Public school kindergarten programs have become increasingly more academic and have educators debating about what skills best serve children in kindergarten that will prepare them for later academic achievement. The Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) is a screening instrument used in Virginia to assess kindergarten students and students in grades 1 through 3. Kindergarten teachers want to make sure that with the more demanding curriculum, and increase in rigorous standards, that students enter kindergarten ready to learn. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between students’ kindergarten PALS scores and first grade PALS scores in a southwestern Virginia school district. This study involved kindergarten and first grade students. The study reviewed their readiness skills required for kindergarten and later academic achievement. The study also examined preschool experience, birth order, and birthdays when students entered kindergarten. In addition, the study included students who were redshirted or held out of school for a year before enrolling in kindergarten. The results showed the Spring PALS scores of kindergarten students and the Spring PALS scores of first grade students are significant indicators of academic achievement for language arts literacy. The results can potentially assist in identifying the skills needed for students to be successful when they begin kindergarten. The relationship between readiness in kindergarten PALS scores and first grade PALS scores appears to extend across students’ preschool experience, kindergarten entrance age, and birth order. Teachers, administrators, parents, policymakers, and legislators can make decisions that affect the curriculum and school readiness policies that will help students begin their educational career prepared to learn.

Mathematical modeling is a thinking process that applies various sets of cognitive attributes – one component of intellectual resources (i.e., cognitive resources). Students are able to develop cognitive attributes when they engage in mathematical modeling activities. Furthermore, using many of the cognitive attributes developed during the mathematical modeling process, students solve mathematics problems, for example, in assessments. Examining students’ mastery of these cognitive attributes, we can investigate relationships between students’ cognitive development through mathematical modeling practices in classrooms and their performance on mathematics assessments. The purpose of this research is to quantitatively and empirically investigate the relationships between students’ development of mathematics cognitive attributes and their achievement. For the current study, we selected the four cognitive attributes representing different stages of the mathematical modeling practices – select, analyze, compute, and represent. The generalized DINA (deterministic inputs, noisy “and” gate) is applied to generate students’ mastery profiles of the cognitive attributes from their responses to test items. Using students’ mastery profiles as datasets, three secondary analysis studies are conducted with linear regression analysis and multivariate approach to repeated measure ANOVA. The findings show that development of the four cognitive attributes in mathematical modeling is positively related to mathematics achievement. In addition, students, who developed select and compute throughout 4th to 8th grades, scored higher in mathematics assessment with large degrees of effects. The findings suggest important implications to teachers: Students need to have opportunities develop a wide range of cognitive attributes of mathematical modeling, which would result in higher achievement. Teachers need to have instructional emphases on different stages of mathematical modeling depending on grade levels: students’ representing a solution at elementary-school levels; and analyzing a problem situation and selecting strategies at middle-school levels. The study also suggests teachers shift an instructional emphasis from learning mathematics contents to high-order thinking like mathematical modeling to accomplish higher mathematics achievement.

The goal of this thesis is to understand how children and adults scale distance. My preliminary work has shown that young children can accurately scale distances along a single dimension (i.e., length) even when the magnitude of the scale difference is very large. In these studies, 4- and 5-year-olds and adults first saw a location marked on a narrow mat placed on the floor of one testing space. They then reproduced that location on another narrow mat that was either the same length (i.e., the memory task) or a different length (i.e., the memory + scaling task) placed on the floor of an adjacent testing space. These experiments illustrated that both children and adults had more difficulty scaling up than scaling down (i.e., had more difficulty going from a small to a large mat than from a large to a small mat). In the present thesis, I used this difference between scaling up and scaling down as a tool to examine the processes underlying the ability to scale distance more generally. I predicted that the difficulty children and adults have scaling up can be attributed to mapping relative distances onto spaces that are too large to be viewed from a single vantage point. Experiment 1 demonstrated that although a visible boundary dividing a large space influenced how children and adults remember locations, scaling up was still more difficult than scaling down. Experiments 2 and 3 examined the influence of absolute size on mapping relative distance. When the absolute size of the test space was reduced, scaling up was no longer more difficult than scaling down. In contrast, when the absolute size was large, both scaling up and scaling down were more difficult, illustrating the importance of absolute size in using relative distance to scale. These findings suggest that when the absolute size of the space is large, children and adults have more difficulty using multiple edges of the space to accurately scale distance. More generally, these experiments underscore how the cognitive system and task structure interact to give rise to the ability to use relative distance to scale.

