Browsing by Author "Borstelmann, Lloyd J"
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Item Open Access A test of interactional power theory : the effects of sibling-status upon dependence, power, and influence success in sibling pairs(1976) Adams, Donald Winfield, 1941-The application of interactional power theory to sibling relationships was tested in a study of sibling pairs in middle childhood. Hypotheses were posed about sibling-status effects upon influence success, power, and dependence. Hypotheses were also posed for correlations among these variables, which correlations were expected irrespective of the sibling-status of the children in the sibling pairs. Hypotheses about dependence-based power, which stated that a child's power would be determined by the sibling's dependence upon him for good play outcomes, was the major tenet of interactional theory to be tested. Closely age-spaced sibling pairs were grouped by position, sex, and sex-of-sibling to form the eight cells of the 2x2x2 factorial design. One child in each pair influenced the other to eat mildly bitter crackers, yielding an influence success score. Each child also filled out a questionnaire designed to measure variables related to the child's general experience of dependence and power in the sibling relationship. The scales formed from this questionnaire were newTy devised and lacked demonstrated reliability and validity. The hypothesized sibling-status effects were not obtained in the influence procedure. One significant but oppositely predicted effect was obtained; children with a brother had greater influence success than children with a sister. This was not due to a sex-linked willingness for boys to eat more crackers than girls. Behaviors of the influencing children were interpreted to indicate that some of them reacted in a highly competitive fashion. The younger children in the pairs and the children with a brother appeared to form a stronger alliance with the investigator and then to use this alliance to pursue their influence attempts more vigorously. This account explained the unexpected sex-of-sibling effect and the expected but missing position effect. The influence procedure was not a measure of relative power but was a measure of how much the usually overpowered sibling seized the competitive possibilities offered by the situation. Sibling pairs differed from non-sibling peer pairs by reacting more competitively to this investigative procedure. No relationships were obtained between the questionnaire scales and influence success. On the questionnaire, older children in the pairs reported more usable power in the relationship than did the younger children. Children in same-sex pairs reported more affinity with the sibling (perceived similarity, play, friendship, and dependence) than did children in cross-sex pairs. Boys and children with sisters reported more power, while boys and children with brothers reported more affinity; these sex-of-child and sex-of-sibling effects were small, inconsistent, and inconclusive. Older children in same-sex pairs reported more affinity and less power than older children in cross-sex pairs. In cross-sex pairs wide differences in power (O > Y) and in affinity (Y > O) were obtained. In same-sex pairs the older and younger reported equal affinity and there was a muting of the reported power difference (O > Y). Greater conflict and greater development of counterpower in the more cohesive same-sex pairs were concluded to have led to this muted power difference. Tests of the dependence-based-power hypothesis were inconclusive. Neither influence success nor reported power showed the sibling-status results expected for dependence-based power. The empirical viability of this theoretical construct was questioned. The assumption that the sibling's dependence determines the child's power was not supported. The questionnaire responses were judged to support other aspects of interactional power theory. Overall, the results of the study were more simply explained by assuming that characteristics associated with sibling-status determine both a child's dependence and his power in the sibling relationship.Item Open Access An experimental investigation of learning and performance in children with academic disabilities(1968) Ussery, Lon Esker, 1928-A distinction between learning and performance has long been traditional in theoretical and experimental formulations of general learning theory. More recently a similar or parallel distinction has developed in the literature on children with academic difficulties. Here it has been referred to as a distinction between "assimilation and utilization" or between "disorders in the function of taking in knowledge" and "disorders in the use of learning." Other recent investigations have further hypothesized that a set of broad motivational variables characterized as "fear of success" or "need to fail" are crucial in the poor achievement of some children with academic difficulties. This study was designed as an experimental investigation of some consequences that seemed deducible from the inter-relationships among these distinctions and hypotheses. Three groups of children were defined within a normal school population by a statistical comparison of academic grades and achievement test scores in reading. All subjects had at least average I.Q. scores. In the first group, academic grades were significantly lower than might have been predicted from the achievement test scores. This was considered to reflect a difficulty in performance and the group was referred to as the non-performers. In the second group, academic grades and achievement test scores were both considerably below the average for the whole group. This was considered to reflect a difficulty in learning, and the group was referred to as the non-learners. In the third group, academic grades and achievement test scores were congruent and both were at an average level. This group was referred to as the normals. Subjects were examined individually under one of three conditions of evaluative feedback: (1) competitive success, (2) competitive failure, and (3) neutral. In the competitive success condition, the subject was convinced that he was performing more adequately than his peers. In the competitive failure condition, he was convinced that he was performing more poorly. In the neutral condition, the feedback was purely procedural. A modified version of the Digit-Symbol Test was the principal task. During the performance trials emphasis was on speed, and time in seconds was taken as a performance measure. After 10 trials, each subject was asked to complete the Digit-Symbol form without a key. The number of digit-symbol combinations remembered correctly was taken as a measure of learning. Thematic Apperception Test stories and Sarason Anxiety Scale scores were obtained from each subject. The major hypotheses may be stated informally. The non-performer group should show greater decrement in performance than in learning, and the largest performance decrement should occur under the competitive success condition. The non-learner group should show decrements in both performance and learning when compared to the other two groups. They should show no special decrement under success. The normal group should show best performance and learning under the success condition with only slight decrements under the other two conditions. There should be no difference between the non-performer and the normal group on the learning measure. None of these major hypotheses were unequivocally substantiated. There was, however, evidence to warrant several conclusions. The groups defined statistically were discriminable on some experimental tasks. This lends credence to the notion of two types of learning problems. The crucial role of competitive success in influencing the behavior of the non-performer group was demonstrated. However, such broad motivational patterns as “need to fail” or “renunciation of success” are not sufficiently explanatory. There was, in fact, evidence that consideration must also be given to the non-performers unduly intense "need to succeed". The experimental conditions were effectively created in that there were differences among conditions across all groups on the learning measure. Also, each group showed a pattern of differential response to each of the conditions.Item Open Access Animistic thinking in children(1966) Stern, Harris WeilThe objectives of the study were based on constructs which were originally described and studied by Piaget and some of which were studied subsequently by other authors with contradictory results. The four major objectives of the study were: 1. to reexamine the development of children's concepts of life, and, in particular to systematically investigate the relationship between children's errors in classifying items as alive or not alive and their use of different justifications for those classifications , 2. to attempt to elicit precausal explanations from children in response to demonstration items (Piaget ; originally studied precausality in terms of natural objects and events and subsequent experimenters failed to find the precausal forms for demonstrations). 