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DOCUMENT RESUME

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AUTHOR Parley, William H.; And OthersTITLE Training Imagery Production in Young Children Through

Motor Involvement. Report from the Research Component"Children's Learning and Development".

INSTITUTION Wisconsin Univ., Madison. Research and DevelopmentCenter for Cognitive Learning.

SPONS AGENCY National Inst. of Education (DHEW), Washington,D.C.

REPORT NO TR-252PUB DATE May 73CONTRACT NE-C-00-3-0065NOTE 15p.

EDRS PRICE MF-$0.65 HC-$3.29DESCRIPTORS *Cognitive Development; *Elementary School Students;

*Imagery; *Kindergarten Children; Learning Processes;Paired Associate Learning; *Psychomotor Skills

IDENTIFIERS Piaget

ABSTRACTKindergarten and first grade children were given a

paired-assdciate learning task following one of five types ofstrategy-training procedures. In the motor training conditions,subjects generated interactions involving pairs of toys by playingwith them or by drawing pictures of them. It was found that relativeto simple imagery practice, motor training facilitated theperformance of kindergarteners, with no differences among four motortraining variations. For the first graders, imagery practice byitself was as effective as each of the motor-training procedures. Theresults are discussed in terms of Piaget's theory of cognitivedevelopment and contrasted with previously unsuccessful attempts toinduce self-generated elaboration strategies in young children.(Author/DP)

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TECHNICALTREPORt:,.N4,..252 .

.,

,

. REPORT:- FROM:. THE ;RESEARCH COMPONENTCHILDREN'OAARNING;'AND: DEVELOPMENT

Technical Report No. 252

TRAINING IMAGERY PRODUCTION IN YOUNG CHILDRENTHROUGH MOTOR INVOLVEMENT

by

William H. Varley, Joel R. Levin, Roger A. Severson, and Peter Wolff

Report from the Research ComponentChildren's Learning and Development

Wisconsin Research and DevelopmentCenter for Cognitive LearningThe University of Wisconsin

May 1973

Published by the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning,

supported in part as a research and development center by funds from the National

Institute of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The opinions

expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the National

Institute of Education and no official endorsement by that agency should be inferred.

Center Contract No. NE-C-00-3-0065

Statement of Focus

Individually Guided Education (ICE) is a new comprehensive system ofelementary education. The following components of the IGE system are invarying stages of development and implementation: a new organization forinstruction and related administrative arrangements; a model of instructionalprograming for the individual student; and curriculum components in prereading,reading, mathematics, motivation, and environmental education. The develop-ment of other curriculum components, of a system for managing instruction bycomputer, and of instructional strategies is needed to complete the system.Continuing programmatic research is required to provide a sound knowledgebase for the components under development and for improved second generationcomponents. Finally, systematic implementation is essential so that the prod-ucts will function properly in the IGE schools.

The Center plans and carries out the research, development, and imple-mentation components of its IGE program in this sequence: (1) identify theneeds and delimit the component problem area; (2) assess the possible con-straintsfinancial resources and availability of staff; (3) formulate generalplans and specific procedures for solving the problems; (4) secure and allo-cate human and material resources to carry out the plans; (5) provide foreffective communication among personnel and efficient management of activi-ties and resources; and (6) evaluate the effectiveness of each activity andits contribution to the total program and correct any difficulties through feed-back mechanisms and appropriate management techniques.

