Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology [1 ed.] 9780816664023, 9780816606412

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MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, VOLUME 6

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MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Volume 6

ANNE D. PICK, EDITOR

THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS • MINNEAPOLIS

© Copyright 1972 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America at the North Central Publishing Company, St. Paul

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-30520 ISBN 0-8166-0641-2

PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND INDIA BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON AND DELHI, AND IN CANADA BY THE COPP CLARK PUBLISHING CO. LIMITED, TORONTO

Preface

EACH year, the Institute of Child Development brings together a group of distinguished investigators who share a common fascination for studying the problems and processes of development. The papers in this volume are based on the sixth of this continuing series, the Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology. These contributions, like those from previous Symposia, are representative of the diversity of content and methodology which characterizes contemporary developmental psychology. The presentation of this symposium, in May 1971, was a stimulating and productive occasion for the members of the audience and, it is hoped, for the contributors as well. The publication of the papers presented makes available to a wider audience of students of development these reviews of diverse programmatic research. The swift emergence of Ernie, Bert, and Oscar as significant characters in the lives of American preschoolers makes the paper of Samuel Ball and Gerry Ann Bogatz particularly timely. Their plan and conduct of evaluative research on the first year of Sesame Street suggest strategies useful for investigators engaged in other types of developmental research. They employed multiple measures for variables difficult to assess and for constructs for which there are not precise definitions. The authors thereby ensured far greater generality for their results than if they had used single measures. Likewise, when some children in "viewing" and "non-viewing" samples did not obey the experimental design, Ball and Bogatz successfully exploited this self-selection by demonstrating a relation between the amount of viewing and performance gain on the posttest. The generality of experimental findings for other settings is of concern also to Kuno Beller and his colleagues. They used tasks designed to have v

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY cognitive requirements similar to those of a classroom, and they investigated the effects of dependency motivation and social reinforcement on children's performance on these tasks. Beller and his colleagues found that the difficulty of a cognitive task and a child's own dependency motivation affect the role of social reinforcement in his learning. Implications for the development of motivation were seen in the fact that social reinforcement functioned similarly in nursery school children's learning and in the learning of older, high dependent children. Alan Hein's paper describes his program of research on the development of visually controlled behavior. His methods involved selective exposure to visual stimulation and restriction of visual-motor feedback during the neonatal period in kittens. These methods have allowed the analysis of components of visually coordinated behavior which ordinarily develop concomitantly. The results of Hein's experiments suggested that visually coordinated behavior consists of visually triggered components and visually guided components and that these components develop independently. Neurological evidence as well as the effects of differing exposure conditions supported the suggestion that the two types of behavior develop independently and depend on different mechanisms. Hein's method of analysis seems generally applicable for investigating the development of the components of coordinated behavior systems. The focus of Henry Ricciuti and Robert Poresky's research is on early human development. They investigated age trends and individual differences in emotional behavior during the first year of life. Viewing emotional responsiveness as consisting of at least three components, they used a variety of behavioral measures to index infants' reactions to several emotion-eliciting conditions. Degree of responsiveness was found to increase with age. The view of emotional responsiveness as a non-unitary variable was supported by findings of greatly increased complexity and differentiation of emotional behaviors by the end of the first year. The concern among contemporary developmental psychologists with the young organism is also explicit in William R. Thompson's paper. He has proposed a developmental model describing the nature of the effects of early learning on later development in which the particular outcomes depend on the developmental stage during which the early learning occurs. The outcomes emphasized in his research program include changes in the organism's typical level of arousal at the earliest stage, changes in the affective states associated with specific events at a second stage, and vi

PREFACE changes in the range of responses associated with events at a third stage. Findings from learning experiments with laboratory rats demonstrated the heuristic value as well as the theoretical usefulness of such a model for the study of developmental problems. Discrimination shift learning has been used extensively as a tool for investigating phylogenetic and ontogenetic differences in learning processes. Thomas and Louise Tighe present here a new analysis of discrimination shift learning which focuses upon the features of the task which control the organism's response. An often neglected fact of research with young children and animals is that the experimenter may construct a task to be solved in one way which the subject may solve in quite another way. Tighe and Tighe argued that the apparent qualitative developmental changes in learning processes reflected in the results of discrimination shift experiments are, in fact, differences attributable to problem solutions based on different features of the stimuli. They examined the results of their own and other research work in light of this analysis. They suggested that the alternative theoretical formulations of discrimination shift learning are not antithetical but rather reflect a variety of mechanisms available for problem solution. Financial support for this symposium was provided by a Public Health Service grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-01765), by a grant from the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota, and by the Institute of Child Development. Many individuals shared the responsibility for the execution of this symposium. The assistance of a number of Minnesota colleagues including, particularly, Gusti Frankel, Elizabeth Haugen, and Douglas Sawin, was appreciable. The staff of the University of Minnesota Press skillfully conducted the Editor and the papers through the sometimes uncertain route from original manuscripts to publication. Obviously the greatest responsibility for the preparation of this volume was assumed by the researchers whose work is reported herein. Next only to their contribution was that of my friend and former colleague John Hill, who inaugurated the Minnesota Symposium Series and guided it through its first five years. His carefully kept records and his detailed counsel made nearly effortless the transition from his Editorship to mine. ANNE D. PICK Minneapolis, Minnesota May 1972 vii

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Table of Contents

Summative Research of Sesame Street: Implications for the Study of Preschool Children BY SAMUEL BALL AND GERRY ANN BOGATZ

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Motivation, Reinforcement, and Problem Solving in Children BY E. KUNO BELLER, PETER ADLER, ALAN NEWCOMER, AND ARNOLD YOUNG

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Acquiring Components of Visually Guided Behavior BY ALAN HEIN

553

Emotional Behavior and Development in the First Year of Life: An Analysis of Arousal, Approach-Withdrawal, and Affective Responses BY HENRY N. RICCIUTI AND ROBERT H. PORESKY

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Storage Mechanisms in Early Experience BY WILLIAM R. THOMPSON

997

Stimulus Control in Children's Learning BY THOMAS J. TIGHE AND LOUISE S. TIGHE

128

List of Contributors

161

Index

167

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MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, VOLUME 6

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SAMUEL BALL AND GERRY ANN BOGATZ

Summative Research of Sesame Street Implications for the Study of Preschool Children

