Title: The effect of concreteness on children’s ability to detect common proportion - eScholarship
Abstract: The effect of concreteness on children’s ability to detect common proportion Jennifer A. Kaminski ([email protected]) Center for Cognitive Science, Ohio State University 210A Ohio Stadium East, 1961 Tuttle Park Place, Columbus, OH 43210, USA Vladimir M. Sloutsky ([email protected]) Center for Cognitive Science, Ohio State University 208C Ohio Stadium East, 1961 Tuttle Park Place, Columbus, OH 43210, USA Gentner & Ratterman, 1991, Vosniadou, 1989). By such accounts, domain-specific knowledge is the primary predictor of ability to attend to relations. In support of this position, there is considerable evidence that while young children may fail to reason analogically (i.e. based on relational structure) in many instances, they can reason analogically in contexts that are familiar to them (see Gentner, Ratterman, Markman, & Kotovsky, 1995 for discussion). For example, Gentner (1977a, 1977b) found that when 4-year-old children were shown a picture of a tree and asked, “If a tree had a knee, where would it be?”, they interpreted the relational correspondence and responded as accurately as adults. Additionally, Brown and Kane (1988) conducted a study of preschool children, aged 3 to 5 years. Children learned problem-solving strategies presented to them through example problems. The problems involved simple biological mechanisms such as mimicry and camouflage. Young children did reason analogically to apply solution strategies to solve analogous problems. Domain-specific knowledge appears to be an important factor in relational development. Abstract Two experiments were conducted to investigate kindergartener’s ability to recognize common proportions across different instantiations. Both experiments varied between subjects the degree of concreteness of the instantiations used during training. In Experiment 1, when explicit training was given, participants who learned with either the concrete or generic material successfully transferred their knowledge to match common proportions involving novel objects. However, in Experiment 2 when no explicit instruction on proportion was given (participants were only shown two examples), only participants who were shown the generic examples successfully matched proportions with novel object. Participants who were shown concrete examples were unable to do so. These findings suggest that simple relations such as the concept of proportion can be picked up spontaneously from generic instantiations, while concrete instantiations do not promote this spontaneous structure learning. Keywords: Cognitive Science; Psychology; Transfer; Relations, Structure Recognition. Education; Introduction Concreteness The ability to recognize common relations across different situations is essential for many cognitive tasks such as interpretation of analogies, acquiring abstract concepts (i.e. bigger than), as well as much of mathematical reasoning. One finding that has emerged from research on analogy is that the ability to detect common relational structure is not always easy and tends to improve through the course of development. Most researchers agree that a relational shift occurs in development (e.g. Gentner, 1988; Gentner & Ratterman, 1991). Early in development, children are more likely to attend to object-level similarities between systems or displays and overlook relations. Later in development, people become more likely to attend to relational similarities. For example, when given a simple metaphor such as a plant stem is like a straw, children’s interpretation is often based on superficial attributes, such as both are thin and straight. Adults tend to interpret such metaphors through deeper relations; in this case, both can carry water (Gentner, 1988). One category of theoretical accounts of relational development is that the relational shift is knowledge-driven (Brown, 1989, Brown & Kane, 1988; Gentner, 1988, Another factor that has been shown to affect reasoning and the detection of common relations is the concreteness of the learning material. The term “concrete” is often interpreted as something tangible, the opposite of abstract or intangible. We suggest that concrete and abstract are not dichotomous, but rather lie on a continuum over which the amount of communicated information varies. For a fixed relational concept, instantiation A is more concrete than instantiation B if A communicates more information than B. By this interpretation, physical objects are more concrete than images of objects because the physical objects communicate additional information such as sensory information. Also, familiar and contextualized entities are more concrete than unfamiliar or decontextualized entities because more is known about familiar, contextualized entities than about the later. Therefore, for example, contextualized mathematics problems are more concrete than decontextualized, strictly symbolic mathematical equations.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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