Young Children with Disabilities
The Use of the Microgenetic Method with Children with Disabilities:
Discovering Competence
Kathryn L. Fletcher, Ph.D.
Lisa F. Huffman, Ph.D., Norman W. Bray, Ph.D., and Lisa A. Grupe, M.A.
1998, Early Education and Development, Vol. 9, pp. 357-373
University of Miami
Department of Psychology
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Department of Psychology and Civitan International Research Center
In this paper, we advocate the use of the microgenetic method, a methodology that combines dense sampling of observations across time and extensive trial-by-trial analysis, to examine strategy change in children with disabilities. This methodology has revealed new information about normally achieving children's cognition, such as large individual variability in strategy use among children of the same age and more gradual patterns of strategy change than previously assumed. In this paper, we review data from three different microgenetic studies in the domains of memory, arithmetic, and reading with children with or at risk for mental retardation and normally achieving children. Our review indicates that there are similar sequences of strategy change, similar rates of strategy change, and similar frequency of strategy discovery and use in children with and without mental retardation (comparable mental age peers). Implications are discussed for the use of this methodology to design instructional techniques for children with disabilities.
Understanding developmental change in cognition is an important aspect of developing new instructional techniques to facilitate learning in children with disabilities. To better understand how developmental changes occur, investigators have become interested in new experimental methodologies. One such method is the microgenetic method, which has recently been advocated by Robert Siegler (Siegler, 1996; Siegler & Crowley, 1991) and other researchers (Kuhn, 1995). By Siegler's own admission, however, the microgenetic method is not new (e.g., Siegler & Crowley, 1991). In their book, Symbol Formation, Werner and Kaplan (1963) discussed a study which used repeated presentations of brief word stimuli to examine the "microgenetic unfolding of meaningful patterns" (p. 215). Similarly, Vygotsky (1978) claimed that, using Werner's approach, "one can, under laboratory conditions, provoke development" (p. 61). Vygotsky (1978) criticized psychologists that commonly disregarded early learning trials during which subjects mastered the desired task response. Instead, he argued that "we will want to study the reaction as it appears initially, as it takes shape, and after it is firmly formed, constantly keeping in mind the dynamic flow of the entire process of its development" (p. 69). Because of this, Vygotsky (1978) advanced Werner's notion of examining behaviors across numerous trials, a characteristic of the microgenetic method.
To extend this methodology, Siegler and Crowley (1991) have outlined three main criteria necessary for the use of the microgenetic method. First, the entire time period during which the change in behavior occurs must be observed. Second, investigators must frequently sample the behavior of interest. Third, data from these observations is examined with trial-by-trial analysis for both qualitative and quantitative changes in children's behavior. The frequency and timing of the observations, as well as videotape technology, allow investigators to document changes in children's behavior across time. Whereas Siegler typically refers to the microgenetic method as involving numerous experimental trials and sessions, other researchers have examined changes in children's strategy use across numerous trials within a single experimental session (Coyle & Bjorklund, 1995; Miller & Aloise-Young, 1995), referred to as a modified microgenetic study (Coyle & Bjorklund, 1995).
Microgenetic studies have now been conducted in domains of cognitive development such as arithmetic (Siegler & Jenkins, 1989), memory (Coyle & Bjorklund, 1995; McGilly & Siegler, 1989; Miller & Aloise-Young, 1995), scientific reasoning (Kuhn & Phelps, 1982; Kuhn, Schauble, & Garcia-Mila, 1992; Schauble, 1990), and map drawing (Karmiloff-Smith, 1984). Evidence from this wide range of studies has revealed important information about children's cognition such as large individual variation among strategy use in children of the same age and gradual changes in strategy use with task experience. Examining children's performance on math problems across 11 weeks, Siegler and Jenkins (1989) found that 4- and 5-year-old children used a variety of strategies, with all children using at least five strategies. There were also large individual differences in the frequency with which children used certain counting strategies, such as the use of a retrieval strategy and the use of a min strategy (i.e., counting from the larger addend). In a serial recall memory task, McGilly and Siegler (1989) found that, across numerous trials, children in kindergarten, first and second grade used three different strategies; repeated rehearsal, single rehearsal, and no rehearsal. Previous research had characterized children of this age as rarely using repeated rehearsal (Ornstein, Naus, & Liberty, 1975), or not being able to produce the strategy (Flavell, 1970). Children of all ages have been shown to use a variety of strategies during problem solving tasks, even sophisticated strategies that are more typical of older children. Thus, the notion of a 1:1 relation between children's age and ways of thinking characteristic of stage models is erroneous (Siegler, 1996).
