Karen J. Pine

More Gestures Than Answers: Children Learning About Balance

This research extends the range of domains within which childrens gestures are found to play an important role in learning. The study involves children learning about balance, and the authors locate childrens gestures within a relevant model of cognitive development--the representational redescription model (A. Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). The speech and gestures of children explaining a balance task were examined. Approximately one third of the children expressed one idea in speech and another in gesture. These children made significantly more learning gains than children whose gestures and speech matched. Childrens gestures were an indicator, at pretest, of readiness to learn and of cognitive gains. The authors conclude that childrens gestures provide crucial insight into their cognitive state and illuminate the process of learning and representational change.

The effect of explaining another's actions on children's implicit theories of balance

Children and adults often hold naive intuitive theories about how the physical world around them works, and their misconceptions can be difficult to change. Self-explanations have been found to be effective in producing better understanding of science (Chi, de Leeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher, 1994), and explaining another persons reasoning can also bring about cognitive change (Siegler, 1995). This study deals with one domain of physics-balance-and investigates the effects of 2 interventions on children who had either a procedure for balancing but could not explain it or had a naive theory. We pretested 140 children, ages 5 to 9 years, to assess their ability on a balance beam task and their knowledge about the principles of balance. These children were classified according to levels of representation derived from Karmiloff-Smiths (1992) Representational Redescription model. In this sample, 104 children could not explain the principles of balance or possessed a naive theory that all things had to balance in the center. These children were allocated to 1 of 2 intervention conditions. Approximately half of the children watched the experimenter model the correct solution to the balance task; the rest observed the model and were also encouraged to produce verbal explanations of what they saw. At posttest, a significantly higher number of children from the latter condition had improved their understanding of balance. The positive effects of interpersonal explanation are discussed in relation to Karmiloff-Smiths model of childrens development, and the implications for teaching are highlighted.

How visual images of chocolate affect the craving and guilt of female dieters

This study asks whether exposure to images of chocolate induces cravings and guilty feelings in females. A further aim was to examine whether these effects are heightened in the case of dieters. The participants, 85 females, saw a series of enticing media images, either of chocolate or of non-food products. Two thirds of the sample were dieting or had dieted in the past; 15% had been on seven or more diets. After viewing the images all participants completed the Attitudes to Chocolate Questionnaire (ACQ) [Benton, Greenfield, & Morgan (1998). The development of the attitudes to chocolate questionnaire. Personality and Individual Differences, 24(4), 513-520]. The different conditions affected only those who dieted. Dieters had significantly higher ACQ scores after viewing the chocolate images than the non-dieters. It is suggested that dietary restriction increases desire for forbidden foods, in the form of craving, and may induce negative affect such as guilt, anxiety and depression.

Dear Santa: The effects of television advertising on young children

Every day children are exposed to the selling messages of advertisers via the television. There is some debate in the literature over the age at which young children can distinguish television advertisements from programmes, when they can remember and want what they see and when they are able to understand that the advertiser’s motive is to sell a product. Resolution of the debate has been hampered by methodological difficulties and paradigms which fail to fully capture and explain children’s responses to advertisements. This study uses a novel and ecologically valid method of exploring how toy advertising affects children by studying their requests to Father Christmas, monitoring toy commercials and collecting television viewing data. Eighty-three children aged from 4.8 to 6.5 years, who had written letters to Father Christmas, were interviewed regarding the extent and nature of their television viewing. Letters and similar data were also analysed for 16 nursery school children, aged 3.8 to 4.8 years, using questionnaire responses from their parents. Overall, children who watched more commercial television were found to request a greater number of items from Father Christmas. These children also requested more branded items than children who watched less. However, the children’s requests did not correlate significantly with the most frequently advertised toy products on television in the build-up to Christmas. Almost 90% of the toys advertised did not feature once in the children’s letters, suggesting that recall for specific brand names is poor in the under-7s. A positive correlation was found between watching television alone and number of requests. One interpretation of this may be that lone viewing renders children more susceptible to advertising. A comparison group of children from Sweden, where advertising to children is not permitted, asked for significantly fewer items. It is argued that English children who watch more TV, and especially those who watch alone, may be socialised to become consumers from a very early age.

Children’s Perceptions of Body Shape: A Thinness Bias in Pre-Adolescent Girls and Associations with Femininity

Despite research documenting the body image concerns of adolescent females, and the association with eating disorders, less is known about children’s perceptions of body shape or the developmental roots of adolescent concerns. This study, involving 140 children aged 5-11, explored what children think is the ideal shape for an adult male and female and whether body shape is related to masculinity and femininity. Children saw a range of figures from very thin to very fat and were asked which they thought was ‘the nicest shape for a lady (or man) to be’. Girls and boys agreed about what is the ideal male shape, but differed in their perception of the ideal female shape from as early as 5 years old. Girls selected an ideal female figure that was significantly thinner than that chosen by boys, and the girls also aspired to a thinner figure for themselves. Girls as young as 9 years, though not overweight, admitted they were dieting. Also, 61% of 11-year-old girls said their mothers dieted compared with only 12% of boys. Significantly more stereotypically feminine traits were associated with a thinner female figure than with a fatter one, whilst masculine traits were not associated with any particular male somatotype. The findings suggest that to be feminine, a female has to be thin although males can be either thin or fat and still be considered masculine. The implications in terms of the distorted beliefs underlying eating disorders are discussed.