WHEN a neologism crops up each year to replace the neologism of the year before, one suspects that there are some negative attitudes attached to the referent these new words are supposed to denote. In the distant Australian past, and before coming to Up Over, one remembers the word foreigner being replaced by alien being replaced by displaced person being replaced (through the sure touch of a genius) by the term new Australian. It is easy to dislike foreigners and aliens. Even displaced persons, though coming in for some pity, can readily be denigrated. But what Australian could hate a new Australian? Well, it took a bit longer, but it happened. Neologisms are often euphemisms. And thus today's euphemism can be tomorrow's profanity. Of course, one does not have to go so far afield for examples. When talking to leaders in poverty areas, we were often dismayed to find ourselves talking about the underprivileged, inner-city, core-city, ghetto, dispossessed, culturally deprived, urban child. The leaders looked at us and said, "I think I know who you're referring to. You mean the so-called underprivileged, inner-city . . ."And then we got down to business. Before getting down to business here, we shall take up from the title the curious term summative research. It has gone through some changes lately, such as educational auditing or accountability assessment — two of the more horrible examples from recent educational jargon. Summative research is itself a neologism or euphemism for evaluation. It carries, per3

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY haps, more precision than evaluation, but that precision is in the mind of the sayer anyway. So, why all these new terms for evaluation? Evaluation, especially educational evaluation, has become a shady word particularly in the halls of pure science. To wit: "Clearly, evaluative research is an activity surrounded by serious obstacles. Satisfied with informal and impressionistic approaches to evaluation, policy makers are often reluctant to make the investment needed to obtain verifiable data on the effects of their programs. Evaluative researchers are typically confronted with problems of measurement and design which greatly restrict their ability to reach unambiguous conclusions. Abrasive relations with practitioners and clients can add to the evaluator's difficulties in obtaining information. Evaluative research is often addressed to a distressingly narrow range of issues; results are not as fully or widely disclosed as they might be; highly pertinent findings are often ignored by policy makers. It is little wonder that many social scientists regard evaluation research as a dubious enterprise." (Caro, 1971). In short, evaluation is too often thought of in connection with poor research design, selective perception, imprecision, and oversimplified presentations of hopelessly complex topics. But this does not have to be. We use the term summative research for reasons of our own, but otherwise we would gladly talk of our evaluation of Sesame Street. We would argue that, properly carried through, educational evaluation can be one of the most fertile sources of data for child psychologists. Interpolating some special pleading, we wish that more of the leaders in child psychology would take an active interest in educational evaluation, not just to improve the science and art of evaluation, but to enable their own research to become, perhaps, less precious. When Children's Television Workshop began to develop Sesame Street, it felt a need for two research groups. One was an in-house formative research group whose research and evaluation of segments as they were taped would provide immediate help for the show's producers. The other was our independent out-of-house (sometimes shortened to out-house) summative research group. Our role was to evaluate the finished product, the first year of Sesame Street (Ball & Bogatz, 1970). This paper will describe what we did and, in the process, suggest where implications might be found, at least for those interested in the study of preschool children. In the summer of 1968, after a series of five meetings, each lasting three days, the goals for the first year of Sesame Street were established. The 4

SAMUEL BALL meetings themselves were innovative, bringing together television writers and producers, educational researchers, Head Start teachers and supervisors, writers and publishers of children's books, librarians, Madison Avenue advertising executives, movie moguls, psychiatrists, and child psychologists. Of major concern to us at the Educational Testing Service was that sixty-six goals were established and that most of them were couched in behavioral terms. The goals were in four categories: I, symbolic representation (letters, numbers, geometric forms); II, cognitive processes (perceptual discrimination, relational concepts, classification, ordering); III, the physical environment; and IV, the social environment. Some of the goals were classified as "primary instructional goals" and were the subject of concentrated production efforts. Almost all of these latter goals received concentrated attention in the evaluation. The goals were mainly in the cognitive areas involving symbolic representation and cognitive processes. Research Strategy Two major principles guided us in the evaluation. First, we felt it important to look for unintended as well as intended outcomes. The goals of the show were important, and we certainly hoped to assess the effects of viewing the show in relation to those goals. But the medical model of evaluation is a reminder that concentrating on intended outcomes and ignoring side effects can lead to some wrong overall evaluations — witness, for example, the original testing of thalidomide (Scriven, 1967). The second major principle was that interactions may tell more in an evaluation than main effects do. In a worthwhile evaluation we must discover not only if the educational intervention, in general, works (an important question, of course), but we should also try to discover for which children it works best, for which children it does not seem to work, and the conditions under which the intervention operates most efficiently. Too often, evaluators have concluded that a new program is of little consequence, when in fact it is a boon to some children, a ruin to other children, and when averaged over all children, is little different in e+ffect from the old program. The application of these two principles in the summative research for Sesame Street caused us to assess at pretest and posttest times not only progress toward some thirty-six primary goals of the show but also transfer effects, home background variables, parental attitudes, and socioeconomic 5

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY status factors. We decided to sample children from middle-class suburbia, lower-class northern and western urban ghettos, lower-class sections of a southern town, rural children, Spanish-speaking children, children at home and children in Head Start and nursery schools, boys and girls, black children and white children, and 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. Initially we tested over 1,300 children. Then we observed many of them viewing the show, made a content analysis of the show itself, administered a questionnaire to teachers whose classes viewed the show, and finally, using four different techniques, assessed the amount of viewing for all the subjects in the study. When evaluating a program in which side effects and interactions are considered important, the study has to be wide-ranging with respect to measurement, the sampling has to be extensive, and the statistics have to be multivariate (Freeman, 1963). If this kind of research strategy is reasonable for educational evaluations, it also bears scrutiny for studies of child development generally. A univariate approach to child psychology is reminiscent of the poem of the six blind men deciding what the elephant must be like — one felt the tail and said the elephant is like a rope, another felt the legs and said the elephant is like a tree trunk, and so on. This is not to say that small, highly focused, cross-sectional, or one-occasion studies are not worthwhile but merely to say that the results of such studies must be replicated and, if necessary, reassessed in more comprehensive, longitudinal studies. FIELD RESEARCH

Sesame Street was intended primarily for preschool disadvantaged children at home who were without the benefit of Head Start or similar educational experience. Therefore, a major aim in our sampling was to study children in this category. Working in ghetto communities is an increasingly difficult problem for researchers. In general, the more militant the community, the more it looks askance at the clipboard-wielding researcher who comes from outside, studies the community's children, and then disappears without any discernible increase in benefits to the children. An evaluator who brings with him a product that might be beneficial to the children is in a potentially more advantageous position than the increasingly distrusted basic researcher (Walsh, 1969). A crucial factor in getting our evaluative work accepted in the days before Sesame Street was known was not our verbal protestations that it was the other fellow who was exploiting the children nor our plea that we 6