Stage models of cognitive change would also lead us to expect that once an effective strategy has been discovered, it would be used on subsequent problems. The microgenetic method, however, has shown that children rarely abandon old strategies after the discovery of new strategies. More specifically, children tend not to immediately generalize the use of new, perhaps more efficient, strategies to subsequent trials (Siegler, 1996; Karmiloff-Smith, 1984; Kuhn, 1995; Kuhn & Phelp, 1982). For example, Karmiloff-Smith (1984) found that when children were asked to draw maps to a hospital, they started by drawing efficient and concise routes, but later began to draw maps with redundant information. Eventually, children returned to drawing more concise maps. Similarly, Kuhn and Phelps (1982) found that, even after adolescents used a systematic experimentation strategy to examine the effects of adding various chemicals to a mixture, they continued to use less adequate experimentation strategies to investigate subsequent chemicals. This suggests that mechanisms of change are more gradual and that the distinct shift in thinking characteristic of stage models of development is inaccurate.
The use of the microgenetic method therefore has provided new information about normally achieving children's cognition, such as the presence of large individual differences and gradual strategy change rather than sudden stage-like change. To determine if cognitive change in children with disabilities also follows these same patterns, the use of the microgenetic method is necessary. Moreover, data from microgenetic studies will provide information about individual differences in the cognitive abilities of children with disabilities, an aspect of research that has been largely ignored (e.g., Baumeister, 1997).
The microgenetic method has also provided evidence of competencies at younger ages than previously believed. Children of different ages seem to differ in the frequency with which they demonstrate complex thinking skills and strategies, not in the ability to produce those strategies. As suggested by Siegler (1996), these results indicate that investigators should be less concerned with the question of whether children have or do not have a particular competence. Instead, he suggests that efforts should be focused on examining " the factors that determine the prevalence of different ways of thinking at any one time, the processes that lead to changes in frequency of reliance on each way of thinking over time, and the processes through which children add new ways of thinking to their repertoires" (p. 13).
Using microgenetic studies, factors such as problem type and feedback type have been shown to influence children's strategy change. Examining addition strategies, Siegler and Jenkins (1989) found that, after challenge problems (e.g., problems in which one addend is greater than 10 and the other addend is less than five, as with 24 + 2) were presented, children who had discovered the min strategy increased the use of that strategy. In a recent study examining 5-year-old children's number conservation, Siegler (1995) asked children to judge which row had more objects and then to explain their judgment. Children were assigned to one of three conditions; feedback only, feedback plus explain their judgments, and feedback plus explain the experimenter's judgments ("How do you think I knew that?"). Children required to explain the experimenter's reasoning responded more accurately across the sessions than children asked to explain their own reasoning, or only given feedback. These results demonstrate that certain conditions influence children's thinking skills and strategy use, leading to greater learning and generalization of new strategies.
In our opinion, this approach to the study of children's cognition has important implications for research with children with disabilities. Similar to young children, children with mild mental retardation have also demonstrated more cognitive competence than previously assumed (Bray, Fletcher, & Turner, 1997; Bray & Turner, 1987). For young, normally achieving children, single session designs and a focus on group means underestimated their cognitive competence. These same practices have created misconceptions about the cognitive abilities and/or deficits of children with disabilities (Baumeister, 1997). Therefore, we believe that the investigation of cognitive abilities in children with disabilities should focus on examining changes in strategy use in different contexts. The use of the microgenetic method can depict such changes. Similarly, Ginsburg (1997) has advocated the use of the microgenetic method to better understand the role of educational context on the cognitive abilities of children with learning disabilities. We further argue that this approach will be useful with children with other disabilities, leading to the design of educational situations that improve their thinking skills.
