Norman D K
Child Dev. 1980 Mar;51(1):288-91.
This study compared the developmental levels of spatial concepts in children from 3 different environments in the United States. Matched groups of 20 10-year-olds from a rural Appalachian community, a middle-class suburban community, and a lower-middle-class urban community were selected and given a Piaget-based map-drawing task. 20 separate elements, each of which is a spatial concept applied to a map feature, were assessed for developmental level (1--6). The element scores were partitioned by individual spatial concept means and analyses of variance were performed on the partitioned scores to compare the groups' developmental levels. Scheffé tests for determining all possible comparisons were then performed on the partitioned scores reaching significance between the groups. Results showed that the suburban and urban groups' mean levels of development on each of the spatial concepts did not differ significantly, and that the Appalachian children performed significantly better than one or both of the other groups on 3 out of the 4 spatial concepts. These findings support research that has demonstrated social/environmental influences on cognitive development and present evidence that urban/suburban environments in the United States are not optimal for the development of all cognitive skills.
本研究比较了美国3种不同环境下儿童空间概念的发展水平。从阿巴拉契亚农村社区、中产阶级郊区社区和中下阶层城市社区选取了匹配的20名10岁儿童组成小组，并让他们完成一项基于皮亚杰理论的地图绘制任务。对20个单独的元素进行了发展水平（1 - 6级）评估，每个元素都是应用于地图特征的空间概念。元素得分按个体空间概念均值进行划分，并对划分后的得分进行方差分析，以比较各组的发展水平。然后，对各组之间达到显著水平的划分后得分进行谢费检验，以确定所有可能的比较。结果表明，郊区和城市组在每个空间概念上的平均发展水平没有显著差异，并且阿巴拉契亚儿童在4个空间概念中的3个上的表现明显优于其他两组中的一组或两组。这些发现支持了已证明社会/环境对认知发展有影响的研究，并表明美国的城市/郊区环境并非对所有认知技能的发展都是最优的。
