Replicating the clock drawing test among Year 1 and Year 2 children : what can we learn from their errors?

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with investigating a distinct application of number words and symbols - that of 'telling the time', for which few empirical studies involving young children exist. Its importance as a skill is recognised in the government's National Numeracy Strategy (1998). It can be taught through various methods e.g., ICT; rote-memorisation, but without knowing which aspects children find most difficult, teachers may find it difficult to identify which areas they need to concentrate on. For adults however, there is a plethora of studies that involve assessments of their ability to 'tell the time' and 'set the clock', mostly among neurologically damaged adults (predominantly dementia), who have been tested with variants of a 'Clock Drawing Test'. What investigators do not know however, is whether the errors committed by dementia patients are also the same errors made by young children learning to tell the time - if found to be similar, this may suggest a regression of the skills and knowledge required to complete the test, which could then be used to track dementia decline / remedial progress. Following a pilot study to primarily test the cultural validity of the Clock Drawing Test of Freedman, Leach, Kaplan, Wino cur, Shulman, and Delis (1994), the main research involved applying a modified version (conditions = free-drawn; pre-drawn; examiner) to 120 paliicipants (Year 1 children: n = 60; Year 2 children: n = 60). The study identified two main categories of clock drmving test errors committed by some paliicipants were also those found in previous studies to have been committed by adults with dementia - perseveration enors and neglect enors. It also found that overall, children have most diUiculty yvith hand placement (transcoding/abstraction enors) and in spatially drawing digits in their conect clock positions. In video-taping paliicipants', it \vas also possible to conclusively deten11ine whether they anchored their clocks yvhen drmving them i.e" dra\ving in the digits at the 90- degree locations (12. 3, 6, 9), and vvhether this made any difference to their accuracy. In the two conditions where anchoring was possible, significant differences were found between the overall clock drawing test scores of pmiicipants yvho anchored their clocks and those that did not which suggests that anchoring is an important function to undertake and is a determinant of a drawn clock's overall accuracy.

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