Siegler R S
Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Cogn Psychol. 1995 Jun;28(3):225-73. doi: 10.1006/cogp.1995.1006.
Microgenetic methods can illuminate the path, rate, breadth, variability, and sources of change. The present study illustrates the types of information the method can yield in the context of number conservation. Five-year-olds whose pretest performance showed that they had not mastered number conservation were presented four training sessions. Some were just given feedback on their number conservation performance; others were given feedback and asked to explain the reasoning that led to the experimenter's judgment. Being asked to explain the experimenter's reasoning produced considerably more learning than either of the other two procedures. The learning involved two distinct realizations: that relative length did not predict which row had the greater number of objects and that the type of quantitatively relevant transformation did. Individual children generated multiple types of reasoning about conservation, both on the pretest and throughout the training procedure; understanding the importance of the type of transformation did not lead to immediate rejection of less advanced forms of reasoning, even for a single problem presented several times during the experiment. This variability was positively associated with learning; children who showed greater variability of reasoning on the pretest, both within and across trials, learned more. Educational and theoretical implications of children's efforts to understand other people's reasoning were discussed.
微观发生法能够阐明变化的路径、速度、广度、变异性及来源。本研究阐述了该方法在数量守恒情境中所能产生的信息类型。对五岁儿童进行了前测，结果显示他们尚未掌握数量守恒，随后对他们进行了四次训练。一些儿童仅得到关于其数量守恒表现的反馈；另一些儿童则得到反馈并被要求解释导致实验者做出判断的推理过程。被要求解释实验者的推理过程所产生的学习效果比其他两种程序中的任何一种都要显著得多。这种学习涉及两种不同的认识：相对长度并不能预测哪一排物体数量更多，而数量相关的变换类型则可以。在预测试以及整个训练过程中，个别儿童针对守恒问题产生了多种类型的推理；即使对于实验过程中多次呈现的单个问题，理解变换类型的重要性也并未导致他们立即摒弃较不高级的推理形式。这种变异性与学习呈正相关；在预测试中，无论是在各次试验内还是试验间，推理表现出更大变异性的儿童学到的更多。文中还讨论了儿童理解他人推理努力所具有的教育和理论意义。