SAMUEL BALL wanted to evaluate the show rather than the children. What was crucial was our willingness to appoint local community members as coordinators, testers, and observers. Although the income was probably a factor, an important principle seemed to be that, in a sense, the work was being controlled from within — if community members were conducting the work, there seemed less chance that they were being somehow hoodwinked. We earnestly recommend that community members be employed in developmental studies of low-income children or special groups of any age. Certain other advantages accrued from our field staff's coming from the community. Many doors were opened to us (both literally and metaphorically) that would not otherwise have been opened. In our house-byhouse listing of 3- to 5-year-olds, we had very few refusals (less than 5 per cent). Second, to say the least, no harm was done to the validity of our testing when our testers spoke, dressed, and behaved in ways culturally familiar to the preschool subjects. The third advantage was one on which we had not counted initially. Since the testers were neither sophisticated in test theory nor advanced educationally themselves, attempts at dishonesty were easily noted when the data arrived at our office. (The literature indicates that with middle-class, well-educated testers and interviewers it is difficult and costly to solve problems of honesty in data collection.) A number of devices were built into our test battery to exercise quality control; as a result, the data from four testers were discarded, and thereby about 130 subjects were lost from the initial 1,300. But since the coordinators were also from the community, they could play unpleasant supervisory roles without much adverse community reaction. The fact that people with low educational levels would be administering the instruments presented problems in constructing the instruments, but this fact too was a blessing in disguise. We had to take a new and patently clear approach to test development, and it is good that we did. MEASUREMENT

The measurement of preschool cognitive knowledge, skills, and processes is usually an esoteric business. Of course, when assessing young children, individual rather than group tests are appropriate, but this has led to a most unfortunate tradition. The tests are individually administered and rightly so; however, most require subjective judgments from the tester. The child is in a situation which may be rich in clinical insights for the tester but limited in generality. 7

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY For the unequivocal assessment of variables, most preschool measures are bad. For example, we might give a toy airplane to Johnny and say, "Make the plane fly over my arm." Johnny plays with the plane and maybe he makes it fly over the arm — but did he mean it to do so, does he understand die term over, or is he merely a very active child? Or perhaps we are interested in field independence, so we present a hidden triangles test. The child is given a stimulus triangle and asked if he can find and trace an identical one in a picture with his finger. If he cannot, does it mean that he does not see it, that he has poor psychomotor coordination, or that he doesn't want to play games with the tester? In small studies conducted by experienced testers in laboratory situations, these deficiencies of subjectivity and confounded assessment may not be overwhelmingly negative. Such deficiencies reduce reliability and they may affect validity, but the observations at least provide the tester with some knowledge of individuals and give the discipline mystique. When it comes to larger studies in field situations, the problems of instrument construction and interpretation are magnified. In one longitudinal study involving multiple assessments of poverty children, the training sessions for the community member testers sometimes took seven or eight weeks. Although this speaks highly for the patience and probity of the principal investigator, it says something too about the subtlety of the measures being used. For our Sesame Street evaluation most of the goals to be assessed were behaviorally defined and referred to the cognitive domain. Most of the children would be tested in their own homes or hi free corners of corridors near classrooms so kits of toys and complicated procedures were out of the question. Further, we were not primarily interested in obtaining clinical insights into the behavior of individual subjects, but rather, we were interested in obtaining reliable and valid data on specified groups of children. Finally, most of our testers were relatively uneducated, and the nature of our task precluded lengthy training procedures. With these considerations in mind, Gerry Bogatz, who was in charge of measurement, set to work. She constructed a battery of over two hundred items which required two hours of testing (over three or four sessions). The battery included only four basic types of items, which thereby allowed both the child and the tester to concentrate on the content of the test itself. The only materials were a set of stimulus pictures. The overt response required of the subject usually was pointing. The child was not required to

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SAMUEL BALL verbalize unless verbalization was the goal being assessed. Nor was he required to interpret the drawings on the stimulus page; he was told what the drawing depicted. The areas assessed in the first year included: body parts (pointing, naming, functions); letters (recognizing, naming, matching, initial sounds, reading words); geometric forms (recognizing, naming); numbers (recognizing, naming, numerosity, counting, addition and subtraction); matching; relational terms (amount, size, position); sorting; classification (by size, form, number, function); incongruities (puzzles test); embedded figures (hidden triangles); sequencing (which comes first). It took about two days to train women with low educational attainments to administer the tests. The median reliability (Cronbach alpha) of the subtest totals at pretest time was .77 (the total score reliability being .96); the median reliability at posttest was .82 (total score reliability, .98). The tests, then, were reliable, and they were either clearly related to the goals (as in naming of lower and upper case letters) or they measured important transfer of learning effects (for example, reading words). As it turned out, the scores were sensitive to the experimental input, and this was a rare, if not unique, outcome in the educational evaluation of 3- through 5-yearold children. In general, tests of 3- through 5-year-olds, at least in the cognitive areas, do not have to be complex to administer nor difficult to interpret, though they do need individual administration.

Flexibility and Evaluation In evaluating Sesame Street there were a number of instances where, if the original plans had been followed, the study would have been a disaster. It is times like that when those involved in field evaluations look longingly at colleagues conducting smaller, better controlled pure research into, say, the reaction times of middle-class 3-year-olds to requests couched in the active and passive voices. What we did was make a virture —flexibility— from the necessity for changing our strategy. One of the biggest problems resulted from the unexpected popularity of Sesame Street. We had purposely chosen sites which had very high frequency rather than ultra high frequency educational television stations because we had worried that too few of the sample would view the show. We had encouraged some of the children to view and had not encouraged the rest, using a pretext for testing the latter group. Some advisers had argued eloquently that we ought to pay the encouraged group to view or 9

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY we might be in the unenviable position of having tested over a thousand subjects of whom but a handful could be classified as experimental. Fortunately we had not followed the advisers' suggestion. What happened was that the show generated such popularity that only one in eight of the sample failed to view it at all. Self-selection swept aside our carefully contrived allocation of subjects to encouraged and nonencouraged conditions. With the inestimable wisdom of hindsight, in the second year's evaluation we chose areas where cable is needed to obtain the show and allocated cable to some homes and not to others. However, this solution did nothing to alleviate the problem that arose in our firstyear study. We constructed an index of amount of viewing, and we found it now convenient to say that we were studying the effects of amount of viewing rather than of viewing versus no viewing. It became apparent that the self-selection factor in viewing meant that the children who viewed the show most had the highest attainments at pretest. Thus, although the more the children viewed, the more they gained, it was not clear at first whether this was a function of greater viewing or of pre-existing steeper growth rates for the children who viewed the most. Even with pretest scores, SES, and Peabody scores covaried, amount of viewing was a significant effect. However, covariance is a controversial, if not erroneous technique in these circumstances. It is rather like asking whether a team of dwarfs would beat the Harlem Globetrotters if the dwarfs were each three feet taller. Besides, covariance often over- or undercorrects depending on circumstances (Campbell & Erlebacher, 1970). Fortunately, there was a better procedure available. We used pretest scores to establish a sort of norm group, taking two groups of children matched for age at time of testing. Group 1 was 53-58 months of age at the time of pretesting; Group 2 was 53-58 months of age at the time of posttesting. These children were not only the same chronological age at the point of comparison, they were also at a comparable mental age and were living in the same communities. There were, in short, no observable differences between the two groups in important matters of previous attainments, IQ, and home background. There were more than 100 disadvantaged children who were not attending school in each group (see Fig. 1). The pretest scores of Group 1 (before the children could have watched Sesame Street) were compared with the posttest scores of Group 2 after the Group 2 children had watched the program. The frequent viewers in 10

