Some factors affecting the success of craft students in technical education: A case study

Trades students and trade calculations: Stupid or stupefied?

“…The Vocational Aspect of Education previously published a case study by Richardson and Kelly (1972) which attempted to find correlates between Piagetian measures of cognitive structures and success or failure in trade calculations. The subjects were first-year students in Fitting and Machining courses at a Sydney metropolitan technical college.…”

Piaget and Bruner: Can they help the technical teacher?

“…Age alone is no guarantee of development. Richardson & Kelly [2] found that a significant number of students within groups they tested could not demonstrate the existence of an intellectual structure commonly found in some pupils by the end of the primary school course, though the mean I.Q. of the technical college group was slightly above the average of the general population.…”

Memory modes and mathematics among technical and further education trade students

“…Other studies have emphasised the semantic and syntactic aspects of language and their relationship to the formation of mathematical concepts or to their underlying cognitive structures (Greenfield, 1966;Philp, 1973;UNESCO, 1974). The question posed by Kelly & Peak (1984) in their study was whether the students unsuccessful in the performance of trade calculations in the earlier study of Richardson & Kelly (1972) lacked the language to perform equivalence tasks based on the theory of sets, or whether they lacked the cognitive structures needed to perform the operations involved in the theory of sets and thus trade mathematics. Kelly & Peak (1984) accepted the view of the Harvard group (Bruner et al, 1966) that individuals code and retrieve information in three main ways, namely, by motor representation (this is, by actions), by visual representation (that is, by images) and by symbolic representation (that is, by symbols such as words).…”

“…For instance, Richardson & Kelly (1972) attempted to relate performance on Piagetian class inclusion and conservation tasks to membership or non-membership of remedial mathematics groups, and to success or failure in trade calculations at end-of-year examinations. The researchers also found the performance of the remedial and non-remedial mathematics groups differed on a Brunerian verbal equivalence task in which participants were required to indicate the way in which things represented by a given list of verbal labels were the same or alike.…”