Effects of age and schooling on the acquisition of elementary quantitative skills.

Abstract

The influence of school-and age-related variables was examined separately on 2 tasks involving elementary quantitative skills: conservation of number and mental addition. Performance on these tasks was compared by using a cutoff design with 3 groups of kindergarten and Grade 1 children who differed in age but not amount of schooling (grade), in schooling but not age, or in both age and schooling. The effects of age and schooling were distinct. On conservation of number, performance improved as a function of age but not schooling. On mental arithmetic, accuracy improved with schooling rather than age, but children's use of various solution procedures (e.g., retrieval, counting) was not influenced by schooling. Thus, in the domain of elementary mathematical skills, the influence of schooling can be very specific, and age-related variables other than schooling play an important role in the development of elementary mathematical skills. Results illustrate the utility of the cutoff design for investigating instructional and developmental influences on cognitive development.

Relative age effect in handball players of Murcia: Influence of sex and category of game

“…Although at the beginning, this type of aggrupation was used with the objective of trying to prevent differences in the formation of the athletes (González, 2007) through an appropriate development and fair competition with equal opportunities (Musch & Grondin, 2001;Gutiérrez, 2013), but what it really provokes is the existence of differences in age and therefore potentially differences in maturation and experience among the members of a same category (Gutiérrez, 2013). Unfortunately, studies confirm that the distribution of athletes to groups by age provokes differences among the athletes at physical (Delorme & Raspaud, 2009), cognitive (Bisanz, Morrison, & Dunn, 1995), motivational (Dixon, Horton, & Weir, 2011) and existential levels (Musch & Grondin, 2001). For this reason, the players born in the first months of the year come to have a kind of advantage over those born later in the competition year (Carling, Le Gall, Reilly, & Williams, 2009;González, 2007).…”

Education and cognitive development: A natural experiment.

“…For example, changes in memory skills have been viewed as a by-product of learning to read as well as a consequence of greater environmental demands for deliberate memory (Rogoff, 1981). In our own research, we have examined potential influences of schooling on growth of syntactic knowledge (Ferreira & Morrison, 1994), development of memory and causal reasoning in narrative comprehension and production (Varnhagen, Morrison, & Everall, 1994), and changes in arithmetic computational skills and number conservation (Bisanz, Morrison, & Dunn, 1995). The present article focuses on the influence of schooling on growth of memory and language skills.…”

Piagetian Conservation Tasks in Ghanaian Children: the Role of Geographical Location, Gender and Age Differences

“…Children of African-American descent who were thought of being in the preoperational level of cognitive development performed poorer in mathematics compared to children of Caucasian decent (Cooper, & Schleser, 2006). Additionally, although conservation capacity of most children improves along with age (Bisanz, Dunn, & Morrison 1995), it is not a direct attribute of age (Ginsberg & Opper, 1969). In effect, the recognised assumption that the relationship between the conservation task and the quality of reasoning among children is not at all as simple as Piaget's theory presumed (Baucal, & Stepanović, 2006).…”