Figure 1. The age cohorts study. As viewing becomes heavier (from Ql to Q4), the achievement differential between Sesame Street viewers (shaded) and non-viewing controls shows an increasing advantage in favor of the experimental viewers.

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MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Group 2 scored about 40 points higher on the 203 common items than the comparable children in Group 1 who had never watched the show. Equally significant is the fact that the infrequent viewers in Group 2 differed by only about 12 points from comparable children in Group 1 who had not viewed Sesame Street at all. In short, holding maturational effects, IQ, previous attainments, and home background constant, the frequent viewers made relatively large and important gains. Such acts of juggling are essential in action research. They are also useful when in new areas of research. Child psychology, at least in some of its areas of research, is not well advanced. When we are still groping to describe the phenomena of our study, then the flexible, watch-the-dataand-react-to-it approach rather than the more precise, hypothesis-testing style seems to be the more appropriate (Rust, 1971). There is a traditional hierarchy in research methodology that puts this flexible (or sloppy, depending on your viewpoint) approach low in respectability. Our point is simply that if this approach is appropriate to the situation, it is the best approach to use. SOME UNEXPECTED RESULTS

There were three sets of results that were unexpected, at least by us. The first is among the three age groups who watched the show: 3-, 4-, and 5year-old disadvantaged children. (The word disadvantaged can be, and is, defined in several different ways. We worked in poverty areas and found that economic status, amount of education, and attitudes were related factors.) Figure 2 presents the data on the pretests and posttests given to all the disadvantaged children. The children were divided into quarters based on the amount they had viewed Sesame Street. Children in Quarter 1 (Ql) viewed never or once a week, Q2 viewed 2-3 times a week, Q3 viewed 4-5 times a week, and Q4 viewed more than 5 times a week. Before Sesame Street went on the air, older children almost invariably performed higher on the test than younger children. After Sesame Street, however, 3-year-olds who watched most (Q4) scored higher at posttest than three of the 4-year-old groups and two of the 5-year-old groups. Furthermore, these 3-year-olds had a pretest score lower than all 5-year-old groups and all but one of the 4-year-old groups. In other words, the placement of the children along the scale measuring the goals of Sesame Street was dependent on age at pretest, whereas at 12

SAMUEL BALL posttest it was much more related to amount of viewing. These data also suggest that 3- and 4-year-olds are capable of learning many of the skills traditionally reserved for the 5-year-old in school. And the data also support the general result of the evaluation — namely, that children who watched the most learned the most. The second unexpected set of results concerns the middle-class 4-yearold children in the study and the 4-year-old disadvantaged children. Recent history of research has warned that such comparisons are often unwise, primarily because so many variables differentiate the two groups that a

Figure 2. Pretest and posttest scores of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old disadvantaged children. Note that at pretest, groups are sorted almost entirely by age; at posttest by whether or not they watched Sesame Street, 13

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

Figure 3. Pretest and posttest scores of disadvantaged and advantaged 4-year-olds.

comparison is likely to be invidious, unfairly discriminating against the disadvantaged group. However, in this instance, the result of the comparison is one that should be welcomed. Figure 3 presents these data. It can be seen that at the time of pretest every group of advantaged children scored higher than every group of disadvantaged children. However, at 14

SAMUEL BALL posttest, the gains of Q3 and Q4 disadvantaged children resulted in a realignment of groups. No longer were scores directly related to social class, but rather, social class effects were modified by amount of viewing. Disadvantaged children who often watched Sesame Street performed better on the measures of the show's goals than middle-class children who watched Sesame Street rarely or never. The third result, also somewhat surprising, concerned the comparison between disadvantaged children at home and at Head Start. Predictably, the scores of these groups differed at pretest, but there was no interaction between amount of viewing and home versus Head Start status. Children at home gained about as much as children at school at each of the levels of viewing. Perhaps children at school were more readily distracted during viewing because of the group-viewing conditions and the availability of alternative satisfactions in the classroom. Also, there was evidence that teachers used the show as an enrichment element in then: program rather than as a central element in the curriculum. Follow-up activities to the program were by no means universal in the classrooms. The other interpretation, and the one to which we lean most, is that Sesame Street met one of the criteria it set for itself. It effectively taught preschool children at home without dependence upon adults in formal supportive roles. If television can be effective in this way, then it can be used in a number of ways in formal education— via cassettes, for example — to help individualize instruction. It also follows from our evaluation that a great drive is needed to ensure that the present lamentable status of children's television programing is radically changed. One inference from our evaluation which has been put forward and which is not warranted is that Sesame Street is an alternative to Head Start. Clearly, the television show is not an alternative in that its scope, goals, and functions are much more limited and specific than those of Head Start. We have suddenly found ourselves in the position of supposedly advocating Sesame Street over Head Start. Our research in no way substantiates that position, and nowhere have we ever advocated it. Political motivations seem to plague the interpretations of evaluations.

