Boyer Ty W, Levine Susan C
Georgia Southern University.
University of Chicago.
Dev Psychol. 2015 May;51(5):615-20. doi: 10.1037/a0039010. Epub 2015 Mar 9.
Recent studies reveal that children can solve proportional reasoning problems presented with continuous amounts that enable intuitive strategies by around 6 years of age but have difficulties with problems presented with discrete units that tend to elicit explicit count-and-match strategies until at least 10 years of age. The current study tests whether performance on discrete unit problems might be improved by prompting intuitive reasoning with continuous-format problems. Participants were kindergarten, second-grade, and fourth-grade students (N = 194) assigned to either an experimental condition, where they were given continuous amount proportion problems before discrete unit proportion problems, or a control condition, where they were given all discrete unit problems. Results of a three-way mixed-model analysis of variance examining school grade, experimental condition, and block of trials indicated that fourth-grade students in the experimental condition outperformed those in the control condition on discrete unit problems in the second half of the experiment, but kindergarten and second-grade students did not differ by condition. This suggests that older children can be prompted to use intuitive strategies to reason proportionally.
最近的研究表明，儿童在大约6岁时就能解决以连续数量呈现的比例推理问题，这类问题可采用直观策略，但对于以离散单位呈现的问题则存在困难，这类问题往往需要引出明确的计数和匹配策略，直到至少10岁。当前的研究测试了通过连续格式问题来激发直观推理是否能提高离散单位问题的表现。参与者是幼儿园、二年级和四年级的学生（N = 194），他们被分配到两种条件之一：实验条件，即先给他们连续数量比例问题，再给离散单位比例问题；或控制条件，即只给他们所有离散单位问题。一项三因素混合模型方差分析的结果，该分析考察了年级、实验条件和试验组块，结果表明，在实验的后半部分，实验条件下的四年级学生在离散单位问题上的表现优于控制条件下的学生，但幼儿园和二年级学生在不同条件下没有差异。这表明年龄较大的儿童可以被激发使用直观策略进行比例推理。
