The development of children’s implicit theories of learning to write

BOSCH, M. B., DE LA CRUZ, M., HUARTE, M. F. Y SCHEUER, N.

Berlín

Congreso; X International Congress for the Study of Child Language; 2005

International Association for the Study of Child Language

Cognitive, linguistic and socio-cultural processes intervening in learning to write have deserved plenty of attention from research, but little is known about how children who are going through this complex process conceive it. These conceptions mediate the goals learners set for themselves, the processes they put into practice and the assessment of their own achievements, competencies and difficulties. Our prior studies indicate that pre-school and school children’s conceptions about notational learning form specific implicit theories (based on conceptual, ontological and epistemological grounds). These theories progress from a direct theory of learning (with an emphasis on factors acting on the learner from the outside), to an interpretative theory of learning (focusing on an agent learner who activates mental representations throughout the learning process).In this new study we explored how children developing in different socio-cultural environments conceive their own learning to write, and how such conceptions change in the course of initial and basic education. The participants were 80 children from two public schools in Bariloche, Argentina. One school was located in extremely poor quarters in the outskirts of the city. Students’ parents had precarious jobs or were unemployed; most of them had not completed primary education. The other school was located downtown and was attended by children from a middle socio-cultural environment, whose parents had at the least completed primary education. In each school, we interviewed ten children attending Kindergarten and Grades 1, 4 and 7. In this presentation we focus on a sequence of open questions regarding the ways whereby children learn to write and they become aware of their progress: How do you learn to write? What do you do to learn? How do you realize you learn to write every time better?Computational analysis of textual data was applied to the complete textual transcriptions of responses, by relying basically on Simple Correspondence Factorial Analysis and the Modal Response Procedure, which selects the complete typical responses corresponding to each variable modality in decreasing order (chi2 criterion).Results show four developmentally ordered lexical groups indicating increasingly sophisticated patterns of referring the own process of learning to write, which we interpret in terms of implicit theories of learning to write. In correspondence with a direct implicit theory, preschoolers focused on additive learning products resulting from external conditions. Most children in first grade were beginning to integrate some aspects of the principle of agency inherent to an interpretative theory of learning. This principle became stronger in fourth grade, mainly in relation to writing procedures. Most seventh-graders integrated the representation of the learner in the learning process explicitly, thus revealing an advanced interpretative theory. Socio-cultural differences engaged both agency and the appreciation of the own writing competence. Children from marginated the socio-cultural environment showed an anxious concern for the acquisition of alphabetical writing, whereas children from the middle socio-cultural one expressed that they mastered such writing and made their own position in this learning explicit, by relating the verification of achievements with expectations of personal improvement.