The purpose of this paper is to review results from microgenetic studies in three different domains of learning and to advocate the use of the microgenetic method to examine changes in strategy use in children with disabilities. In each domain, we will demonstrate that children with mental retardation or children at risk for a variety of disabilities including mental retardation use a wide variety of strategies and demonstrate patterns of strategy change similar to children without mental retardation. In each domain, children were given no direct training in the use of any type of strategy. Rather, we used unprompted conditions that allowed an assessment of the discovery of a variety of strategies. We review studies that demonstrate that patterns of strategy change in children with and without mental retardation show similar sequences of strategy discovery, similar rates of strategy discovery, and similar frequency of strategy use following strategy discovery. By investigating how cognitive change occurs in children with and without mental retardation, we can begin to theorize about potential mechanisms of developmental change and design instructional techniques based on these empirical results and theoretical approaches.
There is a wealth of experimental research which has characterized children with mental retardation as having deficiencies in strategy use (e.g., Belmont & Butterfield, 1971; Ellis, 1970). More recently, however, Bray et al. (1997) have concluded that factors such as task comprehension, the number of to-be-remembered items, the presentation rate, and the amount of practice influence whether children with mental retardation display strategy competence. The use of tasks that allow external representations has also revealed strategy competence in children with mental retardation (Bray, Saarnio, Borges, & Hawk, 1994; Fletcher & Bray, 1995). In these studies, participants were required to listen to sequences of sentences, such as "The shoe is above the ghost; The coin is on the blue side of the shoe" and, following a delay, to place objects according to the sentences (herein called the object placement task). The results are not described in detail, only highlighted to illustrate patterns of strategy change in children with and without mental retardation. Additional details about the results are presented in Fletcher and Bray (1995).
Seven-, 9-, 11- and 17-year-old children without mental retardation and 11- and 17-year-old children with mild mental retardation were presented with an object placement task during two sessions (Fletcher & Bray, 1995). Individual children were not matched for either mental age (MA) or chronological age (CA), but groups were comparable on MA and CA. For example, 7- and 9-year-old children without mental retardation were comparable to the 11- and 17-year-old children with mental retardation on MA, whereas the 11- and 17-year-olds were comparable to the children with mental retardation on CA. All children with mild mental retardation had cultural-familial retardation.
To briefly summarize the procedure, children were seated in front of a horizontal wooden board containing 9 small moveable objects on the end of the board nearest them, and a computer mounted at the opposite end of the board. During sentence presentation, there was a clear plexiglass door in front of the computer screen. While seated in front of the objects and computer screen, children listened to 32 experimental trials (i.e., 16 trials in two separate sessions) presented in a random order. On a given trial, there were either one, two, three, five, or seven sentences to-be-remembered. Children might hear the sentences "The shoe is above the ghost" and "The coin is on the blue side of the shoe" as an example of a two sentence trial. Sentences were presented at the rate of one every seven seconds, and a bell sounded seven seconds after the onset of the last sentence to signify the end of the trial. At this point, the experimenter opened the plexiglass door, allowing the children to place the objects on a matrix of velcro dots on the computer screen.
The main interest was children's use of external memory strategies. Children's movements during sentence presentation were videotaped and scored into the following categories for each sentence with 95% interrater agreement: a) no external strategy use, b) object-oriented external strategy (pointing to, holding an object, or moving the object without orientation to their target location, c) target-oriented external strategy [holding the objects up to the plexiglass door during sentence presentation or an arrangement strategy (arranging the objects around a central point on the board or the palm of their hand in the configuration specified in the sequence of sentences)]. Because the arrangement strategy has been shown to be highly correlated with recall accuracy (Bray, Saarnio, et al., 1994), it was considered the most sophisticated external strategy. For this review, we will focus on the discovery of the arrangement strategy (i.e., the first use of an arrangement strategy on a trial).
Sequence of strategy discovery
Children tended to use simple external strategies such as pointing to and holding the objects before their discovery of the arrangement strategy. Almost all of the 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children without mental retardation and the 11- and 17-year-old children with mental retardation used simple external strategies prior to the discovery of the arrangement strategy (range across these groups = 89% to 100%). And although most of the 17-year-old children without mental retardation were not observed using any overt strategy before they discovered the arrangement strategy, a smaller subgroup did (36%). Thus, the sequence of strategy discovery in children with mental retardation was similar to that observed for their MA comparison group and a large portion of children in their CA comparison group. Furthermore, all children, including those with mental retardation, used a variety of external strategies during the object placement task.