Executive function (EF) is a central aspect of cognition that undergoes significant changes in early childhood. Changes in EF in early childhood are robustly predictive of academic achievement and general quality of life measures later in adulthood. I develop a dynamic neural field (DNF) model which provides a process-based account of behavior and developmental change in a key task used to probe the early development of executive function--the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task. In the DCCS, children must flexibly switch from sorting cards either by shape or color to sorting by the other dimension. Typically, 3-year-olds, but not 5-year-olds, lack the flexibility to do so and perseverate on the first set of rules when instructed to switch. In Study 1, I use the DNF model to integrate behavioral and neural processes by simulating hemodynamics associated with the early emergence of flexible rule-use. I then test predictions of the model using near-infrared spectroscopy. In Study 2, I develop a DCCS that can be used with adults that sheds light on key aspects of the task as they have been revealed with children. Using fMRI, a pattern of behavioral and neural effects shed light on the central processes involved in flexible rule-use. These two studies demonstrate that performance emerges as a property of system-wide interactions and that common neurocognitive effects .can be found between childhood and adulthood.

Previous work shows that young children focus on holistic (or overall) similarity and older children focus on dimensional similarity (selectively attending to one property to the exclusion of others). Research on early word learning, however, suggests that process of learning new words trains attention towards category-relevant dimensions via regularities in the linguistic and physical environment. Thus, over development, children learn to attend to specific dimensions when making nominal category judgments--they selectively attend to shape, for example, when learning names for solid objects. In four experiments, I asked a question fundamental to our understanding of dimensional attention: does word learning scaffold attention to dimensional similarity in more general contexts. The results of Experiment 1 showed that children who are holistic classifiers are slower than dimensional classifiers to learn categories of objects that vary along both a category-relevant dimension (e.g. size) and a category-irrelevant dimension (e.g. brightness). However, the results of Experiment 2 showed that when children were presented with incidental labels during category learning, holistic classifiers learn the categories as quickly as dimensional classifiers. In a follow-up similarity classification task, children who had been holistic classifiers showed an increase in dimensional attention only if they had been in the label experiment. In Experiments 3 and 4, I examined category learning with and without a label in children who preferred to selectively attend to one dimension of similarity (e.g. brightness) regardless of whether this means selecting dimensional or holistic matches in a classification task. The results of these experiments provide a more complete picture of the continuous developmental trajectory of increasing selective and flexible dimensional attention. By showing how labels support dimensional attention, these results clarify the processes involved in development of similarity perception and potentially unify our understanding of attentional processes in word learning with those in a broader context.

Various cognitive learning theories have been examined for the purpose of considering music as an activity developing cognitive processes. It was felt that an exploration of these theories could offer insights into how music can be used to demonstrate cognitive development in learning and in children with learning disabilities. In an attempt to illustrate the relationship between music and cognition, concepts in the theories of Piaget, the Neo-Piagetians (Case, Pascaul-Leone, Biggs and Collis), Bruner, Ausubel, Vygotsky, Luria and Leont'ev have been discussed in association with music activities. It is argued that music can be identified as a cognitive activity and applied to learning and to learning disabilities through recognised special education approaches; these include perceptual-motor, multi-sensory, languagedevelopment related, developmental and behavioural. The theories of Vygotsky, Luria and Leont'ev - the 'troika' - are considered in greater detail. Their theories, although focussing on concepts of language in cognitive development, appear to offer a means for the wider application of music to cognitive development. Vygotsky's developmental hierarchy, Luria's brain functional system, and Leont'ev's theory of activity have been amalgamated into a theoretical framework demonstrating the processing of information through music activity leading to cognitive development. This framework provides for an investigation into learning capacities and learning potential, relevant to cognitive development in learning and in the learning disabled child.

