Catastrophe Analysis of Discontinuous Development

Children’s knowledge of the earth: A new methodological and statistical approach

“…First, they argued that responses to the forced-choice questionnaires may be biased toward the scientific view because the choice between a scientific answer and an intuitive one is limited and because of the lack of justifications of answers. However, empirical evidence with respect to conservation of volume (Kingma, 1984;van der Maas & Molenaar, 1996), the class inclusion task (Chapman & McBride, 1992;Hodkin, 1987;Thomas, 1995;Thomas & Horton, 1997), and the balance scale task (Jansen & van der Maas, 1997, 2002Siegler, 1981) has demonstrated that, if the construction of the test is based on extensive research on possible alternative strategies, it is possible to design a forced-choice task that does not overestimate children's knowledge and allows for the detection of alternative strategies.…”

Recovering Within-Person Dynamics from Psychological Time Series

“…One way in which this approach could be applied is to use global characteristics to select a class of dynamical systems that is known to produce these characteristics. For example, van der Maas and Molenaar (1996) list a number of global characteristics, which they refer to as "catastrophe flags", which indicate that a dynamical system based on catastrophe theory could have generated the data. Next, one could use additional data to narrow down the possibilities to a smaller class of models, such as the cusp catastrophe model.…”

Evidence for the Phase Transition from Rule I to Rule II on the Balance Scale Task

“…The flags can be applied in cognitive developmental research. Van der Maas and Molenaar (1992Molenaar ( , 1996 applied the catastrophe FIG. 1.…”