A microgenetic analysis of the relationship between speech and gesture in children: Evidence for semantic and temporal asynchrony

We present a microgenetic analysis of the gestures that children produce as they talk about a balance task. Children gesture spontaneously on this task and here their hand gestures are considered in relation to the accompanying speech. By close examination of 21 childrens single sessions, and the 163 iconic gestures they produced (a mean of 7.6 gestures per child), it was found that gestures are rarely produced without speech. However, one third of the gestures the children produced conveyed different information to that expressed in their spoken explanations. Furthermore, children were found to convey information uniquely in gesture by expressing ideas in the manual modality that did not appear in their spoken explanations. Finally, in many cases children expressed an idea in gesture before they talked about it. These data suggest that gestures are integrally linked to the childs thinking and are an important and illuminating means of externalising cognition.

Group collaboration effects and the explicitness of children's knowledge

Abstract In a recent model of cognitive development, Karmiloff-Smith (1992) alerts us to levels of cognitive development at which childrens understanding of a problem can be implicit, or can be particularly resistant to input and disconfirmatory evidence. At the same time, numerous studies have illustrated the beneficial effects of working in small groups on childrens learning. This study asks whether the benefits of group work are available to children who have different levels of representation about balancing an object on a fulcrum, and in particular whether children who use a “center” strategy for balancing derive less benefit from social processes than children at other levels. A balance beam task was used to explore 5 to 7 year old childrens behavior and to categorise them according to levels of representation derived from Karmiloff-Smiths model. The 103 children then worked in groups either with others classified at the same or at a different level of representation. Subsequently, children were post-tested individually and classified again. More children were found to benefit from group discussion when they were with children at different levels to themselves. However, this effect was not found for children with a “center theory” who were predicted to be resistant to input or disconfirmatory evidence. This supports Karmiloff-Smiths claim for a level of knowledge which is resistant to input, and adds a cautionary note to the literature advocating group collaboration, since the benefits may not be the same for all children.

Spelling development in young children: a case of Representational Redescription?

Two experiments explored childrens spelling development in the context of the representational-redescription (RR) model (A. Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). Fifty-one 5- to 7-year-old children (Experiment 1) and 44 5- to 6-year-old children (Experiment 2) were assessed, using spelling production and recognition tasks, for phonological to morphological spelling development and representational levels derived from the RR model, respectively. Children were allocated to 1 of the stages for spelling production from T. Nunes, M. Bindman, and P. Bryant (1997) and to 1 of the representational levels derived from the RR model for spelling recognition and accompanying verbal justifications indicating their knowledge and understanding of spelling. These results are discussed in terms of how the RR model accounts for the hitherto unexplained cognitive mechanisms that underlie spelling development and the notion of multirepresentation in spelling.

Barbie or betty? Preschool children's preference for branded products and evidence for gender-linked differences

ABSTRACT. Children in the United Kingdom watch more television and are exposed to more advertising than children in any other European country. This article investigates the extent to which preschool children (aged 4–5 years) prefer brands advertised on television. Seventy-five children were interviewed and given a choice task in which they had to select the product, from eight pairs each comprising a branded and nonbranded product, that children of their own age and gender preferred. Products included popular drinks, snacks, toys, breakfast cereals, and sportswear. Nonbranded control products were carefully selected as close perceptual matches for the branded advertised products. Yet, on 68% of occasions, children chose the branded, advertised product in preference to the nonbranded product. This preference was reliably higher for girls (78%) than boys (58%). Gender-linked differences are discussed in relation to socialization theory and to girls’ greater verbal ability and emotional sensitivity.

The development of representations as children learn about balancing

The proposal that there is a simple dichotomy between implicit and explicit knowledge fails to fully explain why children and adults can perform a task with increasing awareness and efficiency before they are able to completely understand and explain their success. Karmiloff-Smith (1992) in her Representational Redescription (RR) model claims that representations of implicit procedures can be redescribed into further levels, E1, E2 and E3, which gradually afford increasing conscious and linguistic access. This study examines how 25 childrens representations about balancing a beam on a fulcrum changed over time, as they attempted a set of tasks each day for five consecutive days. Childrens behaviour was classified into seven levels, rather than the four identified by Karmiloff-Smith, and the path through these levels is traced as children progressed over the 5-day period. This provided one form of validation about the developmental sequence of the levels. Additional tasks assessed the flexibility of the childrens representations, operationalized either as an ability to predict which beams would balance, or to identify which picture showed a beam that would balance on a fulcrum. The findings from these assessments shed light on the conscious accessibility and transportability of the childrens knowledge, independent of their overt behaviour. The data also reveal a complexity in cognitive functioning which could not be identified from observations of performance alone. This research thus provides a theoretical endorsement and extension of Karmiloff-Smiths multi-representational framework of cognitive development and empirical support for a hypothesized path of development through the representational levels.