Aspects of the development of competence

282 Pages·2015·8.635 MB·English

by  University of Minnesota. Institute of Child Development.;Collins, W. Andrew

ASPECTS OF THE
DEVELOPMENT OF COMPETENCE
The Minnesota Symposia
on Child Psychology
Volume 14
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ASPECTS OF THE
DEVELOPMENT OF COMPETENCE
The Minnesota Symposia
on Child Psychology
Volume 14
EDITED BY
W. ANDREW COLLINS
University of Minnesota
First Published 1981 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
This edition published 2015 by Psychology Press
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Psychology Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright© 1981 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, 14th,
University of Minnesota, 1979
Aspects of the development of competence.
Papers from the conference sponsored by the Institute
of Child Development, University of Minnesota.
“The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, v. 14.”
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Performance in children—Congresses. 2. Cogni­
tion in children—Congresses. 3. Social interaction
in children—Congresses. I. Collins, W. Andrew,
1944- II. Minnesota. University. Institute of
Child Development. III. Title.
BF723.P365M56 1979 1 55.4'13 8 0-20568
ISBN 0-89859-070-1
ISBN 978-0-203-78091-6 (eISBN)
Publisher's Note:
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this
book but points out that some imperfections from the original may
be apparent.
Contents
Preface vii
1. Excitory and Inhibitory Influences on Reflex Responsiveness
Frances K. Graham, Barbara D. Strock, and Bonnie L Zeigler...........1
The Startle Reflex and its Measurement 2
Startle Modification in Mature Organisms 5
Cardiac and Startle Reflexes in the Early Development of
Rodents 13
Cardiac and Startle Reflexes in Early Human Development 15
Implications 26
2. Two Kinds of Perceptual Organization Near the Beginning of Life
Marc H. Bornstein .......................................................................................39
Prologue: A Philosophical Query 39
Introduction 40
Two Kinds of Perceptual Organization: Structure and
Function 41
Two Kinds of Perceptual Organization Near the Beginning
of Life 46
A Comparative View: Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Perceptual
Organization 71
Developmental Continuity: Utility and Meaning 75
Conclusions 81
Epilogue: A Psychological Reply 82
v
vi CONTENTS
3. Constraints on Structure: Evidence from American Sign Language
and Language Learning
Elissa L Newport........................................................................................93
Analog Representation and Morphological Organization 94
The Influence of Learning on Language 113
Summary 121
4. Comparative Cognitive Research: Learning from a Learning
Disabled Child
Michael Cole and Kenneth Traupmann.................................................125
Contexts of Observation 127
Manifestations of Learning Disability: Formal Tests 129
Description and Ascription in an Informal Setting 135
General Discussion 144
5. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation in Children: Detrimental Effects of
Superfluous Social Controls
Mark R. Lepper..........................................................................................155
Internalization Versus Compliance: The Effects of Threats of
Punishment on Children’s Internalization of Adult
Prohibitions 156
Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation: The Effects of Extrinsic
Rewards on Task Performance and Subsequent
Intrinsic Interest 166
Understanding Social Constraints: Some Developmental
Issues 195
The Effects of Superfluous Social Controls: Implications and
Speculations 200
6. A Model of Mastery Motivation in Children: Individual Differences
and Developmental Change
Susan Harter..............................................................................................215
A Model of Effectance Motivation 216
Constructs in Search of Measures: An Interlude 221
Scale Construction and the Vicissitudes of Single
Constructs 226
The Function of Reward: An Alternative Frame of Reference 239
Affective Concomitants of One’s Motivational Orientation 241
Relationships Among Constructs 245
Musings on a Model of Mastery Motivation 249
List of Contributors 257
Author Index 259
Subject Index 269
Preface
The Fourteenth Annual Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology was
held at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, October 18-20,1979. As in
each of the past twelve years, the Institute of Child Development convened six
outstanding developmental scholars to present their current research within
the programmatic perspective in which it was conceived. Although in several
recent volumes, the six contributors have been drawn from the same sub-area
of developmental study, the participants in the Fourteenth Symposium
represent diverse foci. They are scholars in infant physiology, early perceptual
processes, cognition, language development, social relations and
personality—a sampling of the vigorous and varied activity in developmental
psychology.
Nevertheless, despite the intentional diversity of the invited contributions,
these six papers are similar in interesting and revealing ways. Uniformly, the
authors focus on the child as an active participant in the cognitive and social
transactions of typical experience; they go beyond the superficial invocation
of “the active organism” (which one of them rightly calls the “slogan of
cognitive [and developmental] psychology”) to outline specific empirical and
theoretical formulations that give substance to this view of the developing
child. This commonality cuts across levels of analyses from the physiological
to social and personality indicators. Although it was not the purpose, nor the
achievement, of the Symposium to arrive at a synthesis across these different
levels, with hindsight these six chapters appear to bring together
representative problems and approaches that, over the long term, may be
conducive to broad reflection on fundamental psychological and