For all age/intelligence groups, the use of an arrangement strategy increased across the 32 trials for the most difficult trials (i.e., those trials with five and seven sentences). Moreover, the 11- and 17-year-old children with mental retardation showed greater increases in arrangement strategy use across these difficult trials (25% and 16%, respectively) than their 7- and 9-year-old comparable MA peers (13% and 6%, respectively). When children with mental retardation discovered the arrangement strategy, they generalized its use to the more demanding memory problems, like the children without mental retardation.
Rate of strategy discovery
The amount of task experience required before children discovered the use of the arrangement strategy was also similar. Over 90% of the 11- and 17-year-olds without mental retardation discovered the arrangement strategy in the first eight trials. There was more variability in the other groups, with about half of the 7- and 9-year-old children without mental retardation and 11- and 17-year-old children with mental retardation discovering the arrangement strategy in the first eight trials.
Frequency of strategy discovery and strategy use
Eleven- and 17-year-old children without mental retardation had the greatest number of discovers of the arrangement strategy (69% of the children in each group). Children with mental retardation were less likely to discover the arrangement strategy, yet half of the 11-year-olds and 40% of the 17-year-old children with mental retardation discovered this complex strategy. This was similar to the number of 7- and 9-year-old children without mental retardation who discovered the arrangement strategy (50% and 56%, respectively).
Of the children who discovered an arrangement strategy, 59% of the children without mental retardation and 43% of the children with mental retardation used the arrangement strategy on the next trial. Of the remaining children that discovered an arrangement strategy, 88% of the children with and without mental retardation used the arrangement strategy on a later trial. Thus, the numbers of children with and without mental retardation that used each pattern of generalization were similar. Inconsistent with these findings, previous research has indicated that children rarely use strategies immediately following discovery (Siegler, 1996; Kuhn, 1995).
In sum, children with mental retardation use a variety of strategies and demonstrate strategy change with task experience. Children with mental retardation performed like the younger children without mental retardation (comparable MA peers), with a similar number of children discovering the sophisticated arrangement strategy following the use of simple external strategies.
Although laboratory-based tasks have demonstrated strategy deficits in children with mental retardation (Belmont & Butterfield, 1971; Ellis, 1970), less is known about their strategy abilities in classroom-based tasks. Using an object placement memory task, Bray, Saarnio, et al. (1994) and Fletcher and Bray (1995) found that children with mental retardation often used external memory strategies such as pointing to, and/or holding objects to remember object placement. Because of this, Bray, Huffman, Ward, and Hawk (1994) hypothesized that children with mental retardation might use external counting strategies, like those observed in younger children without mental retardation (Siegler & Jenkins, 1989). To examine strategy change, Bray, Huffman, et al. (1994) employed the microgenetic method to investigate addition counting strategies in children with and without mental retardation, using a procedure similar to Siegler and Jenkins (1989).
Bray, Huffman, et al. (1994) examined 10 children with mild mental retardation (Mean age = 8.9 years) and 14 children without mental retardation in kindergarten classrooms. Children with and without mental retardation were not matched, yet the groups were comparable on MA. Of the 10 children with mental retardation, nine children had cultural-familial retardation and one child had Down's syndrome. The two intelligence groups were similar in their use of addition strategies on simple addition problems during two pretest sessions. Thus, children had comparable knowledge of addition at the beginning of the study.
In this study, children were individually presented with 12 simple addition problems on two separate days for 12 weeks (288 trials total). Children were first presented with simple addition problems on a computer screen and then the tester read the problem aloud ("What is 3+5?"). Following their response, children were asked to describe how they obtained the answer. During the first 12 sessions, children were presented with small addend problems (both addends less than or equal to 5) and large addend problems (one addend less than or equal to 5 and one greater than 5 but less than or equal to 9). During the second 12 sessions, children also were presented with challenge problems (one addend greater than 10, the other less than 5) and small and large addend problems. Children's strategy use was videotaped and scored into different categories of counting strategies with reliability greater than 90%. If the children were not observed to use an overt counting strategy, their description of how they obtained the answer was coded into a specific strategy category.
