Background: The Asenze study has the long-term goal of promoting better physical, cognitive and psychosocial functioning of children in a rural area in KwaZulu-Natal, 50 km from Durban, with a view to planning interventions to promote growth and development for very young children. The specific objective in this paper was to provide information for the Child Health and Development project of the Valley Trust to assist with intervention planning. The broader goal was to assess developmental delays in communities ravaged by the HIV epidemic. The Asenze study was designed in two phases from 2008 and 2012. The current paper reports on 1 581 4-6-year-old children in the baseline phase (2008-2010) in the five adjacent tribal areas in the study area. Method: The participants included all the 4-6-year-olds whose parents had consented to inclusion in the project and their caregivers. Data were derived from a brief questionnaire administered in the homes of participants, and subsequently from medical and psychological assessments of the children and their caregivers at the Asenze clinic. The association between child factors and other factors (geographic area, socioeconomic status (SES), parental level of education, the child's preschool education) on the one hand, and the child's cognitive performance (as measured by the Grover Counter and subtests of the KABC-11) were analysed. Linear regression models were employed to determine which predictor variables of interest in a model were associated with the children's cognitive scores as the dependent variables. Results: Based on the data, the principal factors associated with children's cognitive outcomes were height-forage z-score (HAZ), preschool education and the area of residence. Generally children who had low cognitive scores were more often stunted (as defined by the WHO anthropometric tables), had not had preschool education, and came from areas less favourable in terms of local infrastructure and access to employment opportunities and arable land. Conclusion: The finding from this cross-sectional analysis of baseline data showed that in addition to height for age and preschool education, which are commonly thought to impact on cognition, the local authority area where the children lived was associated with their scores on cognitive tests. This has implications for intervention planning. The functioning of local government in promoting the type of community development that will protect the rights of children should be taken into account.
Samples of impoverished Zulu schoolchildren drawn from three age groups were tested repeatedly on the Figural Intersection Test (FIT), a measure of M-power in Pascual-Leone's theory of constructive operators. Results showed an initial underperformance when compared with Canadian and urban Zulu children. This was attributed to the effects of impoverishment. However, impoverished children did acquire the age-related levels of performance after repeated trials, a result consistent with the concept of M-power in the theory of constructive operators.In a recent paper, Poortinga and van de Vijver (1988) suggested that identity of underlying psychological processes can be inferred from the similarity of distributions of responses across cultural groups. Once these identities have been established, thereafter cultural differences in cognitive performance stemming from context-specific demands can be interpreted. However, this requires a theoretical framework which can simultaneously account for similarities and differences in performance. While differences can be accommodated in contextspecific learning-based theories of performance (e.g. LCHC, 1982), the same cannot be said of performance similarities across diverse cultural contexts. These require explicit organismic constructs that develop independently of specific learning experiences.Pascual-Leone's (1970, 1980) neo-Piagetian theory of constructive operators (TCO) is an attempt to establish the nature of the interaction between contextspecific learning and content-free organismic equilibratory mechanisms. Central to the TCO are a set of what Pascual-Leone calls silent operators which in interaction co-determine performance. Silent operators act on the content of experience, the schemes, and regulate which of those schemes will determine performance.TCO postulates a number of silent operators (seven in all), the most important of which for present purposes are the M-operator and the L-operator. The Moperator or M-power can be considered as a reserve of mental energy or attention capacity which can be deployed by the child when engaging in a task. It is important to note that the increase in M-power in the theory is attributed to an organismic maturational growth factor correlated with chronological age. Pascual- Leone's (1987) research indicates that there are clear age-bound limits to the development 0888-4080/90/06045 1-O9$0.500
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