What Leads Children to Adopt New Strategies? A Microgenetic/Cross‐Sectional Study of Class Inclusion

Abstract

Learning of class inclusion by 5-year-olds in response to empirical and logical explanations of an adult's answers was examined. Contrary to the view that young children possess an empirical bias, 5-year-olds learned more, and continued learning for longer, when given logical explanations of correct answers than when given empirical explanations. Once children discovered how to solve the problems, they showed few regressions. Many children in the microgenetic experiment followed the path of change anticipated from previous cross-sectional studies, but children in the cross-sectional part of the study seemed to follow a different path. Reasons for the superior effectiveness of the logical explanations were discussed.

Exploring a Conceptual Model-Based Approach to Teaching Situated Word Problems

“…According to Siegler and Svetina (2006), the adoption of a new strategy is often slow, partly because of the resistance of the old strategies. Children may know or discover advanced strategies at a very early time, but it is possible that they persist in exclusively using the less advanced strategy or using the new strategy intermittently until the efficiency (accuracy and speed) in using the new strategy overtakes that of the old strategy.…”

Progress in the inductive strategy-use of children from different ethnic backgrounds: a study employing dynamic testing

“…These tasks, for example, analogical reasoning, categorisation, seriation, and all require rule finding processes that can be achieved by searching for similarities and differences between the objects, or in the relations between the objects under examination (Goswami, 1996;Klauer & Phye, 2008;Sternberg, 1985). Changes in the use of cognitive strategies after training or repeated testing have been found in inductive reasoning studies using class-inclusion tasks (Siegler & Svetina, 2006), and matrices/analogies (Alexander, Willson, White, & Fuqua, 1987;Siegler & Svetina, 2002;Tunteler, Pronk, & Resing, 2008). In contrast, dynamic testing research using series completion tasks is sparse (e.g.…”

Effects of an Intervention on Children’s Conceptions of Angle Measurement

“…Because we wanted to give a detailed account of the effects of the intervention on students' understanding of angle measurement, we utilized the microgenetic method (Siegler & Svetina, 2006) to observe and document that change. The microgenetic method has three main tenets:…”

“…(Siegler & Svetina, 2006, p. 1000 We used the microgenetic method to inform our design: In an attempt to increase the probability that we would be present when the students exhibited a change in their understanding, we designed an intervention composed of a sequence of individual trials that gave students the opportunity to reflect on dynamic and static angle models. Consistent with the microgenetic method, observations of the highly concentrated trials were dense and spanned the observed period of change.…”