Categories of addition strategies were adapted from Siegler and Jenkins (1989). The most common six of these strategies will be described with the example, 3 + 5 = ?: a) sum (Put up 3 fingers, count "1,2,3." Put up 5 fingers, count "1,2,3,4,5." Begin counting again at 1, "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8."), b) short-cut sum (Count "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8," perhaps while putting up one finger for each count), c) count from first addend (Count "3,4,5,6,7,8," or "4,5,6,7,8," perhaps while putting up one finger for each count), d) min (Count from the larger addend, counting "5,6,7,8," or "6,7,8," perhaps while putting up one finger for each count), e) finger recognition (Put up 3 fingers. Put up 5 fingers. Say "8" without counting), and f) retrieval (Say an answer and explains it by saying, "I knew it."). There were no qualitative differences between the addition strategies used or described by children with and without mental retardation. That is, the strategies and responses of all children could be classified into these categories. We will focus on the discovery of the min strategy (i.e., the first use of a min strategy on a trial).
Sequence of strategy discovery
Overall, Bray, Huffman, et al. (1994) found that children in both groups showed a similar range in the number of different strategies used by both children with and without mental retardation. Half of the children without mental retardation showed an increase of 10% or more in the use of the retrieval strategy from the first 12 sessions to the second 12 sessions. Thirty-percent of the children with mental retardation showed a similar increase of retrieval and 60% showed some type of change in strategy use across the experimental trials. Of the four children with mental retardation who discovered a min strategy, three of them showed gradual strategy evolution from the use of less sophisticated strategies (e.g., sum) to the more sophisticated min strategy. Five out of the six children without mental retardation who discovered min showed the same pattern.
Examining the data more closely, Grupe, Huffman, Bray, Ward, and Hawk (1995) reported that there was a dichotomous split of children into groups based on accuracy scores during the two pretest sessions. In the low performing group, children arrived at the correct answer on less than 30% of the pretest addition problems and, in the high performing group, children arrived at the correct answer on more than 89% of the pretest addition problems. Nine children without mental retardation and four children with mental retardation made up the high performing group. The low performing group consisted of five children without mental retardation and six children with mental retardation. In fact, the four children with mental retardation who did not demonstrate strategy change were all represented in the low performing group.
Rate of strategy discovery
Overall, there was a wide range of the number of trials before the min strategy was discovered (range = 1-240 trials before the min strategy). This variability was observed in both groups, with the six children without mental retardation who discovered the min strategy showing the first use of min on trials 2, 10, 24, 29, 50, 241, and the four discovers with mental retardation showing the first use of min on trials 5, 85, 137, 209. Unlike the external memory task, there was no general trend for the amount of task experience before strategy discovery in either intelligence group. Instead, the range of individual differences in each group was analogous.
Frequency of strategy discovery and use
Four of the 10 children with mental retardation discovered a min strategy, whereas six of the 14 children without mental retardation did. When children in both groups discovered the min strategy, however, they never used this strategy on the next trial. Yet most of the children with and without mental retardation who discovered the min strategy used the strategy on a later trial (75% and 83%, respectively).
In short, children with mental retardation used a variety of strategies to solve addition problems and showed similar rates and discovery of the min strategy to normally achieving children. Children with mental retardation also were unlikely to immediately generalize the use of the newly discovered min strategy to subsequent problems, a finding consistent with the results obtained by Siegler and Jenkins (1989).
Although one can easily see how memory and arithmetic tasks require strategies, it is perhaps less apparent that children might use strategies during shared reading. Shared reading (one-on-one interactions between adults and children) involves a shared experience between two individuals attending to the same activity. For an individual to gain and direct their partner's attention during this activity, children use strategies such as referring to pictures (labeling, pointing or both) and asking questions. Crain-Thoreson and Dale (1992) found that "child engagement" during shared reading was correlated with later language measures, indicating that these strategies may enhance language learning.
