Week 9- Information Processing

Question 1

Why don’t young kids use strategies? (3)

Answer 1

-Mediation deficiency, Production deficiency, Utilization deficiency

Question 2

In terms of why young kids do not use strategies, explain mediation deficiency:

Answer 2

• Can’t benefit from strategy even if you teach it to them
• Can use it but they don’t use it so why bother
• It takes a certain amount of cognitive capacity to use them which means that they might not have this yet
• Not a lot of data to support this theory

Question 3

In terms of why young kids do not use strategies, explain Production deficiency:

Answer 3

• The children can indeed benefit from using some of these strategies but they fail to produce the strategies spontaneously when needed (they forget that there could be a strategy that is useful for a certain task)
• They need to be reminded to use it
• Its not occurring to them to rehearse the strategy

Question 4

In terms of why young kids do not use strategies, explain Utilization deficiency:

Answer 4

• Combo of 2 things:
• > Mediation deficiency in younger children, with improvement with age: Strategies don’t help and may even harm performance on an information performing task but as they get older they get better at using it
• > Strategy inefficiency

Question 5

Why would strategy use improve with age?

Answer 5

• Neurodevelopment: Nature, Prefrontal cortex is developing throughout childhood and well throughout adulthood (As this part develops, the ability to use strategies is developing)
• Experience: As you get older, you pickup tools for dealing with info, Building a knowledge base through experience that tells you things like when to use a certain strategy

Question 6

Role of knowledge: Expertise. Talk about the expertise verses novice chess player experiment.

Answer 6

• ability of children or adults to remember the placement of chess pieces on a chessboard and numbers
• expert kid chess players and novice adult players
• present them with some sort of setup of chess pieces on the board and then take it away and ask them to set up a new one that looks exactly like the one she took away
• children did better than adults
• but when it was set up in non-standard chess arrangement, adults did better
• Performance is domain specific (prodigies are not good at everything, only good at the one thing)