Carolyn Stern

An instrument to measure visual discrimination in young children.

An objective test to measure visual discrimination without the confounding of motor coordination was administered to 291 3-, 4-, and 5-yr.-old Negro and Caucasian boys and girls from 2 levels of socioeconomic status. Significant age and race main effects were found but there were no reliable differences for sex or SES.

Objects versus pictures in the instruction of young children

Abstract A popularly held assumption that young children learn more effectively when they can manipulate “real” objects than when the same concepts are presented pictorially was tested in an experiment with 36 four-year-old children in the Los Angeles Childrens Centers. A supplementary question was whether these young children could learn concepts and vocabulary concerned with the home environment in a replicable instructional program. All the children were pretested and assigned on a stratified random basis to one of three treatments. One group received training with three-dimensional manipulanda, a second group received exactly the same program except that the instructional materials were line drawings, in color, of the three-dimensional objects, and a third group served as a control. On the posttest, both experimental groups were significantly superior (p

Comparative Effectiveness of Echoic and Modeling Procedures in Language Instruction with Culturally-Disadvantaged Children

Comparative Effectiveness of Echoic and Modeling Procedures in Language Instruction with Culturally-Disadvantaged Children 1 CAROLYN STERN, Ed.D. EVAN KEISLAR, Ph.D. University of Calitornia, Los Angeles A wide variety of investigations have clearly demonstrated that the performance of children from socioeconomically disadvantaged homes is significantly below that of middle-class children. Lesser, Fifer & Clark (1965) found differences at the .001 level in

COMPARATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF SPEAKING VS. LISTENING IN IMPROVING SPOKEN LANGUAGE OF DISADVANTAGED YOUNG CHILDREN

The hypothesis that children who repeat sentences aloud will acquire greater facility in forming similar sentences on their own than those who only listen to the spoken sentences was tested with forty disadvantaged Negro children, 43 to 55 months old. Identical sequences of 5 to 15-minute daily lessons plus 2 days of testing were presented under two treatment conditions, speaking and not-speaking.By analysis of covariance a significant difference was found (. 01 level) favoring the speaking group. This difference was attributable to scores on the verbalization subtest, as both groups demonstrated equal facility in identification. A transfer task with verbalization to entirely different pictures produced similar significant treatment effects (p <. 01).

Sequence of Speaking and Listening Training in Beginning French: A Replication Experiment*

The relation of speaking and listening in second language acquisition has not been clarified. Some writers maintain that the child should first listen to a foreign language so as to be able to distinguish the sounds before beginning to speak utterances in the new language (e.g. Brooks, 1960). On the other hand, Lane (1964) has presented evidence to suggest that the child should begin by speaking the language in order to facilitate more careful discrimination among the sounds. Keislar and Mace (1965) have indicated that, since many different definitions of listening and speaking are used, the problem should be defined in terms of tasks which clearly specify the instructions, the stimulus and the response required. Mace (1966) conducted a study with primary children in which he attempted to throw some light on certain aspects of this problem. In his investigation he had four groups who were given fifteen minutes of French instruction each day for two weeks. One group was taught, during the first week, to speak French utterances appropriate to projected pictures and then, during the second week, to listen to and respond with understanding to the utterances they heard. A second group was given the same instruction in the reverse sequence: a week of training in listening comprehension followed by a week of speaking training. A third and fourth group received concurrent training combining both listening and speaking in fifteen-minute daily sessions over the two-week period. All four groups were given the same 600 frames of French instruction; the differences among the treatments lay entirely in the order in which the blocks of speaking and listening were presented.

Discussion: Cognitive and Language Factors

cellent presentation by Dr. Faust. First, when we talk of identifying children with learning problems, we make the implicit assumption that the problem lies within the child. In effect, we are saying that there are specific signs by which certain children reveal quite early in their development that they will have difficulty when confronted with school learning tasks. A corollary of this assumption is that i f we only had sufficiently sensitive evaluation instruments, the child who is going to fail would be identified before he ever experienced failure. Most studies which attempt to validate measures for predicting school success rely primarily upon correlational data. This type of reasoning leads, as any first year logic student can quickly tell you, to the fallacy of post hoe, propter hoc. Two events being correlated, that is, having a dependable relationship, does not warrant the inference that one is the cause of the other. The research evidence, as Dr. Faust has so richly documented, offers no consistent or dependable basis for prediction. If there is one dimension that does seem to offer a clue to the identification of children with potential learning problems, it is that of sex. There is convincing evidence that boys are far more likely to have trouble in school subjects than girls-and yet men are far more likely than women to becorhe scientists, functioning on a highly abstract intellectual level. Having clearly established the inadequacy of attempting to identify predictor variables in the child, Dr. Faust goes on to persuasively present her own position, which is that behavior must be viewed as a result of the interaction between the individual characteristics Discussion: Cognitive and Language Factors CAROLYN STERN, Ed.D. Head Start Evaluation and Research Center University of California, Los Angeles

Echoic Responding of Disadvantaged Preschool Children as a Function of Type of Speech Modeled.

Abstract The question of dialect differences in the comprehension of spoken English was explored with 42 Caucasian and 40 Negro low socioeconomic prekindergarten children. Using the UCLA Echoic Responding Inventory for Children, white children given the test in Standard English scored significantly higher (p These results cast doubt on the validity of a currently popular notion that ghetto children learn more readily when instruction is presented in familiar dialect. More study is needed before accepting Dialect as a language of instruction for black children.

Effect of Variety on the Learning of a Social Studies Concept by Preschool Children

Differential effects of variety versus repetition in the development of categorization skills were studied with fifty-four 5-year-old Head Start children, using a sequence of programmed booklets to teach a social stud ies unit on workers. It was hypothesized that children receiving Intermediate Variety (two categories, twelve instances, pre sented once) would demonstrate superior performance on transfer to new instances of the trained categories when compared to those trained with Low Variety (two categories, six instances, presented twice). Secondary hypotheses were that children trained with Low Variety would demonstrate superior performance on a mastery test when compared to children receiving Intermediate Variety, and that High Variety (four categories, six in stances) would be superior to both Low and Intermediate Variety in transfer to new categories. By analysis of covariance, scores of the Intermediate Variety treatment were significantly higher (p<,.05) on Near Transfer, supporting the hypothesis that children receiving an Intermediate Variety will demonstrate superior performance on the transfer to new instances when compared with those trained on Low Variety. The secondary hypotheses could be neither supported nor rejected on the basis of the data.