3. to test the hypothesis that children who give pre- causal explanations will have difficulty in learning a causal relationship, even in the face of repeated experience. 4. to test the hypothesis that children who classify inanimate objects as alive (and are hence, animistic) will be the children who also give the greatest number of precausal explanations for demonstrations. 5. to attempt to relate systematic animism and pre- causality to a standardized measure of cognitive development.' In order to study these constructs and the relationships in between them, 96 children between the ages of four and ten years were individually administered a test battery consisting of (1) an animistic questionnaire, consisting of 21 plant, object, and animal items to be classified as alive or not alive; (2) eight demonstrations about which the children were questioned in order to obtain their explanations for what took place; (3) a causal learning task, requiring the children to isolate a particular cause for the outcome of an event, given a number of trials and some directly relevant, extra experience and (4) the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The major findings were: 1. that reduction of animism in children is associated with the identification of life with animals' and their characteristics. This association leads children to classify plants as well as objects as not alive, since plants have none of the more obvious characteristics of animals (locomotion, sensation, vocalization), and, it is only at some later stage, when life is identified with more general characteristics (need for air, water, food; death, birth, reproduction), that plants are again classified as alive. 2. Young children do indeed give precausal, non-mechanical explanations for demonstrations. The study suggests that Piaget's particular categories of precausal thought may not have universal validity for all kinds of events or for all children, but that the general characteristics of these explanations which he described (lack of attention to details of how things happen, lack of understanding of temporal sequences of events, and the lack of understanding of the need for spatial contact for the transfer of energy and motion) are found in the explanations of many young children, even for demonstration and mechanical events. 3. Children who gave precausal explanations for the causal learning task did fail to learn the correct cause-effect relationship. 4. There was no support for Piaget's theory that animism, or the attribution of life to objects, has a direct relationship to precausal explanations. In the present study, animistic children were not more likely to use precausal explanations than were non-animistic children.Item Open Access Perceptual and verbal mediation in the concept learning of children(1963) McConnell, Owen Link, 1933-Some investigators have proposed that concept learning in humans can best be explained in terms of internalized processes mediating between the external stimulus and overt response. This approach contrasts with "single-unit" theory, emphasizing direct association between stimulus and response. Some psychologists advocate the developmental hypothesis that single-unit theory applies to lower organisms but that mediational theory holds for advanced organisms. Comparative psychological studies have yielded inconclusive findings with respect to this hypothesis. Some investigators have tried to experimentally influence the hypothesized mediating process by teaching subjects verbalizations which could serve as mediating responses. In general, findings suggest that older children utilize verbal mediators more readily than younger children. The current investigation stems from interest in whether young children have a specific inability to mediate verbally or a more general deficiency in mediation. Are mediating processes in young children possible on a “sensori-motor” level? The purpose of the present research is to compare younger and older children in their use of perceptual cues as a basis for mediation and in their preferences for perceptual versus verbal cues when these are in conflict. Fifty nursery-school children and seventy-five second-grade children learned two successive discriminations. The stimuli, cylinders varying in size (large-small) and brightness (black-white), were arranged on a tray before a vertical clown's face. The child put one of two stimuli taken from the tray into the clown's mouth and was rewarded, when correct, by the clown's nose blinking, an edible item, and praise. In the first discrimination a large, black cylinder was positive; in the second task the "small" object was rewarded, regardless of brightness. Since the first discrimination was solvable on the basis of either size or brightness (or both), the experimenter could attempt to influence the subject to make a mediating response to a particular dimension. The major experimental variables manipulated for this purpose during the initial discrimination were (1) kind of object arrangement on the tray, and (2) kind of verbal label children applied to the stimuli. The size arrangement, for example, had same-sized objects in proximity; but brightness was randomly distributed. In the size verbalization condition the child was instructed to precede his choices with the appropriate size label, i.e., "big" or "little." Independent groups received the following treatments at each age level: (1) size arrangement, (2) brightness arrangement, (3) size arrangement and brightness verbalization, simultaneously,(4) brightness arrangement and size verbalization, simultaneously, and (5) random arrangement, no verbalization (control). The major dependent variable was the mean number of trials to criterion on the second task, as it was assumed that ease of learning the "small" concept was an index of availability of the size dimension relative to the brightness dimension. The results indicated that both younger and older children responded in a mediational manner to the perceptual arrangements, suggesting that previous findings regarding lack of verbal mediation in young children should not be generalized to include other modes of mediation. The interfering effect of perceptually emphasizing an irrelevant dimension was stronger for younger children than for older children. Older children were more influenced than the younger children by relevant verbal cues. When relevant verbal cues were pitted against irrelevant perceptual cues, the former dominated with older children, but the latter with younger children. Younger children, however, were not influenced as predicted by relevant perceptual cues nor older children by irrelevant verbal cues . These discrepancies were discussed in terms of the nature of the experimental manipulations. It was tentatively concluded, subject to further verification, that younger children favor perceptual mediation and older children verbal mediation.