Component Selection in Four‐, Eight‐, and Twelve‐year‐old Children1

Abstract

A method was devised for examining developmental changes in children's component selection–i.e., the disposition to discriminate among stimuli on the basis of a selected component. In an experiment to develop an optimal measure, problems of three levels of difficulty were administered to children of ages 4, 8, 10, and 12. According to data from an initial phase of the task, the problem of intermediate difficulty level, involving five stimuli, proved to be the most appropriate for developmental assessment of component selection. Results for this problem indicated a general tendency for children to select the shape component of stimuli differing in color and shape, with little developmental change in this tendency. In a second experiment, using similar materials, component selection was found to decrease from ages 4 to 8 and to remain constant from ages 8 to 12. These results were interpreted to be inconsistent with the notion, implied by certain theories, that children's tendency to exercise component selection should increase with age. Further information regarding this process was provided by (a) a three‐dimensional measure in the first experiment and (b) two variations of the task in the second experiment that were designed to ensure attention to shape.

Children's component selection with varying degrees of training

“…As before, the most important analyses were those involVing the color scores, and separate analyses were performed 1'or the five-and six-stimulus tasks, with Age and Training Level as factors in each case. The main effect of Age was found to be significant for the five-choice task (F(1,66) = 6.49, p < .05), which again corroborates Hale and Morgan's (1971) observation that 4and 8-…”

“…The most critical result was a significant main effect of Training Level for both the five-stimulus task (F(2,66) = 10.77, p < 0001) and the six-stimulus task (F(2,66) = 4.05, p < 005), corroborating the view that subjects attend to color and acquire a considerable amount of information about this component during the premastery stage of learning. The only other effect that proved significant in the analysis of color scores was a main effect of Age for the five-choice problem (F(1,66) = 9.43, p < .01); the 8-year-olds received generally higher color scores than the 4-year-olds, consistent with the results of Hale and Morgan (1971). Similar analyses performed for the shape scores indicated a main effect of Age for the fivestimulus problem (F(1,66) = 5.38, p < .05), and a main effect of Training Level for the six-choice task (F(2,66) = 5.22, p < .01).…”

“…The two oldest groups were drawn from third-and seventhgrade classes in a middle-class area of Somerset County, N.J., while the youngest group was drawn from six nursery schools in the same general vicinity. An "overlapping-age-levels" design was used (see Hale & Morgan, 1971), such that 4-and 8-year-olds were compared on a task of one level of difficulty, while a slightly more difficult task was used in the comparison of 8-and 12-year-olds; different but equivalent subsets of 8-year-olds were used in the two comparisons. A replication of selected subgroups from the main study included 66 children at age 12, drawn from seventhgrade classes in a middle-class area of Bucks County, Pa. (mean age = 12.8 years).…”

“…CHILDREN1S COMPONE~~SELECTION WITH VARYING DEGREES OF TRAINING l Gordon A. Hale and Suzanne So Taweel Educational Testing Service A recent study by Hale and Morgan (1971) has pointed to developmental changes in children's tendency to exercise component selection--ioe., the disposition to attend selectively to a single component of stimuli in a learning task. The developmental comparisons in that study were based on a single measure indicating the degree of component selection manifested by subjects through the entire course of learning.…”