U-shaped Behavioral Growth PDF
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DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY SERIES SERIES EDITOR Harry Beilin Developmental Psychology Program City University of New York Graduate School New York, New York LYNN S. LIBEN. Deaf Children: Developmental Perspectives JONAS LANGER. The Origins of Logic: Six to Twelve Months GILBERTE PIERAUT-LE BONNIEC. The Development of Modal Reasoning: Genesis of Necessity and Possibility Notions TIFFANY MARTINI FIELD, SUSAN GOLDBERG, DANIEL STERN, and ANITA MILLER SOSTEK. (Editors). High-Risk Infants and Children: Adult and Peer Interactions BARRY GHOLSON. The Cognitive-Developmental Basis of Human Learning: Studies in Hypothesis Testing ROBERT L. SELM AN. The Growth of Interpersonal Understanding: Developmental and Clinical Analyses RAINER Η. KLUWE and HANS SPADA. (Editors). Developmental Models of Thinking HARBEN BOUTOURLINE YOUNG and LUCY RAU FERGUSON. Puberty to Manhood in Italy and America SARAH L. FRIEDMAN and MARIAN SIGMAN. (Editors). Preterm Birth and Psychological Development LYNN S. LIBEN, ARTHUR H. PATTERSON, and NORA NEWCOMBE. (Editors). Spatial Representation and Behavior Across the Life Span: Theory and Application W. PATRICK DICKSON. (Editor). Children's Oral Communication Skills EUGENE S. GOLLIN. (Editor). Developmental Plasticity: Behavioral and Biological Aspects of Variations in Development GEORGE E. FORM AN. (Editor). Action and Thought: From Sensorimotor Schemes to Symbolic Operations SIDNEY STRAUSS. (Editor). U-Shaped Behavioral Growth In Preparation NANCY EISENBERG. (Editor). The Development of Prosocial Behavior WILLIAM J. FRIEDMAN. (Editor). The Developmental Psychology of Time U-SHAPED BEHAVIORAL GROWTH Edited by SIDNEY STRAUSS School of Education Tel-Aviv University Tel-Aviv, Ramat Aviv, Israel With RUTH STAVY The Israeli Science Teaching Center School of Education Tel-Aviv University Tel-Aviv, Ramat Aviv, Israel ACADEMIC PRESS A Subsidiary of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers New York London Toronto Sydney San Francisco COPYRIGHT © 1982, BY ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPY, RECORDING, OR ANY INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER. ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. Ill Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003 United Kingdom Edition published by ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. (LONDON) LTD. 24/28 Oval Road, London NW1 7DX Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: U-shaped behavioral growth. (Developmental psychology) Includes bibliographies and index. Contents: Introduction / Sidney Strauss — U-shaped oehavioral growth in ratio comparisons / Ruth Stavy ... [et al.] — U-shaped curves / D. Dean Richards and Robert S. Siegler — [etc.] 1. Cognition in children. I. Strauss, Sidney. II. Stavy, Ruth. III. Series. [DNLM: 1. Child behavior- Congresses. 2. Child development—Congresses. WS 105 Uli 1979] BF723.C5U18 155.4'13 81-17662 ISBN 0-12-673020-2 AACR2 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 82 83 84 85 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21 To my dear parents ARTHUR AND REVA STRAUSS for their love and efforts List of Contributors Numbers in parentheses indicate the pages on which the authors' contributions begin. JEANNE BAMBERGER (191), Division for Study and Research in Edu cation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massa chusetts 02139 MELISSA BOWERMAN (101), Department of Linguistics and Bureau of Child Research, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045 SUSAN CAREY (169), Department of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 GIDEON CARMI1 (11), School of Education, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Ramat Aviv, Israel WALTER EMMERICH (249), Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey 08541 HOWARD GARDNER (147), Harvard Project Zero and Boston Veterans Administration Hospital, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 DAVID Κ LAHR (63), Department of Psychology, Carnegie-Mellon Uni versity, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 JACQUES MEHLER (271), Laboratoire de Psychologie, 54 Blvd. Raspail 75270 Paris Cedex 06, France NATHAN ORPAZ (11), School of Education, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Ramat Aviv, Israel D. DEAN RICHARDS2 (37), Department of Psychology, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 1 Present address: Israel Science Teaching Center, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. 2 Present address: Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90024 xi xii LISTOF CONTRIBUTORS DONALD A. SCHÖN (227), Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 ROBERT S. SIEGLER3 (37), Department of Education, University of Chi cago, Chicago, Illinois 60637 RUTH STAVY (11), The Israeli Science Teaching Center, School of Edu cation, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Ramat Aviv, Israel 69978 SIDNEY STRAUSS (1, 11), School of Education, Tel-Aviv University, Tel- Aviv, Ramat Aviv, Israel 69978 J. G. WALLACE (87), Cognitive Psychology Research Group, Deakin University, Geelong, V. Australia ELLEN WINNER (147), Psychology Department, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02167, and Harvard Project Zero, Harvard Uni versity, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 3 Present address: Department of Psychology, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 Preface This volume is the product of a workshop conducted at Tel-Aviv University under the joint auspices of that university and the Massa chusetts Institute of Technology. The main purpose of this book is to discuss a phenomenon that has been a puzzle for some investigators of cognitive development; that is the fact that some behaviors appear, disappear, then apparently reappear over time. On occasion, the early appearing behavior seems to be well adapted to the situation in which it is posed; if that is the case, why then would it drop out? Is this disappearance a case of regression? Does the early behavior actually reappear, or is the later appearing behavior only superficially similar to the earlier behavior? These are some of the questions we explored in the course of the workshop and discuss further in the book. A second set of issues discussed in this volume is how different approaches to development suggest different answers to these and related questions. Among the contributions, there