for their metamemory of the efficacy of conceptual and perceptual sorting strategies. The younger children recalled significantly more items under sort-and-remember than under play-and-remember instructions, whereas no significant recall differences between instructional conditions were found for the older children. However, 6-year-olds showed higher levels of recall than 4-year-olds in both instructional conditions. Category cues were much more effective than color cues, regardless of age. In addition, clustering scores indicated that conceptual organization at both encoding and retrieval increased with age and with instruction. These results show that from 4 to 6 years of age children are learning to spontaneously employ memory strategies. In addition, they highlight the increasing importance of conceptual organization to retention of young children. Finally, the metamemory data suggest that there may be a lag between children’s articulated declarative knowledge about the usefulness of conceptual organization and their procedural use of it.
4-6-year-old children's understanding of cognitive cuing was studied in 2 experiments using a strategic interaction paradigm. Ghildren could fool a competitor by hiding targets in locations that were labeled with semantically weakly associated cues and help a cooperative partner by hiding them in semantically highly associated locations. Very few 4-year-olds, half the 5-year-olds, and almost all 6-year-olds appropriately chose semantically highly vs. weakly associated hiding places to make the targets easy vs. difficult to find. The second experiment showed that 4-year-olds did not strategically manipulate cues as sources of information, although they themselves proficiently used them as such in a search task. These findings are discussed with regard to research on children's developing understanding of origins of knowledge and belief and with regard to recent claims that young preschoolers possess a metacognitive understanding of cognitive cuing.
This study addresses three themes that recur in the research on student achievement: (a) developmental modeling ofintraindividual changes in achievement over time; (b) examination of the differences among subgroups within a classroom in the determinants of achievement; (c) description of the interactions among instructional variables in determining achievement differences. Eight classrooms were preselected on the basis of their widely differing slopes obtained in a regression analysis of pre- and posttest achievement scores. Mathematics achievement differences among sixth graders were analyzed in a four-wave design and explained by aptitude and instructional variables in a structural equation framework provided by LISREL. The results demonstrate the local nature of achievement models in that neither their measurement nor structural components proved generalizable across both groups of classrooms. Mention is also made, however, of technical problems and analytical ambiguities in the interpretation of these results.
This paper reports on a longitudinal study dealing with the development of literacy in young children. A total of 163 children were first tested during their last year in kindergarten using a variety of tasks that tapped phonological processing, memory capacity, early literacy, and intelligence. Children's ward decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling skills were assessed in elementary school several years later. As a main result, all of the predictor domains had a significant impact on the acquisition of literacy in elementary school, although the contribution of each domain differed as a function of the criterion measure. An attempt to identify children-at-risk using a kindergarten screening test provided encouraging results. Nonetheless, it was shown that whereas group predictions of reading and spelling performance can be quite accurate, the individual prognosis of school problems is far from perfect.