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Browsing by Subject "kognitiivinen kehitys"

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  • Brain oscillatory responses, working memory and cognitive developmental stages in 11- and 14-year-old children : an ERD/ERS study 
    Heikkilä, Heini (2010)
    Aim: So far, most of the cognitive neuroscience studies investigating the development of brain activity in childhood have made comparisons between different age groups and ignored the individual stage of cognitive development. Given the wide variation in the rate of cognitive development, this study argues that chronological age alone cannot explain the developmental changes in brain activity. This study demonstrates how Piaget's theory and information on child's individual stage of development can complement the age-related evaluations of brain oscillatory activity. In addition, the relationship between cognitive development and working memory is investigated. Method: A total of 33 children (17 11-year-olds, 16 14-year-olds) participated in this study. The study consisted of behavioural tests and an EEG experiment. Behavioral tests included two Piagetian tasks (the Volume and Density task, the Pendulum task) and Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices task. During EEG experiment, subjects performed a modified version of the Sternberg's memory search paradigm which consisted of an auditorily presented memory set of 4 words and a probe word following these. The EEG data was analyzed using the event-related desynchronization / synchronization (ERD/ERS) method. The Pendulum task was used to assess the cognitive developmental stage of each subject and to form four groups based on age (11- or 14-year-olds) and cognitive developmental stage (concrete or formal operational stage). Group comparisons between these four groups were performed for the EEG data. Results and conclusions: Both age- and cognitive stage-related differences in brain oscillatory activity were found between the four groups. Importantly, age-related changes similar to those reported by previous studies were found also in this study, but these changes were modified by developmental stage. In addition, the results support a strong link between working memory and cognitive development by demonstrating differences in memory task related brain activity and cognitive developmental stages. Based on these findings it is suggested that in the future, comparisons of development of brain activity should not be based only on age but also on the individual cognitive developmental stage.
  • Oppimaan oppimisen taitojen kehittyminen yläkoulun aikana 
    Schreck, Salli (2018)
    The aim of the present study was to examine changes in pupils' performance in the cross-curricular learning-to-learn (LTL) assessment during the follow-up period between the sixth and ninth grade in 2013-2016. Furthermore, the aim was to examine how other variables explain the ninth-graders' assessed task-performance. According to Finnish LTL research tradition the learning-to-learn skills were defined as cognitive competences and learning-related attitudes. The present study's data is a part of longitudinal data drawn from a nine-year LTL study in Helsinki in 2007-2016, conducted by the Centre for Educational Assessment at the University of Helsinki. The aim of the study was to examine how pupils' (N = 952) cognitive competences, learning-related self-concepts and motivational beliefs developed during the lower secondary school. Additionally, the differences between sexes and also between three groups based on pupils' GPA were examined. The data was analyzed statistically: the comparisons were made by traditional methods and the path modelling was used to examine the other variables' effects on the ninth graders' task-performance. The study showed that during the lower secondary school the pupils improved their task-performance in LTL assessment 5 percentage units, on average. The effect size (Cohen d) of the improvement for the whole sample in all assessed cognitive tasks was 0.33. The development of the reasoning skills varied a bit according to the sixth grade's school achievement: pupils with weak GPA seemed to improve more than others. The cognitive competences of boys and girls instead developed similarly. The learning-related attitudes declined slightly during the lower secondary school but were still relatively positive in the end of the ninth grade. The sixth grade's task-performance proved to be the strongest predictor of the ninth grade's task-performance. The learning-related self-concept had a small independent effect on the test score. In the present study the sex did not have independent effect on the test score; nevertheless, it was connected to school grades (girls were slightly better) and to the self-concept (boys were slightly better). GPA, the earlier task-performance, sex and the learning-related self-concept together explained 50 percent of the share of accounted for variance in ninth graders' cognitive competences.

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