J. Boom

Utrecht University | UU · Division of Developmental Psychology

The balance model is often used for teaching linear equation solving. Little research has investigated the influence of various representations of this model on students’ learning outcomes. In this quasi-experimental study, we examined the effects of two learning environments with balance models on primary school students’ reasoning related to solv...

Research suggests that metacommunication in young children’s social pretend play is the most complex form of cooperation. In this study, metacommunication was examined using audio and video recordings during pretend play. Participants were 24 children in kindergarten average age 5.1 years. Utterances were coded for metacommunication, the narrative...

Bodily experiences are associated with powerful forms of understanding, yet not much research has investigated to what extent bodily experiences benefit the development of graphical reasoning. We examined the effectiveness of providing embodied support in a teaching sequence of six lessons on motion graphs, including both graph interpretation and g...

The Dynamic Overlapping Waves Model (DOWM) can model strategy use in problem-solving tasks for strategies that can be construed as developmentally and hierarchically ordered (Boom, 2015). We observed children's (M age = 11 years, SD = 6 months) strategy use during a task in which they had to find the rotation direction of the last gear in a series...

The present study analysed the mathematical problem-solving processes, in terms of linearity and recursion, and the relationship with actual and self-perceived performances of a sample of 524 students of upper-elementary students. The results showed a more linear than recursive process while performing the tasks, mainly characterized by continuity....

The aim of this longitudinal study is to evaluate 3 views on the relationship between nonword repetition and vocabulary: (i) the storage-based view that considers nonword repetition, a measure of phonological storage, as the driving force behind vocabulary development, (ii) the lexical restructuring view that considers improvements in nonword repet...

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) has been the dominant measure of moral development. The DIT has its roots in Kohlberg’s original stage theory of moral judgment development and asks respondents to rank a set of stage typed statements in order of importance on six stories. However, the question to what extent the DIT-data match the underlying stage mo...

The present study investigated the measurement properties of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) Toddler using data from 276 classrooms and 375 teachers in Dutch early childhood education and care provisions. First, confirmatory factor analyses based on the CLASS Toddler indicators confirmed the eight-dimension structure of the instrume...

Objective: Problems in early development of executive functioning may underlie the vulnerability and individual variability of infants born preterm for behavioral and learning problems. Parenting behaviors may aggravate or temper this increased risk for dysfunction. This study assessed how maternal parenting behaviors predict individual difference...

Within a perception-action framework, exploration is seen as a driving force in young children's development. Through exploration, children become skilled in perceiving the affordances in their environment and acting on them. Using a perception-action framework, the current study examined the development of children's exploration of the spatial-rel...

Language and metacommunication are assumed to be important for accomplishing a high level of cooperation in social play. Research to date, however, does not address the relationship of language ability and metacommunication to the complexity of cooperation. This study investigated this relationship by observing 24 four- and five-year-old children's...

This study investigates the hypothesis that verbal short-term memory growth in young children can be explained by increases in long-term linguistic knowledge. To this aim, we compare children’s recall of nonwords varying in phonotactic probability. If our assumption holds, there should be growth in recall of high-probability nonwords, but no or les...

The Overlapping Waves Model (OWM) is a metaphor introduced by Siegler (1996) to illustrate a typical sequence of increasing and decreasing use of strategies during development. Going beyond metaphor, a new model synthesized from Latent Growth Modeling (LGM) and Item Response Theory (IRT) will be presented to analyze such categorical longitudinal da...

This paper discusses the results of a study of the relationships between teacher behaviour and the level of play engagement in two- and three-year-old children in Dutch childcare centres. We found that the continuous proximity of the teacher had the greatest impact on the level of play engagement, while the teacher's walking around and only brief c...

An increasing number of studies has investigated the latent factor structure of executive functions. Some studies found a three-factor structure of inhibition, shifting, and updating, but others could not replicate this finding. We assumed that the task choices and scoring methods might be responsible for these contradictory findings. Therefore, we...

Variability in strategy selection is an important characteristic of learning new skills such as mathematical skills. Strategies gradually come and go during this development. In 1996, Siegler described this phenomenon as "overlapping waves." In the current microgenetic study, we attempted to model these overlapping waves statistically. In addition,...

The relationship between executive functions and mathematical skills has been studied extensively, but results are inconclusive, and how this relationship evolves longitudinally is largely unknown. The aim was to investigate the factor structure of executive functions in inhibition, shifting, and updating; the longitudinal development of executive...

In Gibb’s theory of moral development Piagetian ideas concerning egocentrism play an important role. Based on these ideas Gibbs offers a detailed analysis of transitions in moral development. However, Gibbs still fails to utilize the full potential offered by Piaget’s equilibration theory, because he does not generalize the idea of overcoming egoce...

The aim of this study was to explain adolescents' volunteering in terms of their morality and identity and to examine the moderation effect of gender and age in this process. Data were collected among 698 Dutch adolescents aged 12 to 20 (M = 15.19; SD = 1.43). Adolescents' moral reasoning was positively associated with understanding moral issues an...

Because early executive functioning is a potentially important predictor of developmental delay and learning difficulties in infants born preterm, this study assessed the effect of several perinatal predictors on the development of A-not-B performance between 7 and 14 months corrected age in 76 infants born preterm, and its relationship to subseque...

This study aimed to extend the understanding of anti-social behaviour and its association with popularity and sociometric status in a sample of at-risk adolescents from diverse ethnic backgrounds (n = 1491, average age 14.7 years). Both overt and covert types of anti-social behaviour were used to distinguish subgroups. These subgroups were created...

