I want to research the way children conceptualise writing “skills” (eg: paragraphs, personification etc.).
I am aware of phenomenography as the conceptualisation of experience, but I am also interested in any cognitive theories that exist.
Any examples of theories is this area would be much appreciated.
Dear Brett,
The most known theory I know on how people conceptualise things, events and behaviors is the attribution theory. According to this theory, we, as actors or observers, tend to attribute causes to our own and others' behaviors, skills, and the like.
While attributing causes to our and others' behaviors we can see them as a result of external or internal causes. For example, a student who gets good marks can think that they are due to his/her intelligence (internal cause) or to the ease of the exam at hanh (external cause). We can also see such causes as stable, for example, that our marks in an exam situation are due to our intelligence (a stable cause) or to our effort while doing the respective exam (unstable cause). According to the attribution theory, we can still conceptualize our and others' behaviors, skills, and the like, as a function of a third dimension: controllability or uncontrollability. For example, if one thinks that his/her marks in an exam situation are due to his/her effort, then we have a controllable cause. In contradistinction, if one thinks that his/her marks were due to luck, then we have an uncontrollable cause. Needless to say, the type of cause (external vs. internal; stable vs. unstable; controllable vs. uncontrollabe) we attribute to what happens to us in our daily life has a crucial role in what effectively happens to us in our everyday life. Consider the case of a student who thinks that his/her marks are dependent upon luck or its thereof. When this is the case, the student at hand is led to think that it is pointless to studying or not studying before the exam takes place. There is also accumulated evidence that shows that we tend to explain others' unsuccessful behavior in terms personality or physical traits ("s/he slipped while walking because s/he is lame), whereas we tend to explain our failures as if we were behaviorist psychologists ("I slipped because it was dark). This asymmetry in explaining our/others' faillures is called the fundamental attribution error. As for our and others' success there is amassing evidence that show that we tend to attribute it to internal causes when the former is the case, and to external causes when the latter is the case. In other words, I perform well at school because I am intelligent. When the others perform well at school, they do so because of chance or luck. This assymetry is called the self-deserving bias.
I hope I has got your question and that this helps.
Best regards,
Orlando
Thanks Orlando. I’m aware of attribution theory, but I now understand it much better from your description.
What I’m looking for, though, is how people conceptualise writing tools, not so much their self as a writer. Personification, abstraction, paragraphing or right-branching sentence conceptualisation would be examples of these writing tools.
Hi Brett,
I would suggest you to start digging on: "Studies in Reflecting Abstraction" by Jean Piaget. To the best of my knowledge Piaget provides the more cogent theory of conceptual construction.
Cheers,
Fabian
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Medicine
- Epi
- Age Groups
- Children