Young children's ability to remember information about absolute extent.

Young children's ability to remember information about absolute extent.

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Kwon, Mee Kyoung.
Imprint:	2011.
Description:	103 p.
Language:	English
Format:	E-Resource Dissertations
Local Note:	School code: 0330.
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/8855618

Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:	University of Chicago.
ISBN:	9781267071408
Notes:	Advisor: Susan C. Levine. Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, Division of the Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, 2011. Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-04, Section: B, page: .
Summary:	The ability to remember information about the approximate size of objects is an important perceptual skill used in many everyday life tasks and potentially linked to later understanding of important mathematics topics such as measurement. Previous research has, however, shown that preschool children have difficulty remembering information about size information unless the object to be measured is presented with the same aligned standard object across study and test. The present study investigates how preschool children develop their ability to remember size information when the size of a salient comparison object is changed. Experiment 1A provides evidence that 4-year-olds are able to encode size information but have trouble remembering the information. Experiment 1B provides evidence that the ability to remember size information improves significantly between 4 and 6 years of age and within the same age groups, children from middle to high-SES (socioeconomic status) families remember the size information significantly better than their counterpart from low-SES families. Experiments 2 and 3 explore the possibility that children remember size information better in certain conditions than others. Experiment 2 finds that preschool children remember size better when a comparison standard is physically separated from a target object than when the standard is superimposed on or contains the target. Experiment 3 suggests that children remember size more accurately when they execute gestures that represent the size of the object than when they do not or when they watch someone else's gestures. These findings indicate that preschool children encode and remember size information better than suggested by previous research. Implications for existing theories and education are discussed.