Post-Report Reactions After the first-year summative research report on Sesame Street was made public, a critical technical reaction arose over the assessment of 15

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY amount of viewing. This assessment was a composite of four different measures, and one of the measures was said to be suspect. The four measures were: (1) The posttest parent questionnaire, in which a number of questions were asked about the viewing habits of the child. (2) The viewing record, in which the parents of all encouraged at-home children and the teachers of all encouraged at-school children kept a daily record of amount of Sesame Street viewing. (3) The television log, in which, once a month, the parents of all at-home children circled the shows that their children watched that day. (4) The Sesame Street test, in which all children at posttest were shown pictures of central characters on the show and asked if they could name or recognize them. It was the last of these measures upon which criticism focused. It was argued that this test was both a measure of viewing and a measure of learning. Of course we had no perfect measure of amount of viewing partly because, as Nielsen knows, no such measure exists. It would be unnecessary to point out the deficiencies in the other three measures. We doubt that the Sesame Street test was the worst measure of amount of viewing, but on the surface it did present some problems of "confounding." So we ran the major analyses again using the first three measures separately and in combination as our indices of amount of viewing. The results were almost identical to those presented in the report except in one respect. If the Sesame Street test is eliminated, the differences in pretest scores for viewing groups are attenuated. In general, those who viewed the show most did little better at pretest than those who viewed the show least. Thus, the very large increases in scores on the posttest favoring the higher viewing groups became more readily interpretable. We had been worried about the difficulty of assessing amount of viewing, so we had deliberately used four measures, and it is well that we did. The moral is that when a variable seems difficult to assess, try to use a number of different measures. Unfortunately, the area of child psychology is laden with examples of research where this was not done — for example, research in achievement motivation, self-esteem, and anxiety. Many of the measures, say, for anxiety, have but low relationship with other measures also ostensibly measuring anxiety. We must be aware, again, of the primitive state of our knowledge about the conceptualization and measurement of some very important variables. The use of several measures when dealing with such variables allows the assessment of the degree of relations among the measures. Until the state of our knowledge becomes more sophisti16

SAMUEL BALL cated, it would be well not to rely upon just one measure of a particular construct.

Some Concluding Remarks We have not tried to present a comprehensive description of our summative research on Sesame Street. Rather, we have tried to indicate those aspects of the research that were bases for making generalizations about research into the development of preschool children. Incidentally, we have tried to suggest the need for child psychologists to become more involved in, and attuned to, the needs of educational evaluation. In fairness, we should also emphasize the need for educational evaluators to become more knowledgeable about the world of developmental research. It is true that in large-scale field research one has to live with a diminution in precision. One hopes that less precise hammering of a large project at the gateway to knowledge will, in the long run, be as fruitful as the more precise tapping of smaller scale laboratory research. But the probability is that the two, in concert, will be the most productive. References Ball, S. & Bogatz, G. A. The first year of Sesame Street: An evaluation. Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, 1970. Campbell, D. & Erlebacher, A. How regression artifacts in quasi-experimental evaluations can mistakenly make compensatory education look harmful. In J. Hellmuth (Ed.), Disadvantaged child, compensatory education: A national debate. Vol. 3. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970. Caro, G. Issues in the evaluation of social programs. Review of Educational Research, 1971, 41, 2. Freeman, H. E. Strategy of social policy research. In H. E. Freeman (Ed.), Social welfare forum. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Rust, L. Attributes that differentiate boys' and girls' preferences for materials in the preschool classroom: A systems design approach. Ph.D. thesis, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1971. Scriven, M. The methodology of evaluation. AERA Monograph Series on Curriculum Evaluation, No. 1, Perspectives of curriculum evaluation. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967. Walsh, J. Anti-poverty R & D: Chicago debacle suggests pitfalls facing OEO. Science, 1969, 165, 1243-1245.

17

E. KUNO SELLER, PETER ABLER, ALAN NEWCOMER AND ARNOLD YOUNG

Motivation, Reinforcement, and Problem Solving in Children

THE PRESENT paper deals with a program in which an attempt has been made to re-examine the interacting effects of motivation and reinforcement on the learning of tasks which are similar to the learning that occurs in the classroom. The shift in focus to the classroom required a changed rationale and the formulation of hypotheses different from those which have been investigated with regard to the interacting effect of motivation and social reinforcement on the learning of simple tasks. When one reviews the research of the past decade on the role of social reinforcement in learning processes, it is evident that the majority of these studies have employed tasks which involved a low level of cognitive functioning. This is particularly true for studies in which an attempt was made to relate motivation and other antecedent variables to the efficacy of social reinforcement in the learning process (Endo, 1968;Erickson, 1962; Gewirtz & Baer, 1958b; Hill & Stevenson, 1964; Lewis, 1965; Rosenhan, 1967; Stevenson & Odom, 1962). In an extensive review paper, Stevenson (1965) lists a number of factors important in determining an appropriate task for a study involving social reinforcement: (a) the task must not possess high intrinsic interest if the effects of social reinforcement are to be maximized; (b) the task should not have a clear terminus or a visible product because this will make NOTE: Research reported in this paper was supported in part by grants from NIMH (M-849), the Ford Foundation, and from the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity to the Head Start Evaluation and Research Center at Temple University. 18

E. KUNO BELLER the task intrinsically motivating and the child may be affected little by an adult's response; (c) the task should permit the adult to dispense supportive comments arbitrarily. A model task which meets these criteria as well as several others listed by Stevenson is a marble-sorting or marble-dropping task. This task, which has been used by many investigators who have studied the interacting effects of social deprivation and social reinforcement on learning, "in itself is quite dull, apparently endless, requires minimal prior learning, has no clear criteria for adequate performance, and uses discrete responses" (Stevenson, 1965). Stevenson's position appears to have validity, but it limits the study of motivation and reinforcement considerably. For example, it would be difficult to generalize from simple learning tasks in the laboratory to the classroom, where the learning process often revolves around intrinsically motivating cognitive tasks which are more difficult and more complex than tasks such as marble sorting or marble dropping. Moreover, cognitive tasks are not only intrinsically motivating, but they are more motivating to some children than to others. Thus, the reinforcement value of added external incentives and social rewards will vary from child to child. Of course, educational situations require a certain amount of rote learning which is dull and unappealing to most children. However, even the learning of such tasks may not have to depend entirely on external reinforcement. Tasks which are dull by themselves may become instrumental links in the process of discovery and thus derive incentive value from a broader context of the learning process. Conversely, the learning and mastery of cognitive skills which have high intrinsic motivational value for children will no doubt be influenced by the attention and praise from the adult social environment. These complex interactions among motivation, types of reinforcement, and types of learning tasks call for a changed perspective of the learning situation if the study of reinforcement is to be more relevant to the learning of cognitive tasks in the classroom. The studies in this paper represent an attempt to take a broader perspective: first, by concentrating on cognitive learning tasks which are intrinsically motivating, have clear criteria for adequate performance, and vary in their degree of difficulty; second, by extending the study of reinforcement to include external social reinforcement as well as inner incentives with reinforcements derived from the satisfaction which may accompany exploration, discovery, and unaided mastery; third, by extending our concern with motivational variables to include not only dependency 19

