Research on Child Development: Seqencing
Introduction
Research shows that sequencing skills provide a foundation for academic achievement in early education, and specifically that teaching and practicing sequencing skills leads to increased academic achievement. Navigation games may teach sequencing skills that lead to better academic outcomes.
Older children (5yo) are better at prevention planning; even young children (3yo) can do remedy planning. Navigation games might be used to teach prevention planning earlier.
From 3yo up, there is a sequence of abilities you can see developing in how a child narrates a picture story. Early on they name and describe objects and states. Relationships (temporal, spatial, causal, purpose) come later. Navigation games can be designed to match kids' developmental stage and challenge them to develop toward the next level.
We have a memory capacity that increases with age. Navigation games might increase that capacity earlier.
Overall: researchers have studied sequencing-related skills, and these appear to be linked to general cognitive abilities that are important for academics and life. We may be able to show that navigation games efficiently and effectively increase abilities with these skills, and ideally their translation to downstream academic/life skills. It would be great to show that unique aspects of our navigation games (outdoors? integrating physical and mental activity?) are particularly awesome.
Research
“Abstracting Sequences: Reasoning That Is a Key to Academic Achievement”
8 first-grade children from each o 36 classes randomly assigned to 4 conditions:
Increasing values
Decreasing values
Symmetrical
Rotations of an object through 6 or 8 positions
Controls: equal numbers of sessions on math, reading or social studies.
3x/week, 15 min, 7 months.
End of school year test showed: children who were taught sequences...
...scored as well or better on 3 standardized reading tests compared to controls.
...Outscored all kids on tests of math concepts.
...Scored better than controls on some math scales. (not sure diff bw concepts and scales)
Conclusion: "developing an understanding of sequences is a form of abstraction … that provides a foundation for academic achievement in early education."
“Children's Representations of the Pattern of Daily Activities”
Our knowledge of time depends on forming mental representations of recurrent temporal patterns.
Goal: understand how one example pattern is represented. The pattern: daily life activities.
3 experiments.
Conclusion: by 5 years old, kids can judge the backward order of daily activities, judge the forward order from multiple reference points within the day, and evaluate the lengths of intervals separating daily activities. By 7 yo, can judge backward order from multiple reference points.
What it means: contains the types of models that can explain their knowledge of this pattern.
Some operations on this content can be done about SIX YEARS earlier than on 2 other temporal situations: days of the week; months of the year.
Planning in the Real World: Preschool Children's Scripts and Plans for Familiar Events
3-5 yo
Reported scripts or verbal plans for events
Going grocery shopping
Going to the beach
Also made plans to remedy and prevent mishaps that might occur for each event.
Older kids reported more info, focused more on onset activities, mentioned more specici planning activities in their plans than in their scripts (?) (?diff bw plan and script?)
All kids had adequate remedy plans; only 5yo had adequate prevention plans
Kids are better at planning for the beach than for grocery shopping.
Possible research question: through orienteering and our navigation games, can we reduce the age at which kids can do prevention plans?
The Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Serial Memory: List Learning by Pigeons and Monkeys
Humans have lots of experience learning lists by virtue of their education. So doing experiments on serial learning with humans has to assume they are experienced. They claim that pigeons and/or monkeys are new to lists and so research done on them would have a different angle.
Serial learning experiments in pigeons and monkeys show that serial learning doesn’t require language and is phylogenetically quite old.
There are qualitative differences in how pigeons vs monkeys represent lists they learn.
This is a bit of a teaser; or details I think we’d need the article.
Narrating, Representing and Remembering Event Sequences
Univ of Chicago: Trabasso & Stein
A child witnesses a series of events. Questions:
How does the child interpret and represent the events
Does how the child interpret and represent the events affect what they are able to report later in time?
Rashomon effect: differences in encoding across persons experiencing the same sequence of events as they unfold.
Trabasso & Nickels 1992 found that 3yo kids communicate about objects, beings, states, stat changes, adn actions. Interpretations diverge due to still acquiring names, and focus on different aspects. The interpretations converge in older kids, who have shared knowledge about events and more skill with language. Convergence is helped by understanding of goals, plans, intentional action, outcomes that affect well-being, internal states (esp emotions), physical causality.
… cool discussion about what the kid has to be able to do cognitively to understand event sequences in everyday life.
“Our approach focuses on the novel and dynamic states, action, and outcomes that are recognizable but not routine in everyday life."
Aka, the ability to adapt to novel circumstances based on knowledge of the past.
Another piece of research: Berman & Slobin 1994a - series of cross-linguistic investigations of narration to a picture story.
From 3yo and up.
Story was “Frog, Where are You?”
Kid loses, then searches extensively for, and finally finds his pet frog.
Example narrations, starting with 3yo's:
3 yo: naming, identifying, describing animate and inanimate beings and states. (atemporal; acausal descriptions) (lack relations between events)
4yo: more than name & describe. Relationship of possession. Actions; verbs indicate search. Missing: explicit markings of the actions with goals or purposes and their causal consequences in terms of explicit outcomes. Ie actions with temporal but not causal relations.
5yo: reasons for actions and outcomes. Episodic structure emerges.
9yo: marks more actions with purposes and includes more outcomes that indicate obstacles or failures.
Researchers use this episodic structure to model the story:
Setting → (Initiating Event → Internal Response → Goal → Attempt → Outcome)
[but I wonder about the story - 3yo love hearing a story that includes the more advanced features - are they hearing those more advanced features, and learning them as they listen?]
[How do these relate to our orienteering games?]
1st and 4th grade children, and adults.
24 per age group
Carried out visual task while hearing lists of spoken digits.
Received a post-list digit recall cue only occasionally, for some lists.
Researchers presume that list info must be stored in a passively held store such as auditory sensory memory.
Result: core memory capacity limit
Memory capacity appears to increase with age during childhood.
Other, attention-demanding process also contribute to memory for attended lists.
A Developmental Evaluation of Frequency Memory for Actions Presented in Lists, Scripts, and Stories
Experiment 1: adults estimated the frequency of typical and atypical actions in stories about scripted routines. Estimates were better for atypical than typical. I don't understand typical vs atypical yet.
Experiments 2 & 3: children & adults estimated frequency of atypical actions that were presented in lists, or embedded in stories, or in stories describing unfamiliar activities…
Result: supports theory that encoding of freq info is automatic and invariant across wide range of ages.
Both kids and adults estimate influenced by manipulations that varied the difficulty of retrieving the memory
New support for the Script-Pointer-Plus-Tag theory of script memory. From Google AI: "A "script-pointer-plus-tag" is a cognitive psychology concept that describes how our memory stores information about routine events (like going to a restaurant) by using a "pointer" to a generic script of the event, along with additional "tags" for any atypical actions that deviate from the typical sequence within that script; essentially, it means we remember the basic structure of a familiar event and highlight anything unusual that happens within it."
[No idea what this means, but would like to know]
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