developmental processes.
vii
viii PREFACE
In Chapter One, Frances Graham and her collaborators report
investigations of the nature of control systems that are “presumed to affect the
flow of information in cognition.” In mature organisms the startle reflex has
been found to be affected differently by transient and by sustained stimulation
before a reflex stimulus is presented. Graham and her colleagues piece
together evidence from a series of studies to indicate that, in the young infant,
transient stimuli produce inhibitory responding, usually in the second month
of life; but, according to the experimenters, the effect is relatively weak
compared to the effect of transient stimuli on adults. Graham provides a
detailed discussion of the physiological and neurochemical basis for
inhibitory and facilitating responses and the probable maturational course of
these neurophysiological correlates of cognitive control processes.
Marc Bornstein finds evidence in recent research of two kinds of perceptual
organization near the beginning of life and discusses the relation of these
organizational patterns to cognitive functioning in many domains. He argues
that infants’ abilities to respond to discriminably different stimuli as though
they were the same indicates capacity for recognizing important perceptual
similarities and that, within any given class or sensory domain, certain stimuli
are especially salient to infants in the first six months of life. Bornstein argues
that these perceptual organizations, added to other recognized congenitally
organized behaviors such as grasping and rooting, stimulus seeking, and the
ability to learn soon after birth, provide young human beings with the ability
to perceive the world in organized ways very early on. They may also provide
the important initial structures on the basis of which cognitive development
proceeds.
In Chapter 3 Elissa Newport proposes that young deaf children’s learning
of American Sign Language is, like the language learning of hearing children,
dependent on each child’s internal analyses of morphemes that are acquired
one by one. In contrast to the facilitative early organizational principles
identified by Bornstein, language learning appears to require relatively
laborious inductive effort over a period of several years, even though the
environment for American Sign Language learners (particularly second- and
later- generation signers) offers striking iconic and analogue possibilities that
should make language learning a simpler process for them. Newport
concludes that the similarity of processes apparently required for learning
spoken languages, as well as this visual-gestural language, lies in the nature of
the language learning mechanism itself.
These contributors’ emphases on developmental regularities in cognitive
functions is balanced by the analysis of differences in children’s strategies
presented by Michael Cole and Kenneth Traupman. The theme, as in much of
Cole’s writing about cross-cultural cognitive research, is the limitations of
traditional performance measures for understanding the nature of cognitive
PREFACE ¡X
capabilities. In Chapter 4, he and his collaborator report their analysis of
detailed observations of a child identified by traditional procedures as
learning disabled, concluding that in natural settings the child shows many
adaptive task-achievement strategies. They urge a broader view of both
assessment procedures and the nature of adaptive abilities themselves.
The sometimes deleterious effects of superfluous adult controls on
children’s interest in and performance on tasks is Mark Lepper’s focus in
Chapter 5. Lepper reviews his extensive research on the effects of extrinsic
constraints on compliance and intrinsic motivation and proposes that the
effectiveness of external pressure follows a “Minimal Sufficiency Principle,”
in which increased constraints beyond a level necessary for initial compliance
or participation in many tasks undermines subsequent intrinsic control over
behavior. As in other chapters, the role of children’s constructive cognitive
activity is central. In a final discussion, he notes the need to investigate the
operation and effects of alternatives to the traditional emphasis on immediate
reinforcement and punishment as means of socialization.
In her discussion of mastery motivation in Chapter 6, Susan Harter also
addresses issues of external social forces and internalization in the develop-
ment of a sense of competence. Departing from Robert White’s seminal ideas
about effectance, her emphasis has been more psychometric and differential
than Lepper’s; but like the research in earlier chapters, Harter’s work
concerns the nature of children’s perceptions and concepts as bases for
significant psychological responses. Much of her work to date has been
devoted to issues of measurement of the mastery construct for children of
different ages, and in her chapter she discusses implications of psycho-
metrically sound methods for constructs and theories of mastery and
competence.
Financial support for this fourteenth Minnesota Symposium was provided
by Public Health Service Grant No. 1R13HD-10650 from the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Institute of Child
Development. In addition, part of the work of editing the papers was carried
out while I was a Visiting Fellow at the Boys Town Center for the Study of
Youth Development, Boys Town, Nebraska, and the provision of facilities
there is gratefully acknowledged. The Symposium is carried out coop-
eratively by the faculty, staff, and students of the Institute of Child
Development, whose efforts deserve the highest praise. Special acknowledg-
ment is given to the Minnesota Symposium Committee composed of the
following: Ryan Bliss; Mary Ann Chalkley; Helen Dickison; Wayne Duncan;
Virginia Eaton; Elizabeth Haugen; Becky Jones; Daniel Keating; Judy List;
Michael Livingston; Frank Manis; David Mitchell; Fred Morrison; Lynn
Musser; Marion Perlmutter; and Mary Jo Ward. In addition, Catherine
Meyer was an efficient and enterprising consultant and collaborator through-