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The effect of task on preschool children's ability to represent meaning through graphic skills
Author(s) -
Sorsby Angela,
Martlew Margaret
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-835x.1994.tb00639.x
Subject(s) - psychology , task (project management) , meaning (existential) , repertoire , representation (politics) , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , function (biology) , cognition , expression (computer science) , control (management) , computer science , artificial intelligence , physics , management , evolutionary biology , neuroscience , politics , political science , acoustics , law , economics , psychotherapist , biology , programming language
Knowledge of letter shapes comes from teaching but an understanding of the representational and communicative functions of graphic expression may be based in established knowledge and procedures. Associations need to be built up between these systems for an understanding of graphic symbolic communication. Two groups of 34‐year‐old children took part. In the experimental group, the children's functional use of graphic representation in socially meaningful tasks using visible stimuli was compared with their performance on more decontextualized tasks. The children gave significantly more representational responses on the more meaningful, socially motivated tasks and sustained these when re‐examined on the decontextualized task. A control group had the same tasks but they were only asked to record items; the communicative function was not emphasized. None of these children moved from the non‐representational to the representational category and there were significant differences between their performance and those of the children in the experimental group. The findings suggest that learning letters should not be divorced from meaningful contexts that emphasize the communicative functions of writing. They also show that young, preliterate children have the ability to assess and select from their repertoire of skills those which will be most serviceable if they are given tasks that will encourage these insights.