Dynamic testing and transfer: An examination of children's problem-solving strategies

Abstract

Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Abstract (150 words max)This study examined the problem-solving behaviour of 104 children (aged 7-8 years) when tackling construction-analogy tasks. Children were allocated to one of two conditions: either a form of unguided practice alone or this in combination with training based on graduated prompt techniques.Children's ability to solve figural open-ended analogy-problems was investigated as well as their ability to construct new analogy problems themselves. We examined children's progression in solving analogy problems and the variability in their strategy-use. Results showed that the group that received training made greater progress in solving analogy problems than children who only received unguided practice opportunities. However, the training appeared to give no additional improvement in performance on the transfer task over that of repeated unguided practice alone. Findings from this study demonstrate that an open construction task can provide additional information about children's cognitive learning potential.

Young Children's Transfer of Series Completion in a Dynamic Test Setting: Does Cognitive Flexibility Play a Role?

“…In line with the results of previous studies utilizing a graduated prompts training in series completion [31,42], the training procedure proved to be effective in improving children's series completion skills from pre-to post-test. This improvement, as reflected by their learner status, was therefore considered a useful measure of children's ability to profit from the training procedure.…”

“…By means of a reversal procedure [26,31], during which the children were asked to construct three series completion items by themselves, their transfer abilities were examined. Transfer was measured through two performance measures: the accuracy and level of difficulty of the selfconstruction items.…”

“…Although the ability to profit from training was a predictor of children's transfer accuracy, the training sessions might not have sufficiently taught the children about the factors underlying task complexity, such as the number of transformations present in the item, or the periodicity of the recurring changes. A longer, more intensive training, for example with more items, or with more prompts, might lead to children being able to construct more difficult items [31]. Moreover, it is important to note that children were not instructed to construct difficult items.…”

“…Children constructed more adequate series when they executed their series completion strategies more efficiently [49], and it was therefore argued that during the testing phase they gained a better understanding of the underlying principles involved [3,31]. In addition, cognitive flexibility played a significantly greater role in performance on the complex self-construction task, when children could insufficiently rely on the previously learned problem-solving strategies, when working on the self-construction items.…”

“…It was assumed that asking the children to construct series completion items of comparable open-ended format as the practice and training items, with the same materials, would prime them to activate and apply their previous experiences and learning. The reversal format was expected to be more challenging than the open-ended items, since it was assumed that self-construction explicitly required children to draw upon various advanced series completion skills in their memory in order to construct a correct series completion item [30,31].…”