Conversational Interactions between Mothers and Learning-Disabled or Nondisabled Children during a Problem-Solving Task

1984 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanis Bryan ◽  
Mavis Donahue ◽  
Ruth Pearl ◽  
Allen Herzog

This study focused on mother-child interactions during a problem-solving task to determine whether (a) mothers of learning-disabled children engage in conversational buffering to facilitate their child's participation in the task, and (b) whether learning-disabled children differ from nondisabled children in their use of language with their mothers. The results of this study provide some evidence that mothers of both learning-disabled and nondisabled children engage in conversational buffering, although there were few differences between the mothers of the learning-disabled and nondisabled children. Differences between learning-disabled and nondisabled children showed that the learning-disabled were more likely to agree with and less likely to disagree with their mothers than were the nondisabled children. These findings provide some evidence of maternal conversational buffering and suggest that learning-disabled children's previously reported unassertive conversational style in peer interactions extends to talk with their mothers.

1981 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanis Bryan ◽  
Mavis Donahue ◽  
Ruth Pearl

Learning disabled children in grades three through eight participated in a problem-solving task requiring group decision making. An analysis of group choices indicated that the independently made choices of learning disabled children were less likely to be among the group's final choices. Analyses of the children's communication patterns revealed that learning disabled children were less likely to disagree with classmates, less likely to try to argue for their choices, and more likely to agree with their peers. In addition, learning disabled children were found to be less likely to engage in “conversational housekeeping” than nondisabled children. Hence, learning disabled children were less persuasive than nondisabled children, apparently as a result of their assuming a submissive, deferential role when interacting with small groups of peers.


1976 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 851-858 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva M. Pajurkova ◽  
R. Robert Orr ◽  
Byron P. Rourke ◽  
M. Alan J. Finlayson

A version of the Word-Finding Test was constructed for use with children. This test was administered to 40 normal children and 20 children with learning disabilities who had been matched for age and WISC Full Scale IQ. The results indicated that the test is appropriate for use with 9- and 10-yr.-old children, and that performance distinguishes between normal and learning disabled children of these ages at a high level of confidence. There were also some indications that the mode of approach to the test exhibited by the children with learning disabilities differed qualitatively from that of the normal children.


1983 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-320
Author(s):  
Rose Sinicrope ◽  
Lori Bell Mick

Noelting's (1980a, 1980b) three parallel instruments on proportional reasoning—two presenting problem-solving tasks in the ratio and division interpretations of fractions and one presenting the tasks in the purely symbolic form of numerical fractions—were administered to 6 female and 41 male learning disabled students, grades four through eight. Performances on the instruments were then compared to the performances of 120 non-learning disabled students in grades five through nine of the same school district. The purpose of the study was to determine whether learning disabled students differed in their development of proportional reasoning and whether their disability was in the use of symbols and language and not in their ability to solve proportional problems. Developmental scalograms, PPR>0.93, resulted in support of the hypothesis that the proportional reasoning abilities of the learning disabled student are developmental and thus not unlike those of the non-learning disabled student. A comparison of the three means for the two groups revealed a reversal in performance with the learning disabled students more successful at problem solving and the non-learning disabled students more successful at the purely symbolic form of numerical fractions. Unlike the non-learning disabled students, the learning disabled students' inability to express a strategy did not indicate an inability to solve the problem.


1995 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 1117-1125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mavis L. Donahue ◽  
Ruth Pearl

This study examined the conversational interactions of mothers’ and their 4.5-year-old children, who had been bom preterm, during a social problem-solving task asking each dyad to agree on the choice of a snack. Relative to comparison mothers, mothers of preterm children seemed to approach the task as a vocabulary lesson; they produced less complex sentences and were more likely to name the snacks and to test their children’s knowledge of snack names. Comparison mothers were more likely to focus on the social negotiation aspect of the task, by offering more opinions and reasons. Discussed is whether the conversational strategies of mothers of preterm children reflect appropriate “fine-tuning” or a lag in adjusting to their children’s emerging language skills because of a lingering “prematurity stereotype.”


2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda A. Métrailler ◽  
Ester Reijnen ◽  
Cornelia Kneser ◽  
Klaus Opwis

This study compared individuals with pairs in a scientific problem-solving task. Participants interacted with a virtual psychological laboratory called Virtue to reason about a visual search theory. To this end, they created hypotheses, designed experiments, and analyzed and interpreted the results of their experiments in order to discover which of five possible factors affected the visual search process. Before and after their interaction with Virtue, participants took a test measuring theoretical and methodological knowledge. In addition, process data reflecting participants’ experimental activities and verbal data were collected. The results showed a significant but equal increase in knowledge for both groups. We found differences between individuals and pairs in the evaluation of hypotheses in the process data, and in descriptive and explanatory statements in the verbal data. Interacting with Virtue helped all students improve their domain-specific and domain-general psychological knowledge.


Author(s):  
K. Werner ◽  
M. Raab

Embodied cognition theories suggest a link between bodily movements and cognitive functions. Given such a link, it is assumed that movement influences the two main stages of problem solving: creating a problem space and creating solutions. This study explores how specific the link between bodily movements and the problem-solving process is. Seventy-two participants were tested with variations of the two-string problem (Experiment 1) and the water-jar problem (Experiment 2), allowing for two possible solutions. In Experiment 1 participants were primed with arm-swing movements (swing group) and step movements on a chair (step group). In Experiment 2 participants sat in front of three jars with glass marbles and had to sort these marbles from the outer jars to the middle one (plus group) or vice versa (minus group). Results showed more swing-like solutions in the swing group and more step-like solutions in the step group, and more addition solutions in the plus group and more subtraction solutions in the minus group. This specificity of the connection between movement and problem-solving task will allow further experiments to investigate how bodily movements influence the stages of problem solving.


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