A self-renewing system of elementary education is projected in eachparticipating elementary school, i.e., one which is less dependent on externalsources for direction and is more responsive to the needs of the children attend-ing each particular school. In the IGE schools, Center-developed and othercurriculum products compatible with the Center's instructional programing modelwill lead to higher student achievement and self-direction in learning and inconduct and also to higher morale and job satisfaction among educational per-sonnel. Each developmental product makes its unique contribution to IGE asit is implemented in the schools. The various research components add to theknowledge of Center practitioners, developers, and theorists .

iii

Acknowledgments

The research reported here was done as part of the firstauthor's doctoral dissertation, with support from the WisconsinResearch and Development Center for Cognitive Learning atthe University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Varley is now atthe Dartmouth-Hitchcock Mental Health Center in Hanover,

'New Hampshire. We are grateful to Billie Albrecht for typingthe final draft of the paper. Thanks are also due to the staffand students of the Sauk Prairie Public Schools in Sauk Prairie,Wisconsin.

iv

Table of Contents

Page

Acknowledgments iv

List of Figures

Abstract vii

I. Introduction 1

II. Method 3

Subjects 3

Design and Materials 3

Procedure . 3

III. Results 5

IV. Discussion 7

References 9

List of Figures

Figure Page

1 Mean number of correct responses bygrade and experimental condition. 6

Abstract

Kindergarten and first-grade children were given a paired-associate learning task following one of five types of strategy-training procedures. In the motor-training conditions Ssgenerated interactions involving pairs of toys by playing withthem or by drawing pictures of them. It was found that relativeto simple imagery practice, motor training facilitated the per-formance of kindergartners, with no differences among fourmotor-training variations. In the first grade imagery practiceby itself was as effective as each of the motor-trainingprocedures. The results are discussed in terms of Piaget'stheory of cognitive development and contrasted with previouslyunsuccessful attempts to induce self-generated elaborationstrategies in young children.

vii

IIntroduction

It is well established that paired-associatelearning is facilitated by the addition of experi-menter-provided elaborations (Rohwer, 1967).However, this is not always true when youngchildren (typically below eight years of age)are asked to generate such elaborations them-selves (Levin, 1972; Rohwer, 1972). Giventhat young children are unsuccessful at gener-ating sentence and imagery elaboration strat-egies on request, the possibility exists thatwith systematic instruction or training theymay be taught to do so. However, initialefforts to train mnemonic elaboration in youngchildren have been disappointing (Rohwer &Ammon, 1971; Rohwer, Ammon, & Levin, 1971),leading Rohwer (1972) to conclude that childrenmust attain a certain age or maturational levelbefore they can be taught to use elaboration.strategies effectively.

Considering the above failures, such aconclusion is tempting. On the other hand, ithas recently been demonstrated that suppos-edly "pre-imagery" children can be inducedto generate facilitative imagery elaborationsthrough concurrent motor involvement (Wolff &Levin, 1972). In that experiment it was foundthat while six- and seven-year-old childrendid not benefit from instructions to imagine aninteraction between pairs of toys, When they ,

were permitted to play with toys concurrentlytheir performance improved dramatically (even

though they were not allowed to see the mani-pulations they generated). This result wasinterpreted as being consistent with Piaget'stheory of cognitive development, in which itis assumed that the preoperational child cannotproduce dynamic visual representations (inter-nally) without motor activity involving theevents to be represented (Piaget, 1962).

Danner and Taylor (in press) were alsoable to induce imagery in first graders bygiving them pretraining in drawing pictures ofseparate objects interacting. Although theseinvestigators did not interpret their findingsin terms of motor involvement, Piaget andInhelder (1971) would view playing and drawingactivities similarly, with each resulting ininternalized imitation (visual imagery). Thus,the important distinction between the Danner-Taylor and Wolff-Levin experiments is that inthe former the motor activity (i.e. , the pre-training) was temporally removed from thecriterion performance (and involved differentitems), whereas in the latter the niotor activityand criterion performance were concurrent.

The purpose of the present study was two-fold: (a) to investigate differences in perfor-mance of "younger" and "older" childrenwithin the imagery-transition stage and (b) toextend the motor/imagery separation resultsto other types of training procedures.

II

Method

Subjects

Eighty kindergarten and 80 first-gradepupils from a small middle-class communityin southern Wisconsin served as Ss. Alltesting was done during the spring of 1972.At that time the median age of the kinder-gartners was 6 years, 1 month, and that ofthe first graders was 7 years, 1 month. TheSs were taken in turn from their classroomsand randomly assigned (in equal numbers) toone of five treatment conditions at the timethey entered the experimental room.

