Ground rules for testing: Expectations and misunderstandings in test situations

Abstract

Since young children have little experience in answering test questions, misunderstandings easily arise when they are subjected to tests. The experimenter wants to test the children, whereas they expect the experimenter to help them solve the problem. In an experiment the expectations of children about the interaction with the experimenter were influenced in a pre-task. In condition Exp:A (Expectation: Assistance) it was suggested that the experimenter would help the child. In condition Exp.T (Expectation: 'lest) children were made to expect that the experimenter would give no assistance. A third condition was a standard condition (8) without a pre-task. The experimental task was a conservation of number problem. The subjects in condition Exp/I' performed significantly better than the children in the other conditions. It is concluded that unfamiliarity with the rules of testing contributes to children's poor results in this kind of experiment. Making explicit what is intended leads to better performances.

‘I’ve come for his throat’: roles and identities in doctor–parent–child communication

“…Heath (1981) emphasizes the special character of openings in medical conversations; they are sequentially implicative (in the sense that invitations set the addressee’s response) and relationally affirmative (in the sense that openings (re‐)define the relationships between participants). Children’s participation does not only depend on their communicative competence, but also on their awareness of how the interaction will proceed (Elbers & Kelderman 1994; Elbers & Streefland, 2000). As we are interested in how identity alignment in the opening phase in triadic medical encounters is orientated to establish a relevant context for child participation, we will examine to whom the GP addresses the invitation for describing the reason for attendance.…”

Conversational asymmetry and the child's perspective in developmental and educational research

“…The researcher told the child "I am not going to help you, because I am curious to see whether you can do the task on your own." The children who were told this performed much better than the children in a control condition in which the classical Piagetian format was used and in another experimental condition in which the children were deliberately misled by the suggestion that the researcher would help them if necessary: 49% in contrast to 16% and 19% respectively (for details, see Elbers & Kelderman, 1994). Mulder and Vrij (1996) found similar results in an study involving memory.…”

“…Elbers and Kelderman (1994) gave children aged between 4 and 6 years a well-known cognitive task (Piaget's conservation task, see Piaget & Szeminska, 1941). The task requires children to twice estimate the number of blocks in a row-first when the blocks lie in one-to-one correspondence in two lines, and later after the blocks in one of the rows have been shifted apart.…”

Interaction Analysis and Psychology: A Dialogical Perspective

“…Special emphasis has been put upon the enmeshment between the subject's definition of the situation and cognitive activity (e.g., Wertsch et al 1984). Research carried out by Rommetveit (1976) showed that the child's answers in a test are tightly linked with the states of intersubjectivity which the adult and the child construct through the interactional dynamics (see also Elbers and Kelderman 1994;Grossen 2000;Säljö 1991). It was also shown that in a test situation, the experimenter is not neutral (Grossen and Perret-Clermont 1994) and that scaffolding strategies (Bruner 1990) such as mutual co-orientation, (mis) alignments and feedbacks, may also be observed in these situations.…”