著者

Danny D. Steinberg 山田 純

出版者

一般社団法人 日本教育心理学会

雑誌

教育心理学研究 (ISSN:00215015)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.28, no.4, pp.310-318, 1980-12-30 (Released:2013-02-19)

参考文献数

20

被引用文献数

2 1

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This research attempts to determine the natural ability of children in learning to write. It is especially concerned with determining the earliest age at which children might benefit from reading instruction.The subjects were 95 Japanese nursery school girls (40) and boys (55) grouped according to age from 2 to 6 years. They were given 5 hiragana figures (ka, su, hi, me, ru) and 5 Roman figures (B, H, O, S and W-all capitals) to trace and to copy in two sizes, small (2 1/2cm×21/2cm) and large (5cm×5cm). For tracing, dotted lines formed the component strokes and the entire figure while a single entire figure was presented for copying into a blank space.The test period extended over two weeks, 5 days a week, with the test period on each day lasting less than 20 minutes. In the first week, the subjects traced figures. On each test day, the 2 and 3 year olds were given l hiragana and l Roman figure in both the small and large sizes to trace, while the 4, 5and 6 year olds were given 2 hiragana figures and 2 Roman figures in the two sizes. In the second week, the subjects copied the same figure they had been given to trace. Two judges independently rated the 5th day's subject responses on both the tracing and copying task. The judges rated the quality of each figure on a 5 point scale, where l indicated unidentifiable and 5 indicated near adult. The correlation between the judges' responses was +.85 for the tracing task and +.91 for the copying task.The results from analyses of variance show that Age, Sex Task and Size each has a significant main effect and that all significantly interact with one another in various ways. The only variable which showed no effect was type of writing, i. e., there was no significant difference in quality between the hiragana and the Roman figures.In general, there was steady progress for both sexes. The mean for the 2 year old group=1.85, for the 3 year olds=2.22, for the 4 year olds=3.40, for the 5 year olds=4.09 and for the 6 year olds= 4.57. The greatest and most important gain occurred between ages 3 and 4 years. The females did significantly better than the males, especially at the older ages. Such a finding is in agreement with other writing research, where boys may sometimes equal the performance of girls but they never exceed them.Surprisingly, the smaller size figures received higher scores than the larger size ones in both types of task. This finding challenges the generally held assumption that larger figures are easier to form. Possibly, the larger figures require more control, e. g., it seems more, difficult to draw a long straight line or a long curved line than a short one. With regard to type of task, the results, not unsurprisingly, show performance on the tracing task to be better.Because at 2 years of age the children's writing was largely unidentifiable, and by 4 years it was quite identifiable, it is concluded that the critical age for children learning to write is 3 years. Thus, it appears that writing instruction would benefit 3 year olds and perhaps 2 year olds as well.