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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.
The effects of age, study time, and importance of text units on strategy use and memory for texts
(1988)
This study investigated study behavior and recall of a narrative text as a function of the reader's age, study time, and importance level of text units. Fifth graders, seventh graders, young- and older adults were asked to read a fairy tale, and do anything they liked to prepare for verbatim recall. Half of the subjects in each age group were assigned to an immediate recall condition; half were given additional study time. Examination of recall data showed that all subjects showed higher recall of important units in the text than unimportant units. This effect was independent of age and study time condition. Study behaviors varied significantly across age groups and study conditions: while adults underlined or took notes with equal frequency, children preferred note-taking as a study strategy. With additional study time, fifth graders, seventh graders, and older adults increased their strategic behavior; young adults did not.
A MODEL of good information processing is sketched, describing how metacognitive knowledge influences strategy selection and use. Three factors pose particular problems for learning disabled students as they attempt to acquire metacognitive knowledge and to use study strategies productively: neurological impairments; deficiencies in general world knowledge; and negative beliefs, attitudes, and styles that limit self-efficacy. Creating an educational atmosphere that explicitly builds conceptual (domain-specific) knowledge and teaches positive beliefs about learning potential is essential in promoting metacognitively-oriented instruction.
Previous research has shown German children to be more strategic on sort-recall memory tasks than their American age-mates, and to show fewer effort-related attributions. We conducted this study to determine if those differences are due to systematic differences in the strategy instruction and attributional beliefs of German and U.S. teachers, and to explore metacognitive instructional practices in the two countries. Teachers responded to a questionnaire that inquired about their use of strategy instructions, fostering of reflective thinking in pupils, sources of children’s learning problems, and modeling of metacognitive skills such as monitoring. The second part of the questionnaire asked about the reasons underlying children’s academic successes and failures. German teachers reported more instruction of task-specific strategies, while American teachers showed more effort-related attributions. The types of strategies instructed and types of learning problems most frequently described varied across the two countries, and also according to how many years the teachers had taught. Results were discussed regarding their implications for metacognitive developmental theory, particularly regarding culture and other environmental influences on the development of controlled processing.
This study explored the differential effects of strategy training on German and American elementaryschool children and assessed the role of parents in the development of their children's strategic behavior and metacognition. 184 German and 161 American children were pretested on memory and metamemory tasks. Children were then assigned to either an organizational strategy training condition or a control condition. All children were tested on the maintenance and far-transfer of the strategy and task-related metamemory 1 week following training. Parents completed questionnaires about strategy instruction in the home. Strategy maintenance and metacognition were reassessed 6 months following training. German children were more strategic than American children. Instructed children performed better than control children. German parents reported more instruction of strategies in the home. These data suggest that formal education is responsible for aspects of cognitive development that have sometimes been viewed as a function of age.
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.
Nine hierarchical and four nonhierarchical clustering algorithms were compared on their ability to resolve 200 multivariate normal mixtures. The effects of coverage, similarity measures, and cluster overlap were studied by including different levels of coverage for the hierarchical algorithms, Euclidean distances and Pearson correlation coefficients, and truncated multivariate normal mixtures in the analysis. The results confirmed the findings of previous Monte Carlo studies on clustering procedures in that accuracy was inversely related to coverage, and that algorithms using correlation as the similarity measure were significantly more accurate than those using Euclidean distances. No evidence was found for the assumption that the positive effects of the use of correlation coefficients are confined to unconstrained mixture models.