Longer breastfeeding durations may enhance cognition and accelerate motor development; motor development, and in particular, crawling, may lead to dramatic changes in cognition. Based on these empirical relations, the hypothesis that crawling mediates breastfeeding duration and cognitive outcome was tested. Specifically, it was hypothesized that longer breastfeeding durations would significantly predict both earlier crawling and higher cognitive scores at 2 years of age, that earlier crawling would also predict higher cognitive scores, and that earlier crawling would account for part of the relationship between longer breastfeeding durations and higher cognitive scores. A sample of 44 full term infants from Winnipeg, Manitoba was followed longitudinally between birth and 2 years of age. Data on breastfeeding duration and crawling were collected through daily parent checklists, with supplemental breastfeeding information obtained via questionnaires. Near the toddlers’ 2nd birthdays, cognitive abilities were assessed with the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences (Fenson et al., 1993) and the Parent Report of Children’s Abilities (Saudino et al., 1998). All 3 key variables were measured on continuous scales, and a mediational analysis based on Baron and Kenny’s (1986) classic approach of 3 regressions was used. Several covariates were considered for inclusion in the regressions, but none reached significance in preliminary tests and thus, were not included. In the first 2 regression analyses, exclusive and partial breastfeeding durations significantly predicted neither cognitive scores (p = .59) nor age of crawling attainment (p = .41). The 3rd regression analysis showed a significant, small-to-medium effect size for earlier crawling attainment predicting higher cognitive scores (p < .05, adjusted R2 = .09). However, crawling onset had no effect on the breastfeeding-cognition link. The overall test of the mediation was inconclusive, due to low power. The significant finding between age of crawling onset and cognitive outcomes at 2 years of age may be due to earlier crawling altering the course of development, to reverse causation whereby more cognitively advanced infants are motivated to crawl sooner, or to a 3rd variable affecting both crawling and cognition. Future research should continue to explore motor and cognitive connections in infant development. / May 2005

An understanding of ownership is an important aspect of child development because it helps to promote harmonious social interactions. People are typically restricted from using objects belonging to others. Respecting others’ ownership rights is necessary for socially appropriate behaviour. Because of the frequent property disputes that children engage in, it might be expected that preschoolers’ appreciation for ownership is limited and that adult input is needed to teach children about ownership rights. In three experiments, I demonstrate the opposite. Preschoolers value ownership rights more strongly than do adults and support ownership rights in property entitlement disputes between a possessor and an owner. An additional two experiments demonstrate that although children strongly value ownership rights above other principles of entitlement, they show some flexibility in their reasoning about ownership rights when provided with sufficiently compelling reasons to consider disregarding these rights. These findings show developmental differences in children’s ability to determine when ownership rights should be disregarded. Older children and adults disregard ownership rights when they are provided with compelling enough reasons do so, whereas younger children often uphold owners’ rights to the exclusion of all other factors. Together, these studies challenge the intuitive view that children learn about ownership from adult input. Rather than strengthening children’s appreciation of ownership rights, adult input may serve to teach children about situations where it is socially appropriate to disregard ownership.

Thesis (EdD)--Open University. BLDSC no. DXN081883.

This dissertation engages in two major hypotheses regarding infants' naïve theory of social relationships. First, it proposes that infants may apply a domain-specific understanding to represent and reason about social groups defined by affiliation amongst their members. Second, it argues that infants may have an understanding of the causal role that behavioral conformity plays in promoting affiliation, and that this understanding may help to determine how infants reason about the coalitional social groups referred to in the first hypothesis. Experiments across three chapters address different aspects of these hypotheses. The experiments in Chapter 2 ask whether infants selectively use coalitional groups to make certain sorts of behavioral inferences, in contrast to the inferences they draw regarding other animate and inanimate categories. The experiments in Chapter 3 investigate the role of similarity of appearance in infants' representations of coalitional groups. Finally, the experiments in Chapter 4 look at how infants evaluate behavioral conformity and what they think it indicates about the attitudes of conformers and their targets. Chapter 5 synthesizes this work and discusses how it might apply to the study of imitation in both developmental and comparative fields. / Psychology