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Related Experiment Videos

Development of the middle concept

F M Rabinowitz1, M L Howe

  • 1Department of Psychology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Canada.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|June 1, 1994
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Children

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Development
  • Developmental Psychology

Background:

  • Understanding how children learn abstract concepts is crucial in developmental psychology.
  • The concept of 'middle' is a fundamental spatial and quantitative concept that children develop over time.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate children's understanding and mastery of the 'middle' concept.
  • To examine factors influencing the learning and transfer of the middle concept in children.

Main Methods:

  • Two developmental studies were conducted with elementary school children (Kindergarten to Grade 5).
  • Experiment 1 involved pretraining on middle-size and presenting novel dimensions, comparing performance based on task instructions.
  • Experiment 2 used varied pretraining sets to assess transfer of the middle concept to novel dimensions.

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Main Results:

  • Children showed significant improvement in mastering the middle concept across elementary grades.
  • Explicitly identifying the 'dimension label' (e.g., middle oval) improved performance compared to identifying the 'middle thing'.
  • Pretraining with two stimulus sets led to better transfer of the middle concept to novel dimensions than pretraining with one set.

Conclusions:

  • Children's ability to grasp the middle concept develops significantly throughout elementary school.
  • Instructional cues, such as focusing on dimension labels, can enhance learning of the middle concept.
  • Learning the middle concept benefits from varied pretraining experiences, suggesting implications for implicit and explicit learning theories.