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY or social needs for recognition and attention but also autonomous needs for achievement and mastery. Our changed focus to a more complex interaction of motivation, reinforcement, and learning task requires a reformulation of hypotheses. Investigators employing learning tasks such as those outlined by Stevenson (1965) have found that dependency motivation and social deprivation enhance separately and cumulatively the effectiveness of social reinforcement (Gewirtz & Baer, 1958a; Hartup, 1958; Lewis & Richman, 1964). In these studies the learning tasks served merely to facilitate the interplay between motivation and reinforcement. Reinforcement in the form of attention and verbal praise constitutes an essential goal of the dependency motive. Therefore, arousal of the dependency motive through deprivation enhanced the effectiveness of verbal praise as a reinforcer of responses (to be learned), which were in turn effective in bringing about praise. This situation changes when the response to be learned is part of a task which requires sharpened perception and concentration of thought. In such a case, the increase of motivation in the high dependent child may result in interference rather than facilitation of learning, since the task to be learned requires both concentration and attention. In the high dependent child arousal through social deprivation will result in a heightening of anxiety or other emotional responses to frustration which will interfere with the child's ability to organize his thoughts and concentrate on the task. Thus, for the aroused high dependent child social reinforcement can serve as a distracter rather than as a f acilitater of learning when the task to be learned requires concentrated thought rather than simple association or shift in motor responses. In contrast, the low dependent child may be insufficiently motivated to learn when the task is easy and the instigation for learning depends on a need to please the adult who introduces the task. For these children, the introduction of nurturance deprivation in the form of attention withdrawal would raise motivation to please the adult who sets the task and also would raise the motivation to learn the task. Thus, the introduction of cognitive tasks which vary in degree of difficulty requires a very different set of predicted relationships among characteristic levels of dependency motivation, deprivation, and social reinforcement. In the place of a simple cumulative effect, we hypothesized a curvilinear relationship in which insufficient motivation to learn a task that presents no challenge to low dependent children is at one extreme, followed by an optimal level of motivation when motivation has been 20

E. KUNO BELLER raised through appropriate arousal, especially for low dependent children on easy tasks, and finally, at the opposite extreme, a disruptive effect of too much anxiety and distraction produced by raising the motivational dependency level in high dependent children when they are required to learn a cognitive task which requires concentration and reflection. Another major effect that we were interested in exploring was that of social reinforcement compared with non-social task intrinsic reinforcement. In cases of a cognitive task in which learning is gradual, the experience of success may be sufficient for some children to master the task. The task to be learned has to have a terminal point, and has to be potentially interesting. Then the learning of the task is self-rewarding. Such a condition is common in the classroom and serves as an appropriate alternative to the comparison between social reinforcement and no reinforcement in the learning of an uninteresting task. The important question is whether the effectiveness of social incentives for learning varies as a function of both the task to be learned and the characteristic levels of motivation such as dependency. As pointed out elsewhere (Beller & Turner, 1964), the high dependent, passive child appears to develop insufficient interest and motivation for exploring and mastering problems. The failure of the high dependent child to function autonomously becomes particularly pronounced when the problem to be solved is posed by an adult who is seen as a nurturant person or authority figure who is in a position to help the child in efforts which he initiated and to praise the child for readiness to conform with the demands of the authority figure by trying to solve the problem. Unless upset by unexpected responses from the adult, the high dependent child should perform well provided the adult meets the child's needs for support. If an expectation of nurturance is set up in the pre-learning situation and the adult discontinues his nurturance during the learning phase, as is the case under task intrinsic non-social reinforcement, the high dependent child may become upset and have difficulty concentrating on the task. The low dependent child is less likely to become upset by discontinuation of support from the pre-learning to the learning phase — indeed, the low dependent child may be insufficiently motivated initially and reach a more optimal level of motivation following the reduction of nurturance. Alternately, the low dependent child may simply perceive the nurturant niteraction during the pre-learning phase (in which the experimenter poses no problems to be solved) as play, and the learning phase as a more serious situation in which he is left to his own devices. Thus, the second major 21

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY hypothesis to be tested was that following a nurturant experience during the pre-learning phase, a high dependent child will manifest more discrepant performances than a low dependent child with and without social reinforcement. Finally, we were interested in the implications of this complex interaction for developmental change. Specifically, we were concerned with whether the relative difficulty high dependent children experience in learning without external guidance and social reinforcement points to their being at an earlier level of psychological development, and whether the greater ability of the low dependent child to learn problem-solving tasks under conditions of only task intrinsic reinforcement implied internalization of cognitive and social standards and thus their being at a higher level of psychological development. A series of studies was instigated to explore these complex issues. The major variables of the research were dependency motivation, the learning task, and types of reinforcement. First, we shall describe the major variables of the research program which were common to most or all studies that have been carried out so far. Then, we shall preface the results of each study with relevant information concerning its objectives and its sampling and experimental procedures. Motivation. In Studies I-III the major motivational variable was dependency. Dependency was conceptualized as the motive which has the aim of bringing about interpersonal relationships in the form of interaction with, attention from, and help from the dependency object, which may be a real person or a phantasy creation (Beller, 1959a). This particular formulation deals only with the motivational characteristics of dependency, that is, maneuvers or strategies on the part of the person which have as their aim bringing about certain interpersonal relationships. The motivational aspect of dependency as defined here does not encompass other important aspects of dependency, such as interdependence involving respect for the autonomy of the dependency object, phenomenological dependency (characterized by a feeling of helplessness), and dependency conflict (inhibition, displacement, and inconsistency in the expression of dependency needs). However, our measure of dependency motivation does include anxiety as an essential mechanism of the motive (Beller, 1959). The child's apprehension over separation from the dependency object, coupled with his anticipation of becoming helpless and overwhelmed, is an essential part of the dependency motive. 22

E. KUNO BELLER Dependency has been operationally defined by the frequency and intensity with which a child seeks interaction, proximity, recognition, attention, and help from people who are in a position to provide nurturance. Dependency motivation was not defined on a bipolar continuum which extends from high dependence to high independence. Independence or autonomous achievement striving was conceptualized separately in terms of unaided striving, and was measured by the frequency with which the child initiates activities, overcomes obstacles, and completes activities by himself, the frequency with which the whole behavior sequence results in tension reduction, a process which we commonly refer to as satisfaction from work. The advantage of measuring dependence and independence separately rather than on a bipolar continuum is that it permits one to determine the balance and conflict between dependence and independence in an individual (Beller, 1959, 1961). The applicability of this separation will be seen in Study III. In a succession of studies, the senior author obtained measures of dependency, independency, and aggression on different samples of children. (Although aggression will not be discussed in the present paper, it was an essential part of the factor analysis of measures of dependency and independence and is therefore included in Table 1.) The method of measurement was identical in all studies; it involved two independent raters trained by the senior author who acted as participant observers. The method of measurement has been described in detail in Beller (1957, 1959). The first sample of subjects consisted of 41 boys and 48 girls, three to six years of age, coming from predominantly (94 per cent) white, middleclass families and attending the therapeutic nurseries of the Child Development Center in New York City. None of these children was so severely disturbed as to be classified psychotic. Approximately thirty pairs of raters were involved in the collection of data on these children over a period of ten years. The scores used for the present analysis were based on approximately three ratings by two independent raters for any one year. The data for any one child were limited to measurement obtained for a single year. Finally, the nursery program was essentially the same as for nonclinical nurseries. The second sample consisted of 82 boys and 96 girls from three to six years of age coming from middle-class families and attending nurseries in the Downtown Community School in New York City. More children came from black families (25 per cent) than was the case at the Child Develop23

