• Hi Guest - Come check out all of the new CP Merch Shop! Now you can support CigarPass buy purchasing hats, apparel, and more...
    Click here to visit! here...

Take a Survey, Help Child Learning Research

i can't believe i had the biggest problem judgeing the stars
does that make me a lil under par with children
Shape typicality depends on one's exposure to both good and bad examples of a shape. Difficulty rating a given shape might mean you have not seen many versions or paid much attention when you did.

Done, Wilkey, will you post the results when you get them. I'm curious to how this will turn out.
I'll post the typicality ratings. In and of themselves, they're not going to be terribly interesting. It is how children respond to shapes that are less or more typical that is the phenomenon of interest. That data won't show up for months.

Done. What is the significance of the bolder vs light outlines on some of those shapes?
Previous research used outline thickness as a "dimension of variation," along with size, orientation, aspect ratio, it is one way in which shape appearance can be modified and affect recognition.

Wilkey,

How is this going?

I knew that playing with shapes helps a child get ready for reading and math from years ago. When I took a speed reading course we were taught to recognize shapes of words to accelerate our speed and comprehension, they told us that infants have this inborn ability. Is this part of the continuing research associating shape recognition with general word recognition? What are the age groups involved?

Are they incorporating touch as a sensory/perceptual device?...or is this strictly a visual awareness study.

Did this post put your topic near the top? :laugh:
It's going well. I've got almost 70 responses and a sneak peek at the results shows that we're getting a good range of ratings and shapes to choose from. Gary, infants pop out with basic perceptual abilities. Verbal, kinesthetic, spatial-visual all appear to bootstrap each other in ever more complicated, reinforcing fashion. Even infants can distinguish parts from the whole, but it is not until 5-8 years of age that children become adept and analyzing and parsing out the components of complicated objects or designs. Interesting that you link shape and language. That is one very important part of this research. Here's a clip from an abstract I'm working on for the precursor study to this one. The age group range will be from 24-36 months and the method is a visual recognition and processing paradigm.

"The visual world is rich in structure and detail providing an unending profusion of shape forms. For infants and young children, learning to segment this fluid milieu is an essential process initially in discriminating events, objects, and space, and eventually in manipulating them. In the environment, shapes are instantiated by whole objects and their components, for example: the rectangular shape of a door or the circular form of a dinner plate. This visual input provides opportunities for young children to develop an understanding of polygons, angles, and parallelism: some of the formal geometric concepts fundamental to spatial reasoning and which underlie the study of geometry, engineering, and physics. Thus, “spatial and geometric thinking are essential human abilities that contribute to mathematical ability” (Clements and Sarama, 2007).

Insofar as language in shape learning, initially, perceptual input exceeds verbal as "children can easily distinguish...shapes but are exposed to a limited number of shape names" (Clements and Sarama, 2007). Interestingly, shape names are absent from the MacArthur-Bates Lexical Database for production by toddlers up to age 30 months. This suggests that young children do not hear shape names in profusion and that their use is uncommon contributing to the early predominance of spatial competence. This is consistent with research demonstrating that children are more adept at shape matching than shape naming and that the ability to name a shape correlates with shape drawing (Lehrer, Jenkins, & Osana, 1998). Geometric language, however, can be recruited to support shape concept and word learning by indicating that shape names are a lexical category and by providing contextual cues to "shift attention to the appropriate object property" (Sandhofer and Smith, 1999).

In the context of informal learning through play, one of the first toys that a toddler might encounter that has shape learning as an explicit purpose is the shape sorter. The archetypical shape sorter is no more than a box with shaped openings to admit matching pieces. However, toys today increasingly include electronics that make sounds, talk, and light up and these E-toys are rapidly gaining in popularity. During the 2007 toy-buying season, "six of the nine best selling toys for 5 to 7-year olds on Amazon.com” were electronic tech toys (Richtel and Stone, 2007). Despite their popularity and growth, there are few studies that assess whether children profit from such enrichments (Garrison and Christakis, 2005). The purpose of this exploratory study is to describe the differences in parent-child verbal interaction when playing with a traditional, non-electronic shape sorting toy (T-toy) versus an electronic shape sorting toy (E-toy). Our expectation is that geometric shape language will be reduced in the E-toy condition due to attention being directed to non-shape learning functions."


What about the terminally immature?
Doc.
As long as they answer honestly according to their sense of typicality, that'd be just fine. I'm not too concerned with social maturity. ;)

Thanks again to all my board mates. Want to guess how many responses I've got so far from the two labs that I've asked to help? 3. You guys rock!

Wilkey
 
Thanks again to all my board mates. Want to guess how many responses I've got so far from the two labs that I've asked to help? 3. You guys rock!

Wilkey
Do you (bump) still (bump) need (bump) anymore responses?....bump, bump , bump :laugh:
 
Gentlemen,

I thank all of you for your help. I do believe we have enough data to proceed! :thumbs:

Best,
Wilkey
 
Top