THE EFFECT OF EVENT STRUCTURE ON YOUNG CHILDREN'S ABILITY TO LEARN AN UNFAMILIAR EVENT.
Item
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Title
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THE EFFECT OF EVENT STRUCTURE ON YOUNG CHILDREN'S ABILITY TO LEARN AN UNFAMILIAR EVENT.
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Identifier
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AAI8515663
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identifier
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8515663
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Creator
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SLACKMAN, ELIZABETH A.
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Contributor
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Katherine Nelson
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Date
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1985
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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When they are asked to report "what happens" about events that are familiar to them, young children demonstrate the ability to produce consistent and well-sequenced accounts not only for events that are logically related in terms of an overall goal, such as the steps in making cookies, but also for events that have an invariant but temporal sequence, such as singing "Happy Birthday" before blowing out the candles on a birthday cake (Nelson & Gruendel, 1981). This may mean that children do not distinguish between invariant sequences that are causally connected and sequences that are invariant for reasons of social convention. An alternative possibility is that causal structure is no more important than other factors such as age, event familiarity, or degree of participation in the event (Nelson, 1979(a)).;To address this issue, 41 preschoolers (mean age 4,6) and 43 first graders (mean age 6,6) were given practice trials over a 3-day period in either a causally or temporally sequenced version of the same unfamiliar event, "what happens in the day of a toymaker". The event was presented to children as a story and was also modelled by the experimenter using toys and props. Some children enacted and verbalized the event immediately after the experimenter's demonstration each day (active condition), while others simply related it verbally (passive condition). After the third practice session, children were asked to recall the event immediately after it was related verbally to them.;Children who acted out the event recalled more overall than children who did not, and were also more likely to recall cause and effect as a unit (cause immediately followed by its effect). However, they did not recall the causal event better than the temporal event. On the other hand, children of both ages remembered actions that had a greater degree of causal entailment between them better than actions that were less causally related. In addition, they sequenced the causal event more accurately than the temporal event, especially preschoolers.;These results indicate that children between the ages of 4 and 6 clearly differentiate between causality and invariance but that causal structure is not the only influence on event representation. Active participation and degree of causal relatedness influence how much children remember about an event while causal structure is more important in representing event order.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