Design and Materials

Following Wolff and Levin (1972), apaired-associate task was constructed withchildren's small toys comprising the stimulusmaterials. Fifteen pairs were created for thelearning task, with an additional eight pairsused for practice and examples during training.All pairs could be easily labeled by kinder-garten and first-grade children, as determinedfrom an earlier pilot study. Each pair (e.g.,toy cowboy, 'car) was randomly formed subjectto the constraint that a plausible interactionexisted for the two paired toys.

Prior to the learning task, Ss were givenone of five types of strategy training. In theimagery control condition E demonstrated apredetermined interaction for each of the firstfour training pairs, after which S was giveninstructions to imagine an interaction for eachof the four remaining pairs. This nonmotor-imagery condition was incorporated as a base-line for evaluating the effects of four motor-imagery training procedures in each grade asfollows: In two conditions Ss were instructedto generate interactions for each of the eighttraining pairs either by playing with the toys(repeated play). or by drawing a picture of themin interaction (repeated draw). These condi-

tions approximated those used by Wolff andLevin (1972) and Danner and Taylor (in press),respectively. In the other two conditions Sswere given playing (or drawing) practice onthe first four training pairs, followed by adelayed play (or draw) instruction for the re-maining four pairs in which Ss were requiredto indicate that they had generated an imaginalinteraction before they were permitted to exe-cute it through playing with (or drawing) thetoys. It was assumed that these latter twoconditions, faded play and faded draw, wouldproduce better subsequent performance thantheir repeated counterparts (especially forkindergartners), since Ss would be receivingpractice in generating imagery apart frommotor activity.

Procedure

In order to monitor the elaboration of Ssduring training, interactions created by S orE were briefly described by E without labelingthe toys (e.g., "Look. It's chasing that").The S's verbalizations regarding his interactionswere suppressed by E during training so thatfacilitative effects of S-generated verbaliza-tion would not cloud an imagery interpretationof the training effects. It was difficult toequate the amount of time across training con-ditions. Altogether, S spent about 25 minuteswith E in the imagery control, repeated play,and faded play conditions, and about 35 min-utes in the repeated draw and faded draw con-ditions.

The learning task itself was presented byway of an incidental-learning format becauseit was thought to be less reactive in this kindof training experiment and because no differ-.ences in performing the task as a function ofintention to learn were found in an earlier un-published study with Ss of this age. The S'sintroduction to the learning task was the same

3

across all conditions, but the "set" given toeach S was based on the training he had re-ceived.1

All Ss were tested individually. Followingthe eight training items, the 15 learning-taskpairs were presented one at a time at a 10-second rate (timed by E).. After the last pairwas presented, the 15 response toys were

1 The instructions given to the childrenwithin the various conditions and a list ofthe stimulus materials employed are availablefrom the second author on request to the Wis7consin Research and Development Center.

4

displayed, and for each stimulus toy (pre-sented in a different random order than studyitems) S was required to pick up the responsetoy with which it was initially paired. TheSs were given 7 seconds tlo respond to eachstimulus toy. Each of S's selections wasreplaced in the array before the next stimulustoy was presented.

III

Results

Learning was defined as the total numberof correct responses (out of 15) during the rec-ognition test. The mean number of correct re-sponses, by condition and grade, is presentedin Figure 1. In the analysis of variance com-parisons were nested.within grades so that state-ments about the effectiveness of the differentconditions could be made separately for eachgrade. To do this, each motor-training con-dition was compared with the imagery controlcondition via Dunnett's test (one-tailed, a =.05). In addition, the factorial combination ofthe nature (play or draw) and extent. (repeatedor faded) of motor involvement yielded threeorthogonal comparisons among training proce-dures within each grade.

