Young children's photographic practice: Representation and world knowledge.
Item
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Title
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Young children's photographic practice: Representation and world knowledge.
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Identifier
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AAI9521317
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identifier
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9521317
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Creator
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Sroka, Iris E.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Harry Beilin
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Date
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1995
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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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Representation is at the heart of cognitive and developmental psychology, having received attention from Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner, who theorized that underlying the different stages in cognitive development were qualitatively different modes of representation. This study was undertaken to explore the early development of representational functioning, taking the position that examining such functioning in action, or practice, offered opportunities to elucidate the child's knowledge of the world in coordination with the child's ability to act on the basis of representations of the world to create photographic artifacts.;Children from three to eight years of age were presented with a photograph of objects arranged on a table in a room and asked to "make a photograph that looks just like this one." In order to solve the problem posed, the child had to have an understanding of the relatively complex representation-object relationship as embodied in the photographic process, or a theory of photographic practice. The design of the study allowed children to express what they understood about the relationship between photographic representations and the world, and about how photographic representations are constructed.;Older children demonstrated greater mastery at reconstructing the array, capturing the visual content of the target photograph, were more likely to reflect on several criteria simultaneously when judging sameness, and employed more complex strategies to solve the task than younger children. Older children also demonstrated a deeper grasp of the complex relationship between a photograph and the world it represents than younger children. Both what children said needed to be fixed in their photos to achieve a greater degree of match to the TARGET photo and what they actually did to improve the accuracy of subsequent trial photos were significantly associated with age. Finally, what children actually did to correct errors of "match" was more relevant to Experimenter-judged errors of match, more complex, and more successful than what they said was wrong with their photos. The findings on children's talk and action demonstrate that children were better able to express what they knew about the task through their actions in the effort of making their photos than when they had to translate this knowledge into another symbol system and talk about what they knew about the task.
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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.