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY ment Center (6 per cent). Data collection was carried out over three years by eighteen pairs of raters. Two ratings were obtained on each child by two independent raters each year. The data of one year only were included for any one child in the analysis. The third sample consisted of 156 boys and 153 girls coming almost exclusively from lower-class black families. The children were three to six years of age and were enrolled in experimental summer and all-year Head Start programs for disadvantaged children in three cities in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, Chester, and Philadelphia) and in kindergarten classrooms of four public schools in a large urban slum area of Philadelphia. Twenty-one pairs of raters collected these data over three years. Half of the data were based on two repeated ratings of each child, and the other half on one rating of each child by a rater pair. Table 1 contains the outcome of a principle axis factor analysis which was performed with multiple R2 as communality estimates. A varimax rotation was performed on the first three factors for the data of each subsample; these factors accounted for 68-78 per cent of the variance in the subsamples. The important conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that the composite measures of dependency motivation, independence, Table 1. Comparative Factor Structure of Fourteen Personality Measures in Middle- and Lower-Class Preschool Children

Measure

Middle-Class Clinical Girls Boys (N = 41) (N - 48)

Middle-Class Nonclinical Boys Girls (N = 82) (N = 96)

Lower-Class Nonclinical Boys Girls (AT =156) (AT =153)

Factor I Dependency Help Recognition Contact Attention Nearness A.A.S. Work Satisfaction Routines Obstacles Completion Aggression Threat Derogation Destruction Attack

.84 .54 .83 .84 .94

.73 .73 .79 .77 .92

.66 .64 .74 .65 .78

.71 .72 .81 .68 .79

.62 .70 .76 .60 .75

.69 .73 .82 .78 .83

.08 -.42 -.18 -.02

-.05 .03 .11 .04

-.01 -.23 -.18 .08

-.10 -.36 -.40 -.08

-.05 -.13 .03 -.01

-.06 -.07 -.05 .01

.14 -.13 .13 .36

.08 .22 .10 .09

.11 .14 .13 .02

.12 .11 .14 .10

.20 .18 .22 .19

.27 .31 .26 .26

24

E. K U N O SELLER Table 1 •— Continued

Measure

Middle-Class Middle-Class Lower-Class Nonclinical Nonclinical Clinical Girls Girls Boys Girls Boys Boys (N = 41) (N — 48) (N - 82) (N = 96) (N = 156) (N = 153) Factor H

Dependency . -.16 Help Recognition .26 Contact . . . . -.07 Attention . . . -.15 .05 Nearness . . A.A.S. Work Satis.89 faction . . .67 Routines . . .80 Obstacles . . .81 Initiative . . Completion .86 Aggression —.07 Threat Derogation .02 Destruction . -.46 Attack . . . . -.08

-.14 .33 .01 .02 .05

-.34 -.01 -.07 .02 -.08

-.45 .03 -.25 -.16 -.23

-.24 .11 -.04 -.07 .04

-.20 .09 .02 -.02 -.03

.80 .64 .79 .61 .84

.79 .69 .86 .82 .82

.68 .62 .78 .72 .80

.59 .67 .83 .74 .84

.80 .69 .85 .82 .83

.13 .12 -.03 .12

-.01 .01 -.08 -.04

-.03 .02 -.12 -.06

—.13 .06 -.16 —.14

—.05 .02 -.06 —.00

Factor HI Dependency Help Recognition Contact Attention . Nearness . . A.A.S. Work Satisfaction . . Routines . . Obstacles . . Initiative . . Completion Aggression Threat Derogation Destruction Attack

. . . .

.09 .36 .07 .21 .03

.26 .27 -.09 .52 .01

.17 -.02 .26 .51 -.03

.12 .12 .14 .45 -.03

.17 .24 .21 .41 -.04

.26 .38 .22 .34 .08

-.16 -.15 .14 -.07 -.23

-.09 .01 .33 .36 .00

-.29 -.08 .06 .16 -.03

-.18 -.12 .00 .16 -.08

-.40 -.04 -.06 .09 -.17

-.20 .04 -.04 .15 -.05

.88 .46 .75 .71

.88 .70 .88 .87

.89 .89 .81 .93

.94 .97 .90 .91

.91 .78 .88 .91

.93 .84 .89 .91

and aggression manifest high internal consistency. The composite measures of dependency and independence represented relatively pure factors (see Table 1). Thus, dependency and independence are not bipolar when they are defined and measured separately, allowing each variable to vary freely within any one child. The concept of dependency and independency as 25

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY generalized motives appears to be strongly supported by these replications involving approximately seventy pairs of raters and close to six hundred preschool children of different backgrounds. The motivational variables in Studies I-III are identical with the measures of dependence and independence as defined by Factors I and II in Table 1. Experimental Manipulation of Motivation. Dependency motivation was experimentally manipulated by means of attention withdrawal. The effects of attention withdrawal were investigated in children having different characteristic levels of dependency motivation. We selected attention withdrawal in preference to social isolation, which has been used frequently in social deprivation studies. A major reason for using this method of manipulation was that it offered better control than social isolation for studying the interaction effects of varying levels of dependency and types of reinforcement on learning. Giving or withholding positive attention are both forms of dependency gratification and deprivation and ways of expressing or withholding social reinforcement. An alternative method, the social isolation procedure, adds another component — the absence and presence of the person who gives social reinforcement. However, in our method the difference between types of reinforcement depends on what the experimenter does or does not do rather than on whether he is present or absent. In another method (Lewis, 1965; Walters & Ray, 1960), deprivation was introduced by letting a stranger take the child from the classroom and by not communicating with the child on the way to the experiment. Such procedures maximize anxiety and fear of a novel situation and add stress factors beyond the immediate issue of studying the effects of nurturance deprivation and dependency motivation on the efficacy of positive attention in the form of verbal praise as social reinforcement. We preferred to make the experimenter and the experimental room familiar; after spending some time in the classroom the experimenter took the children singly or in small groups to the experimental room and let them explore the room, ask questions, or play for a while. Thus, the main variable to be manipulated was the withholding or giving of attention to the child in the pre-learning and the learning phase of the experiment. The experimental procedure was as follows: When E entered the room with the child, E let the child know that there was a note for him to make an urgent telephone call and that he had to delay the game which S had been promised. S was asked to be seated and wait, receiving minimal ma26