Within the kindergarten sample Dunnettcomparisons revealed that each motor-trainingcondition produced significantly better learningthan did the imagery control condition. However,within the first-grade sample mean performance

in the imagery control condition was as good asin each of the motor-training conditions. Nosignificant differences among the four motor-training conditions were detected in either grade(all 2's > .05) .

A cost hoc breakdown of these effectsyielded further interesting information. Whenthe data were analyzed separately for boys andgirls it was found that the comparability of theimagery control and motor-training conditions inthe first grade was true only for girls (L < 1);for boys, however, significant differences infavor of motor training still existed (L. = 1.86,df = 29, p. < .05, one-tailed), as they had forboth sexes in the kindergarten sample (girls:t =2.96, df = 32, 2 < .01; boys: t =2.57,df = 38, 2 < .025). Despite these differenteffects for boys and girls , the previous findingof no significant differences among the fourmotor-training conditions did not change wheninvestigated for each sex group separately.

5

No. Correct11

10

6

Imagery Repeated Faded Repeated Faded Imagery Repeated Faded Repeated Faded

Control Play Play Draw Draw. Control Play Play Draw Draw

Kindergarten First Grade

Fig. 1. Mean number of correct responses by grade and experimental

condition.

IvDiscussion

The results of the present study indicatedthat for kindergarten children each motor-trainingcondition resulted in significantly better learningthan the nonmotor, imagery control condition.However, this effect due to motor training wasnot observed in the first-grade sample wheremotor and nonmotor training resulted in nonsigni-ficant learning differences. It might therefore beinferred that between the ages of six and sevenyears the young child becomes increasinglyadept at generating dynamic representations inthe absence of concurrent motor involvement orwithout immediately prior training. This agerange may well be adjusted depending on thesex of the child (with the present data suggest-ing that the ability develops earlier in girlsthan in boys), as well as on the particularsociocultural characteristics of the populationbeing considered.

The fact that playing and drawing trainidid not differ statistically is consistent withPiaget and Inhelder's (1971) view that bothplaying and drawing represent vehicles forvisually internalizing external stimuli. Thefailure of the faded draw and play trainingconditions to produce learning superior to therepeated draw and play conditions was unex-pected. However, it was noted by E that Ssin the repeated conditions typically hesitatedbefore either playing with or drawing the toysfor each training pair. This observation sug-gests that Ss in these conditions were thinkingup (imagining?) interactions before they exe-cuted the motor activity, even though they werenot explicitly instructed to do so as they werein faded conditions. Such an observation, ofcourse, also suggests additional research (uti-lizing response latencies , delayed visual feed-

back, motor blockage, and other variables) tospecify more precisely the temporal antecedentsof imagery production in young children.

The results of this study have implicationsfor future efforts to train imagery elaborationin children of this age. They strongly supportthe assumption that procedures designed totrain cognitive skills must take into accountthe information-processing skills of the youngchild as postulated by developmental learningtheories. The present training procedures,based on Piaget's theory of cognitive develop-ment, indicate that motor involvement shouldbe a dominant feature of imagery training inyoung children, an approach not fully exploitedin previously 1.1nsuccessful training studies(Rohwer & Ammon, 1971; Rohwer, Ammon, &Levin, 1971) .

It should be noted that the learning mate-rials of the present study consisted of toys,which may be regarded as being more concretethan the pictures and aurally presented wordsof Rohwer's earlier work, and which may beassumed to evoke dynamic images more readily(Levin, 1972). However, perhaps one of themost exciting results here was the marked fa-cilitative effects of the drawing-training con-ditions, substantiating those of Danner andTaylor (in press). A worthwhile direction forfuture training studies with young childrenwould be to apply drawing training to the learn-ing of less concrete materials. In this way chil-dren could be taught to elaborate pictorial oraural learning materials while honoring the needfor motor involvement in the training process.The fact that the playing and drawing conditionsresulted in equal degrees of facilitation herestrengthens this conclusion.

