The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an instructional program designed to modify the impulsive learner to become more reflective. The instructional program consisted of instructional materials designed to foster reflective problem solving skills and teacher modeling designed to model reflective classroom behavior. / The subjects selected for this study were fifth grade students in the Escambia County (Pensacola) School District, Escambia County, Florida. Seven classrooms representing three elementary schools were used. / All subjects were pretested with the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT) developed by Kagan (1965). Subjects were identified as impulsive, reflective, slow-inaccurate, or fast-accurate based on their average response time and error rate on the MFFT. Sixty-six subjects were identified as impulsive, fifty-one as reflective, thirty-nine as slow-inaccurate, and thirty-five as fast accurate. / All subjects were also pretested with selected subtests from the Stanford Achievement Test, Intermediate Level II (vocabulary, word study, mathematics concepts, and mathematics applications). The subtests measured the problem solving skills taught in the instructional materials. / The treatment consisted of exposure to specially constructed instructional materials over a nine week period. The instructional materials were four self-contained, self-instructional modules designed to foster reflectivity. The modules contained elements of the following problem solving skills: (a) visual discrimination, (b) word study, (c) mathematics computations, and (d) inductive problem solving. The teacher modeling treatment included teacher training to model reflective classroom behavior in (a) verbal pacing, (b) physical pacing, and (c) direction giving. / A control group consisted of 66 fifth grade students in the same school district in similar classrooms. The control group was given the same pretests and posttests as the experimental group. / At the conclusion of the nine weeks treatment, the impulsive subjects in both the experimental and control groups were given the MFFT as a posttest. The mean gain scores on the MFFT of the groups were compared for significant differences. The impulsives in the experimental group showed significant gains on the MFFT posttest over the impulsives in the control group. The subjects were also given the problem solving skills subtest as a posttest. The mean gain scores on the problem solving skills subtest for the impulsives in the experimental group were significantly higher than those of the control group. / It was concluded that an instructional program consisting of instructional materials designed to foster reflectivity and teacher modeling of reflective behavior can significantly effect impulsives to behave more reflectively on the MFFT test and to perform better on a test of problem solving skills. It was recommended that a long range study on the effects of such an instructional program be used as a follow-up of this study to determine the residual effects of such treatment. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-05, Section: A, page: 1872. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74188 |
| Contributors | MATSON, GARY D., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 90 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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