E. KUNO BELLER terial for distraction. E began a telephone conversation which consisted of brief comments such as "yes," "really?" During the entire period E paid no attention to S and did not respond to S's bids for attention. At the end of a 10-minute period the learning task was started. In the control group, E played with S for 10 minutes, giving S as much attention as he demanded before introducing the learning task. Types of Learning Tasks. The learning task was essentially the same in all studies reported and discussed in this paper. The child was informed that an object — a barrel, a little animal, a die, or a crystal — was hidden under one of three boxes placed in front of him. He was instructed to guess under which of the three boxes the object was hidden. He was told that there was a way of guessing correctly on each try. The boxes were, in most instances, identical except for one relevant cue — either a visual symbol on the box, the size of the box, or the position of the box hiding the treasure. Thus, the solution of the problem involved discrimination and acquisition of a concept. On each trial, the position of the three boxes was arranged out of S's sight according to a predetermined randomized order. The Ss were always given 30 trials. S was permitted correction on each trial. As indicated earlier, minor variations of this task occurred from study to study and will be described as appropriate. Types of Reinforcement. Types of reinforcement differed on two basic dimensions, the distinction between social and non-social reinforcement and the distinction between task extrinsic and task intrinsic reinforcement. Social reinforcement consisted of verbal praise by the examiner after the child made a successful response. Task intrinsic reinforcement consisted of reinforcement derived from the task. For example, under intrinsic and non-social reinforcement, the child was instructed to guess which box hid the object and to pick up that box to see whether he guessed correctly. His success on each trial (i.e., seeing the object) after having picked up the correct box constituted the criterion for the correctness of his response and the sole source of his reinforcement. Under the condition of intrinsic plus social reinforcement, E told S that he was a good guesser and so on after S had lifted the correct box and seen the object. After Studies I and II we modified the social reinforcement condition to contrast it more sharply with intrinsic non-social reinforcement. E asked 5 to point to the correct box rather than to lift it. At the beginning of the procedure, 5 was shown that one box hid a treasure and was told that E would tell him subsequently whether or not he had pointed to the 27

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY correct box. Although the cue for the correct response and the social reinforcement (praise) provided by E were not arbitrary, they were both external and extrinsic to the task. The task was, as before, the discovery that the middle-sized box always hid the object. However, instead of producing the relevant cue himself, S depended on E for praise. Therefore, S depended more fully on the social agent (E), who provided 5" with both the cue for the correctness of his response and with praise. For these reasons, we labeled this last condition extrinsic social reinforcement. Study I The first of the studies to be reported was carried out by Peter T. Adler at the Child Development Center Therapeutic Nursery School in New York City (Adler, 1961). One major objective of Study I was to test the prediction that the interacting effects of nurturance deprivation and types of reinforcement will depend on a child's characteristic level of dependency motivation. Since the task was fairly difficult for preschoolers, it was expected that heightening dependency motivation through nurturance deprivation would raise the drive level and anxiety to an optimal level for learning in low dependent children. However, in high dependent children, nurturance deprivation was expected to raise dependency drive level, and thus anxiety, to a point at which it would have a distracting and disruptive effect on cognitive functioning, particularly when the conceptual task to be learned was difficult. On the basis of this rationale, it was hypothesized that heightening dependency motivation through induced nurturance deprivation would facilitate problem-solving in low dependent children but not in high dependent children. A second major hypothesis was that high dependent children would rely more heavily on external social support for sustaining efforts to solve the problem. It was expected that these children would have difficulty learning cognitive tasks when they have to rely solely on reinforcement derived from objective evidence of success, whereas low dependent children would gain sufficient reinforcement for learning from objective evidence of success. Therefore, it was hypothesized that for the low dependent children, the difference between performance under social and under non-social reinforcement would be less than that for high dependent children. The Ss (from first sample, p. 24 above) were 24 children, 12 boys and 12 girls, ranging in age from 48 to 75 months, with a median age of 59 months. The range of IQ's was 98-146, with a median of 119. The chil28

E. KUNO SELLER dren had a casual acquaintance with E (Adler) as an observer in other studies. The design of the study called for dichotomization of the 5s on each of two variables, characteristic dependency motivation and type of reinforcement. Thus, there were four experimental groups, each consisting of six children. Each S was seen under two different conditions of deprivation. Half of the Ss received the deprivation condition before the learning task, and the other half received a non-deprivation condition before the learning task. Each S received the two deprivation experiences in a predetermined order 1 to 15 days apart. The children were divided at the median on total dependency scores. Experimental manipulation of dependency motivation was also carried out by means of the telephone conversation described earlier. The non-deprivation condition consisted of 10 minutes preceding the learning task in which E informed 5 that it was not their time to play the game, but that S could play with some toys before entering the playroom. S was asked to guess under which of three boxes a small barrel was hidden. E told S, "There is a way in which you can always tell which box has something hidden under it because I always put it in the correct box. And remember that it is very important to try and find it on the very first guess." The barrel was always hidden under the middle-sized box, and 5" was encouraged to keep on lifting boxes until he discovered the barrel under the box. Two sets of boxes were used in the procedure, one in each session. The first was four plastic boxes whose dimensions were: (1) \1A by 25/s in.; (2) W4 by 2% in.; (3) 21A by 2% in.; (4) 3V4 by 3Ys in. The other set, also plastic, was regular cubes: (1) IV& in. square; (2) 1V2 in. square; ( 3 ) 2 in. square; (4) 2% in. square. The S was first presented with boxes 1,3, and 4 (3 concealed the object). On succeeding trials, the same three boxes were presented in randomly varied positions until S made two successive correct guesses. He was then presented with boxes 1, 2, and 3 (2 concealed the object). If this combination was correctly evaluated twice, he was presented with 2, 3, and 4. Thus, S had to decide between the box which had been correct on the previous trial and the box which would be conceptually correct. The procedure continued for 30 trials or until S met the criterion of four successive correct first guesses. In the social reinforcement condition, S"s discovery of the barrel was immediately appended by verbal praise from 29

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY E. In the non-social reinforcement condition, S derived his reinforcement only from solving the problem successfully. The first major finding in Study I was the interacting effect of induced deprivation and dependency motivation on problem solving (F = 10.26, df= 1/16, p