Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemThe cognitive levels of grade VI, form II and form IV students when solving social studies type problems and the influence upon performance of varying the method of question presentation( 1972)An examination was made of the thinking abilities of students measured on social studies type tests and the influence upon performance of varying the method of presentation. The study was undertaken with subjects drawn from grade 6, form II and formlV. The social studies tests were five in number. Two were based upon verbal materials, two upon photographs and one upon actual objects. For the questions asked, each testing situation provided conflicting information which the subject could either ignore or attempt to resolve. Three treatment groups were used to assess the impact of varying the method of test presentation. In the first the subjects were given each set of data and the appropriate questions were posed. With the second variation the subjects were asked to consider possible answers to each question before they saw the data. The third variation involved a short teaching sequence where individual subjects were shown model answers to a question based upon a situation that was not part of the testing program. The qualities of these model answers were indicated and the subject was asked to replicate similar attributes in his own responses. This brief introduction was given to each subject in Treatment Three on five occasions, just prior to each of the five testing situations. Aside from the two major issues investigated, the study also examined the relationship between performance on the social studies situations and performance on the A.C.E.R. Intermediate Test D; A.C.E.R. Word Knowledge, Form B; a multi-choice social studies reasoning test; and a test of current affairs. In addition performance on the social studies tasks was related to the socio-economic status of parents and to performance on a replication of Piaget's colourless chemicals experiment. The results of the study are based upon an examination of the responses of 171 subjects from two different socio-economic areas and assigned at random to the three treatment groups. Performance was rated against the stages of cognitive growth proposed by Piaget together with some additional sub-sections. Overall, 8 categories were used to classify the responses; the categories ranged from the intuitive stage to the stage of formal operations. The analysis of results indicated that the performance of the three grade levels differed significantly from one another. The mean score of grade six, across the five tasks, was at the early level of concrete operations. Form II was still within the concrete stage although at a higher or more sophisticated level. Form IV mean score almost reached the transitional stage between concrete and formal operations. Performance on the three groups of social studies tests - verbal, visual and objects - differed significantly from each other. This result was interpreted with caution. Although the verbal material situations were more difficult than the visual materials which in turn were more difficult than the objects test, this sequence of decreasing difficulty also corresponded to the order of test administration. Thus the change in difficulty level could have been due to a learning phenomenon rather than to the nature of the test materials. The differences in scores between Treatment Three and the other two treatments was accepted as a real difference and a significant interaction was discovered between grade 6 and Treatment Three. The correlations between the social studies tasks and other variables followed the order sequence of intelligence test scores, vocabulary, social studies reasoning, chronological age, social studies knowledge, colourless chemicals experiment, and socio economic status of parents. The lower correlation between the last two measures and the five social studies tasks was not anticipated.
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ItemDifferential arousal of state anxiety and problem solving performance( 1972)In Part A of an experiment, tertiary students were assigned at random to either failure or success experiences with three types of task materials. The effects of manipulations on reported state anxiety levels were examined using pro-treatment levels as the covariate. Data from ten replications indicated that, although adjusted means of failure groups were significantly higher than those of success groups, the magnitude of anxiety arousal depended upon the material used in the experimental treatment. Results indicated that exposure to anagram materials produced more marked variation in anxiety levels than either number or vocabulary materials. It was clear that students experiencing stronger failure showed higher adjusted state anxiety scores than did students experiencing milder failure or success. Greater lability of scores was found for female subjects and state anxiety arousal was found to be correlated significantly with proneness to test anxiety. In Part B, which was quasi-experimental, all subjects worked through a set of letter series problems. In post-hoc analyses, subjects within the failure or success treatments were classified by degree of proneness to test anxiety and level of orientation towards achievement. Levels of test anxiety and aroused state anxiety were associated with differences in both number of problems attempted and number of items abandoned. A significant triple interaction on the log time spent correctly solving problems, suggested that high state anxiety could either facilitate or debilitate performance depending on the strength of the trait differences. These results were consistent with the hypothesised operation of either impulsive or reflective strategies activated to cope with high anxiety arousal. It was found that reversed items of the State Anxiety Scale tended to reflect increases in situational stress to a greater extent than did directly stated items. The practice of reversing the scoring weights on reversed items to derive state anxiety scores does not appear to produce an exact alignment with the meaning of the directly stated anxiety items.