7

References

Danner, F. W. , & Taylor, A. M. Integratedpictures and relational imagery trainingin children's learning. Tournal of Experi-mental Child Psychology, in press.

Levin, J. R. When is a picture worth a thou-sand words? In Issues in imagery andlearning: Four papers. Wisconsin Re-search and Development Center for Cogni-tive Learning, Theoretical Paper No. 36,1972.

Piaget, J. Play, dreams, and imitation inchildhood. New York: Norton, 1962.

Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. Mental imagery inthe child. New York: Basic Books, 1971.

Rohwer, W. D. , Jr. Social class differencesin'the role of linguistic structures inpaired-associate learning: Elaborationand learning proficiency. Final Reporton Basic Research Project No. 5-0605,U.S. Office of Education, 1967.

GPO 803-393-3

Rohwer, W. D., Jr. Decisive research: A .7means for answering fundamental questionsabout instruction. Educational Researcher,1972, 1(7), 5-11.

Rohwer, W. D. , jr., & Ammon, M. S. Elabor-ation training and paired-associate learningefficiency in children. Journal of Educa-tional Psychology, 1971, 62, 376-383.

Rohwer, W. D., Jr., , Ammon, M. S. , & Levin,J. R. Learning efficiency and elaborationtraining among four- and five-year-oldchildren. In W. D. Rohwer,Jr. & P. R.Ammon, The assessment and improvementof learning and language skills in four- andfive-year-old culturally disadvantaged chil-dren. Office of Economic Opportunity, FinalReport, Contract No. B99-4776, June 1971.

Wolff, P., & Levin, J. R. The role of overtactivity in children's imagery production.Child Development, 1972, 43, 537-547. .

9

National Evaluation Committee

Helen BainImmediate Past PresidentNational Education Association

Lyle E. Bourne, Jr.Institute for the Study of Intellectual BehaviorUniversity of Colorado

Jeanne S. .ChallGraduate School of EducationHarvard University

Francis S. ChaseDepartment of EducationUniversity of Chicago

George E. DicksonCollege of EducationUniversity of Toledo

Hugh J. ScottSuperintendent of Public SchoolsDistrict of Columbia

H. Craig SipeDepartment of InstructionState University of New York

G. Wesley SowardsDean of EducationFlorida International University

Benton J. UnderwoodDeparcment of PsychologyNorthwestern University

Robert J. WisnerMathematics DepartmentNew Mexico State University

Executive Committee

William R. BushDirector, Program Planning and ManagementDeputy Director, R & D Center

Herbert J. Klausmeier, Committee Chairman,Principal InvestigatorR & D Center

Joel R. LevinPrincipal InvestigatorR & D Center

Donald J. McCartyDean, School of EducationUniversity of Wisconsin

Richard A. RossmillerDirectorR & D Center

Dan WoolpertDirector, Management SystemsR & D Center

Faculty of Principal Investigators

Vernon L. AllenProfessorPsychology

Frank H. FarleyAssociate ProfessorEducational Psychology

Marvin J. FruthAssociate ProfessorEducational Administration

John G. HarveyAssociate ProfessorMathematics

Frank H. HooperAssociate ProfessorChild Development

Herbert J. KlausmeierV. A. C. Henmon ProfessorEducational Psychology

Stephen J. Knezevich-lessor

Educational AdministrationJoel R. Levin

Associate ProfessorEducational Psychology

L. Joseph LinsProfessorInstitutional Studies

James LiphamProfessorEducational Administration

Wayne OttoProfessorCurriculum and Instruction

Robert PetzoldProfessorCurriculum and Instruction

Thomas A. RombergAssociate ProfessorCurriculum and Instruction

Richard A. RossmillerCenter DirectorProfessor, Educational Administration

Richard L. Venezky.Associate ProfessorComputer Science

Alan M. VoelkerAssistant ProfessorCurriculum and Instruction

Larry M. WilderAssistant ProfessorCommunication Arts