are represented struc turalist approaches, production system models of information pro cessing, a rule systems approach, nativism, and a model of how mat uration factors may influence U-shaped behavioral growth. It is apparent that the issue of whether or not U-shaped behavioral growth as a poten tially interesting developmental phenomenon worthy of further investi gation has its proponents and antagonists, depending upon the theory used to describe and explain the phenomenon. A third purpose is to present and discuss a broad range of content do mains so that a comparison can be made of where there is and where there is not overlap in our understanding of the developmental processes oc curring in U-shaped behavioral growth. The domains discussed are: the xiii xiv PREFACE development of physical concepts, musical concepts, metaphor produc tion, artistic production, face perception, social cognition (gender iden tity), and language acquisition. The idea of a workshop at Tel-Aviv University about U-shaped behav ioral growth grew out of a series of meetings I had with various people at the Division for Study and Research in Education (DSRE) at the Massachu setts Institute of Technology while there on sabbatical in 1976.1 would like to express my appreciation to Micha Chen and Rina Shapira from Tel-Aviv University and to Ben Snyder and Barbara Nelson from DSRE for their help in making the workshop a reality. In addition, Richard Held of the Psy chology Department at MIT, was instrumental in securing funds from the Bernays Foundation at a critical moment, and I am deeply grateful for his efforts. A year after the workshop, I was fortunate to meet Eddie Bernays, one of the most irrepressible men I have ever known, and I wish to thank him personally for his support. The workshop ended with a general feeling among its participants that we had all learned a great deal not only about our own positions but about those of others as well. I hope this volume bears witness to that feeling. Introduction SIDNEY STRAUSS Let me begin with an attempt to describe what will occupy the chap ters to follow: U-shaped behavioral growth curves. Such a curve in dicates the appearance of a behavior, a later dropping out of that be havior, and what appears to be its subsequent reappearance. In one variant of this phenomenon Phase 1 behavior is a correct performance and Phase 2 is an incorrect performance, whereas Phase 3 behavior is a correct performance once again. These behaviors, when graphed using aggregated data with percentage correct performance on one axis and age on the other, lead to a U-shaped behavioral growth curve. Calling the phenomenon U-shaped is arbitrary since if we plotted percentage of errors instead of percentage of correct performances we would see an inverted U-curve instead. I would like to reiterate at the outset that in and of itself the shape of a curve is not particularly interesting. In fact, if we looked only at the shape of a performance curve we would probably never get off square one. If we are to learn something from U-shaped curves, we will have to devise a way of thinking about what underlies each of their three phases, what their relations might be, and what the nature of the shift between these phases is. Keeping the preceding comments in mind, I would like to describe the organization of the chapters in this volume. Rather than make this brief introduction read like a museum guide ("First you will see this and then you will see that"), I prefer to provide some structure so that the reader will be able to place the arguments in the various chapters in a context. The framework has two slices that are not mutually ex clusive: (a) representational reorganization and (b) characterizations of ι U-Shaped Behavioral Growth Copyright © 1982 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-12-673020-2 2 SIDNEY STRAUSS relations between Phases 1 and 3, which, in turn, have consequences for how one thinks about Phase 2. Representational Reorganization Elsewhere, Ruth Stavy and I have presented a taxonomy of expla nations of U-shaped behavioral growth (Strauss & Stavy, in press) in which we suggested that U-curves are a result of some kind of reor ganization of the ways one represents one's world, be it the physical world, language, music, etc. I will now present the taxonomy along with a brief explanation of what the categories include. In all, there are five categories of explanations of this phenomenon, and these explanations center around the nature of the relations be tween the various phases of the behaviors: Phase 1—when the behavior appears, Phase 2—when it disappears, and Phase 3—when it apparently reappears. Researchers working within various traditions have taken different positions about these phases and, not surprisingly, these po sitions are often not explicitly stated. One of the purposes of this book is to make them more explicit. The first type of drop in performance-recovery lasts for short periods of time and occurs as oscillations or fluctuations when one is in tran sition between two systems of representation. It tends to be short-term, unstable, and specific. This shifting is characterized by a halting, un certain kind of advance that happens when one is constructing a new representational system and leaving the old one. The old system leads to an incorrect solution to a problem, whereas the new one leads to a correct solution, and the oscillation between them produces a series of incorrect, then correct, then incorrect, etc., solutions. We shall simply note this kind of drop in performance and will not deal with it further. For discussions of this phenomenon see Inhelder (1968) and Strauss (1972). The remaining types of drops and rises in performance are the result of the relationship between the new representational system and the former one and not of the oscillations between representations. Here we find changes that are long-term, stable, and general. The second explanation of U-curves is within the organismic-devel- opmental tradition and has been described by a research group working under my direction at Tel-Α vi ν University. Chapter 1 in this volume is a report on work that we have been doing in this tradition. We show that three phases result from the application of rules from one repre sentational system onto a second, and from their eventual disentan glement. The first phase is an experience-based, intuitive understanding
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