Unfortunately, most of the prior research has investigated how adults elicit children's participation during shared reading (DeLoache, & DeMendoza, 1987; Ninio, 1983; Ninio, & Bruner, 1978; Pellegrini, Brody, & Sigel, 1985; Senechal, Cornell, & Broda, 1995; Snow & Goldfield, 1983; Sulzby & Teale, 1987). Thus, limited information is available about children's spontaneous strategies during shared reading. In one study which examined children's spontaneous strategies during shared reading, Yaden, Smolkin and Conlon (1989) found large individual differences in the frequency of children's questions. The main interest was therefore to examine changes in children's strategy use during shared reading.
Using a microgenetic design, Fletcher (1997) examined children's spontaneous strategies across six reading sessions in 2-year-old children from either at risk or middle income backgrounds. In the middle income group, a total of seven children participated. For these families, both parents worked, mostly employed by a university. In the at risk group, a total of six children participated. Children from at risk backgrounds were sampled from an inner city early intervention center designed for children prenatally exposed to cocaine. Unfortunately, maternal drug use is correlated with a wide variety of other factors, which are also associated with increased risk for developmental delays (Azuma & Chasnoff, 1993; Billman, Nameth, Heimler, & Sasidharan, 1996; Singer, Arendt, & Minnes, 1993; Williams, & Howard, 1993). In this population, children and families suffer from a variety of risk factors such as poverty, insecure attachments to caregivers (Clausen & Anderson, 1997), and parenting stress and psychological symptomatology (Anderson, Collins, & Claussen, 1997). Thus, these children face multiple risk factors associated with increased risk of developmental delays such as mild mental retardation (Dunst, 1993).
Children were individually read the storybook, Mr. Magnolia (Blake, 1980), twice a week for three weeks. The reading session lasted about a minute and half. The book contained simple rhyming sentences and repetition, repeating the main theme that Mr. Magnolia had only one boot. Thus, the book was supportive of children's potential efforts to remember the story. For each session, the reader simply read the story and did not elicit participation from the children. However, if children asked questions, the reader answered their questions to maintain the naturalness of the interaction. Interactions were videotaped and scored with 89% interrater reliability. These strategies included categories such as a) referring to pictures (child either pointed to, and/or labeled a picture), b) asking questions ("What's that?"), c) commenting about the pictures or story ("The dinosaur is scary."), d) repeating the words (saying the words after the reader), and e) reading along (saying the words at the same time as the reader). Although strategies such as referring to pictures and commenting about pictures or story focused mainly on the pictures, repeating the words and reading along focused on the story text. Reading along was considered the most sophisticated strategy so we will focus on the discovery this strategy.
Sequence of strategy discovery
For both children from at risk and middle income backgrounds, referring to pictures increased across the sessions, as well as reading along. In fact, reading along did not occur with any frequency for any child until the fourth reading session. Comparable numbers of children who eventually started to read along were found in each group, with two children from at risk backgrounds (33%) and three children from middle income backgrounds (43%) "discovering" reading along. All of these children had repeated the words before they discovered reading along. Interestingly, the two children that repeated the words most frequently during the first three sessions (percentage in first three sessions: 31% and 21%, respectively), were among the five children that started to read along during the last three sessions.
Rate of strategy discovery
Reading along never occurred until the third session, which was used only once by one child, and was more frequent in the last three sessions (11% for the at risk children and 31% for the middle income children). For the children from at risk backgrounds, one child discovered reading along in the fourth session, and the other child discovered this strategy in the sixth session. Similarly, two children from middle income backgrounds discovered reading along in the fourth session and one child discovered reading along in the third session. For the domain of reading, it seems reasonable that a certain amount of storybook experience is necessary before reading along would be observed.
Frequency of strategy discovery and use
For the five children (2 children at risk and 3 middle income children) that eventually discovered reading along, they never used this strategy on the next page. However, four of the five children read along at a later time, with two children reading along again during the same session and two children reading along on the session following discovery. The child who did not discover reading along until the sixth session read along only one time in this session.
In sum, children from at risk and middle income backgrounds demonstrated similar changes across the reading sessions. Both groups were also similar in their frequency and rate of strategy use.
