CHILDREN’S IMPLICIT THEORIES OF LEARNING TO WRITE

NORA SCHEUER, MONTSERRAT DE LA CRUZ & MARÍA FAUSTINA HUARTE

Nicosia, Chipre

Congreso; 11th Biennial Conference del European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction; 2005

European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction

Though the cognitive processes and the socio-cultural contexts intervening in learning to write have deserved plenty of attention, very little is known about how children who are going through this complex process conceive it. Getting to know conceptions of learning is very important for educational research, planning and intervention, since such implicit representations have a pervasive influence on learning itself. Here we explore 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 attended by children living in extreme poverty; the other, by children from middle socio-cultural environments. In each school, we interviewed individually ten children attending Kindergarten, first, fourth and seventh grade respectively. Here we focus on the analysis of children’s responses to a key sequence of open questions regarding the ways whereby they 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? The application of the lexicometric method to the complete textual transcriptions of responses revealed four lexical groups. The first axis in the factorial plane adopts a clear educational/ developmental significance; socio-cultural environment is contributive to the third one. The analysis of these groups supports an interpretation in terms of implicit theories of learning. In correspondence with a direct implicit theory of learning, 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 revealed an advanced interpretative theory, since they integrated the representation of the learner him or herself in the learning process explicitly. Socio-cultural differences engaged both agency and the appreciation of the own writing competence.