Children’s shifts of attention in phases of stable performance in arithmetic tasks

Voutsina, Chronoula, George, Lois and Jones, Keith (2019) Children’s shifts of attention in phases of stable performance in arithmetic tasks. In Biennial Conference of the European Association for Research in Learning and Instruction - EARLI19. (In Press)

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of data from two qualitative microgenetic studies that aimed at examining changes in the verbal reports of 5-6 year old children solving an additive task and 9-10 year old children solving partitive quotient problems. In each of the two studies, children participated in a sequence of task-based interviews. The analysis presented here focuses on phases during which children’s performance in solving the tasks remained stable. Children’s verbal reports in these phases were analysed through the lens of the theory of shifts of attention. The analysis revealed changes in how individual children communicated and conceptualised the same solving approach over a number of sessions. We propose that these changes appear to be accounted for by shifts related to the object and structure of children’s explicit attention; that is, what children attend to and how, when reporting on their solving approach. The findings suggest that seemingly unchanged performance can be viewed as a ‘dynamic’ notion that can be underlain by processes of change in how children attend to relationships between elements of the same task and the same approach in an interactive context. On the basis of our findings, we suggest that it is essential that educators are aware of, and sensitive to, subtle changes that may occur in learners’ shifts of attention, even when task performance appears to be unchanged.

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Contributors

Author: Chronoula Voutsina

Author: Keith Jones

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