We have reviewed data from three microgenetic studies in different domains which examined strategies in children with or at risk for mental retardation ranging in age from 2- to 17-years-old. In each study, most children with or at risk for mental retardation used the same types of problem-solving approaches observed in normally achieving children. There were large individual differences in the strategies used by children with or at risk for mental retardation in each domain, so much so that, at times, it appeared that subgroups of the children with mild mental retardation looked more similar to the children without mental retardation of comparable MA and, for some measures, comparable CA (i.e., arrangement discovers in the memory study, the high accuracy performers in the math study, and the children who read along in the reading study). Children with mental retardation also demonstrated changes in strategy use with task experience, similar to the normally achieving children (i.e., increased arrangement strategy use, increased retrieval, increased reading along). But like children without mental retardation, children with mental retardation did not immediately abandon old strategies following the discovery of a new strategy. The use of the microgenetic method therefore revealed that general trends observed in normally achieving children are also observed in children with mental retardation. More importantly, the microgenetic method is an essential experimental tool to examine changes in the cognitive abilities of children with disabilities.
Consistent with these general trends, similarities were also noted with more specific analyses. For the sequence of discovery in each domain, children with mental retardation (or at risk for mental retardation) followed the same progression from less to more sophisticated strategies observed for comparable MA peers. Even comparable CA peers (11-year-old children and a subgroup of the 17-year-old children without mental retardation) discovered the arrangement strategy in the same manner as the children with mental retardation. In the arithmetic study, the majority of children with and without mental retardation who discovered the min strategy first used simple counting strategies. These findings indicate that children with and without mental retardation demonstrated a similar sequence of strategy evolution.
Children with mental retardation were also similar to comparable MA peers in the rate of strategy discovery in each domain. In the memory study, approximately half of the 7- and 9-year-old children without mental retardation and the 11- and 17-year-old children with mental retardation discovered the arrangement strategy in the first eight trials. In the arithmetic study, the same range in the number of trials required before children discovered the min strategy was similar for both intelligence groups. Thus, rate of strategy discovery in the math domain was more related to individual differences than group differences. In the reading study, reading along never occurred until the fourth session (with the exception of one time) for children in either the at risk or middle income group. These results indicate that similar amounts of task experience produce strategy change in children with or at risk for mental retardation and children without mental retardation.
Children with mental retardation were also similar to groups with comparable MAs, as well as their comparable CA peers, in the frequency of generalization of new strategies to subsequent problems. In the math and reading study, none of the children with or at risk for mental retardation who discovered a new strategy (i.e., min, reading along) ever used this strategy on the next trial. This was also true of the children without mental retardation. In contrast to these domains, in the memory task, about half of the children in each age/intelligence group did use the arrangement strategy on the next trial following strategy discovery. Hence, the general result from microgenetic studies that children tend not to immediately use new strategies may also reflect individual differences and/or be influenced by task domains. This will require further research.
The data reviewed in these studies clearly demonstrate the utility of the microgenetic method and the importance of considering developmental research with normally achieving children for the study of children with disabilities (Hodapp & Zigler, 1995; Hodapp & Zigler, 1997; Zigler, 1969). Had we only examined overall means of strategy use, we would have concluded that children with mental retardation, in general, demonstrate lower frequency of strategy use than their CA peers and similar frequency of strategy use to groups with similar MAs. Although children with mental retardation did perform similar to groups with comparable MAs, in each domain, subgroups of children with or at risk for mental retardation were observed to perform more like groups with similar CAs. The fact that children with mental retardation at times performed like groups of CA peers highlights the significance of the microgenetic method. Thus, when children with mental retardation are allowed sufficient task experience in supportive contexts, they are likely to demonstrate cognitive competence. Researchers should move beyond a deficit model of mental retardation and instead focus on the contexts that influence cognitive change in individuals with disabilities (Baumeister, 1997; Bray et al., 1997; Ginsburg, 1997).
With the microgenetic method, we can examine more specifically similarities and differences in developmental change between children with and without mental retardation. The preliminary research in our laboratory indicates that the similar patterns of change occur in children with and without mild mental retardation. The richness of these types of data allow for investigators to ask more specific questions than are typically addressed in more laboratory-based research, involving one session and overall mean analyses. Future research will be needed to determine whether these similarities are specific to the domains examined and/or to the specific etiological group examined (i.e., cultural-familial mental retardation). For this question, the use of microgenetic method must include children with mental retardation in different etiological groups (Burack, Hodapp, & Zigler, 1988, 1990) and children with other disabilities.