This study addresses the longitudinal relationships between three kinds of moral cognitions – self-serving cognitive distortions, moral judgment, perception of community – and antisocial behavior in young adolescents. Aims were to gain insight in direct and indirect relationships, stability, and causality. The sample included 724 students (M age 1/...

The current study examined to what extent information in long-term memory concerning the distribution of phoneme clusters in a language, so-called long-term phonotactic knowledge, increased the capacity of verbal short-term memory in young language learners and, through increased verbal short-term memory capacity, supported these children's first a...

A quasi-experimental pretest/posttest study using a control group was conducted to investigate the effects of EQUIP for Educators—implemented as a universal prevention program—on prevalence of antisocial behavior , attitude towards antisocial behavior, self-serving cognitive distortions, and moral judgment of young adolescents. Participants were 76...

Equilibration as a central concept in piaget’S THEORY According to Piaget, models of equilibration are involved in all questions about cognitive development. Cognitive development, for him, is a succession of constructions with constant elaborations of novel structures. Moreover, for Piaget, this implies a process that improves existing structure...

In his paper, Joe Becker has reminded us that abstraction has a key role to play in understanding cognitive development. For me that was the most important message, particularly in comparison to his previous and related paper in this journal [ Becker, 2004]. What I found lacking, still, were ideas on how his views can be supported by ( empirical) r...

This chapter deals with inequality constrained latent class analysis. As will be exemplified, researchers often have competing theories that can be translated into inequality constrained latent class models. After this translation it is rather straightforward to evaluate these theories.

Kohlberg’s characterization of moral development as displaying an invariant hierarchical order of structurally consistent stages is losing ground. However, by applying Rasch analysis, Dawson recently gave new interpretation and support to his characterization of stage development. Using Rasch models, we replicated and strengthened her findings in a...

Latent class analysis (LCA) has been successfully applied to tasks measuring higher cognitive functioning, suggesting the existence of distinct strategies used in such tasks. With LCA it became possible to classify post hoc. This important step forward in modeling and analyzing cognitive strategies is relevant to the overlapping waves model for str...

In the field of developmental, psychology researchers may have several competing theories with respect to their research subject. In this paper an approach will be proposed that can be used to select the best of these theories. It will be shown that a theory can be translated in a constrained latent class model using inequality constraints. This ca...

In the 1970s Lawrence Kohlberg extended his theory on the development of moral judgment competence to include a social and educational component referring to the development of a just community. Critics have focused on the first version of his theory without taking into consideration the latter. This shortcoming becomes particularly obvious with re...

How students perceive the moral atmosphere in their school may affect their behaviour in and around school. The perception of the moral atmosphere in school demands an assessment of the majority perspective among students, and is influenced by several individual and group-related characteristics. Can students learn to perceive the moral atmosphere...

The Balance Scale Task was recognized in the early 1980s as a way of eliciting different rule-governed response patterns for proportionality reasoning (Siegler, 1981). However, soon other rules than the four defined by Siegler were suggested and doubt was expressed whether task behavior was rule-governed at all. Doubt could emerge since the scoring...

Following criticism of Kohlberg's theory of moral judgment, an empirical re-examination of hierarchical stage structure was desirable. Utilizing Piaget's concept of reflective abstraction as a basis, the hierarchical stage structure was investigated using a new method. Study participants (553 Dutch university students and 196 Russian high school st...

In theoretical analyses of early mother–child interaction, it has been argued that interaction should be studied in its flow over time, and that the behaviour of each interactant is likely to be non-linearly determined. The mother–child dyad can be seen as a non-linear dynamic system, the development of which is determined by the mutual relations b...

Cognitive development theory examines how we deal with the world and how we coordinate our dealings with it. In this chapter we shall discuss some philosophical problems of such theories, concentrating on Piaget’s work since, though much criticized, it is still very influential. His theory is especially interesting philosophically because of its ve...

The relationship between the concept of developmental stage and the concept of developmental task is yet unclear. Central to the developmental task approach is a focus on the micro social interaction in order to explain the developmental process. Especially expectations, for example parental expectations, play an important role. Central to the deve...

The learning paradox, which dates back to the Sophists, illustrates how difficult it is to give an adequate account of the emergence of novelty in cognitive functioning. More recently, Fodor has raised the same problem, criticizing Piaget on the grounds of the ‘impossibility of acquiring more powerful structures’. Convincing counterarguments to Fod...

Cognitive development can be construed in terms of conceptual or operational structures. The notion of‘operational structures’ is used to refer to Piaget’s dynamic form of structuralism and implies an autonomous, universal development through self-regulative processes. This position was criticized because the social aspects of development were unde...

The concept ‘development stage’ seems to be going through a revival (cf. Commons and Richards, 1984; Levin, 1986). Three positions regarding the conceptualization of development stages can be distinguished. Piaget's original formulations are presented as a starting point (Piaget, 1960). Trends in the sub‐discipline of developmental psychology conce...

A hierarchical structural model of moral judgment is proposed in which an S is characterized as occupying a particular moral stage. During development, the S's characteristic stage progresses along a latent, ordered dimension in an age-dependent way. Evaluation of prototypic statements representative of moral stages below an S's current stage are a...

Includes bibliographical references. Thesis (doctoral)--Catholic University Nijmegen, 1993.

In his paper, Joe Becker has reminded us that abstraction has a key role to play in understanding cognitive development. For me that was the most important message, particularly in comparison to his previous and related paper in this journal [Becker, 2004]. What I found lacking, still, were ideas on how his views can be supported by (empirical) res...

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) has been the dominant measure of moral development. The DIT has its roots in Kohlberg’s original stage theory of moral judgment development and asks respondents to rank a set of stage-typed statements in order of importance on six stories. However, the question to what extent the DIT-data match the underlying stage mo...