While we have attempted to promote the use of the microgenetic method with children with disabilities, other researchers have posed serious questions about the use of microgenetic experiments. Pressley (1991) argued that the data obtained by Siegler and Jenkins (1989) may be a result of repeated assessments rather than developmental change, particularly since no control condition was included. Yet this criticism can be addressed. Currently, Norman Bray and his colleagues are conducting a pre- and posttest design experiment to examine the types of changes in kindergartner's simple addition strategies that may occur naturally (or within the classroom) across 12 weeks.
There are also practical concerns (Siegler & Crowley, 1991). With the dense sampling of observations required, there is a substantial cost in both money and time involved in data collection. This can be offset somewhat by observing children during a time period when change is occurring (i.e., learning simple addition in school) or during novel tasks (e.g., Kuhn, 1995) to maximize the observation of change. In considering the investment of time and money, the benefits of this methodology should also be considered. First, investigations of the process of change in children with disabilities will encourage closer associations between the disciplines of developmental psychology and special education. Second, information about the cognitive abilities of individual children with disabilities, and the contexts which impact those abilities, will lead to a more productive research agenda. In reviewing research on mental retardation, Baumeister (1997) argued that "…emphasis should shift away from nonproductive efforts to decompose and predict IQ, and more toward how individuals process information in different contexts, how these processes are reflected across the entire range of intellectual functioning, how they develop, and how they matter in real life" (p. 12). Third, with this new perspective, greater emphasis can be placed on educational advances that support learning in the education of children with disabilities.
The use of the microgenetic method with children with disabilities will provide a more complete understanding of their cognitive abilities and limitations. As suggested by Siegler (1996), a next step is to examine, within microgenetic situations, the factors that appear to influence children to change their ways of thinking. These factors may provide clues to instructional techniques that can stimulate cognitive change in children with disabilities. Furthermore, when children discover new ways of thinking through repeated experience, they might be more likely to transfer these strategies to other tasks (Kuhn, Schauble, & Garcia-Mila, 1992). This approach could possibly lead to more natural modes of learning that would have better maintenance and generalization properties than the current reliance on direct instruction.
The basic tenet of most discovery learning approaches during the last few decades has been that children learn with a deeper level of comprehension when situations are arranged for them to "discover" the solutions to problems without direct intervention by an instructor. For example, Kamouri, Kamouri, and Smith (1986) noted that the discovery "training environment requires the learner to generate and test hypotheses, providing the opportunity and need to seek and identify relationships between pieces of information" (p. 174). This is consistent with the views of Bolertz (1967), Egan and Greeno (1973), and Shaw and Wilson (1976), who maintained that discovery learning methods result in the development of more abstract knowledge than direct instructional methods.
The view that begins to emerge is that if situations are engineered to increase the likelihood of discovery, then children will more fully understand the principles and relations involved in that situation. Put in terms of most current information processing views of transfer (e.g., Bassok & Holyoak, 1989; Reed, 1993), discovery learning in a training task may result in the development of an abstract representation of the relations involved in the task. If the understanding of these relations is greater following discovery than direct training, then transfer to a new but similar situation should be more likely following discovery learning. Following this type of discovery, we believe children will be more likely to retain and to generalize their strategy knowledge to other tasks. This has been a difficult issue to address, however, because children with mental retardation did not seem to "discover" very sophisticated strategies without direct instruction. Using the microgenetic method, however, we have demonstrated that children with mental retardation are capable of strategy discovery. This methodology provides a way to better examine domains and/or factors such as problem type or memory demands which promote strategy discovery in children with disabilities. This approach appears to be consistent with a middle ground between developmentally appropriate and teacher directed curricula. That is, special education teachers could be encouraged to engineer developmentally appropriate situations in the classroom to promote strategy discovery, with the incorporation of less direct instructional techniques (e.g., feedback type) that are found to influence strategy evolution. Future research, however, is needed to determine the factors that influence strategy change in children with disabilities.
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