Biomedical subjects

Peter Bryant

Publications and source records attributed to Peter Bryant.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Doublet challenge: form comes before function in children's understanding of their orthography.

Several current spelling models suggest that children cannot have any knowledge of orthographic form before they have acquired knowledge about orthographic function. We evaluated this proposition by using an orthographic choice task to inspect Finnish schoolchildren's knowledge of two aspects of consonant doublet use: the allowed doublet position (an aspect of orthographic form) and the type of phonemic information they represent (an aspect of orthographic function). The results challenged the view of the existing spelling models, since they showed that already at the beginning of the first school year children possessed formal knowledge of doublet use and knew that word-initial doublets are not allowed. However, these children were ignorant of the function of doublets, i.e. that they stand for long consonants.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed2004

A multiplex microsphere bead assay for comparative RNA expression analysis using flow cytometry.

Comparative gene-expression profiling is an important tool in understanding molecular signatures of complex diseases as well as the responses of cells and tissues to external factors. With increasing microarray data, disease-specific molecular patterns are emerging but the acquisition of these data is expensive, difficult to customize and not well standardized. Once genome-wide scans identify differentially expressed genes in a given disease, cheaper, more easily customized methods will be needed for evaluating the expression of these genes in large population samples. Here we describe a novel multiplex microsphere bead assay (MBA) to compare gene expression levels. To test this assay we evaluated the expression levels of four transcripts (BRCA1, MGB1, DLG1 and ACT1) in normal and cancerous mammary tissue. The results were consistent with those generated by quantitative real-time PCR.

Actins↗

PubMed2004

The performance of young deaf children in spatial and temporal number tasks.

Deaf children tend to fall behind in mathematics at school. This problem may be a direct result of particular experiences in the classroom; for example, deaf children may find it hard to follow teachers' presentations of basic, but nevertheless quite abstract, mathematical ideas. Another possibility is that the problem starts before school: They may either be worse than hearing children at early, nonlinguistic number representations, they may be behind in learning the culturally transmitted number string, or both. This may result in deaf children failing to develop informal problem-solving strategies, which prepare most children for the more formal learning of number and arithmetic that they will have to do at school. We compared 3- and 4-year-old deaf and hearing children's ability to remember and to reproduce the number of items in a set of objects. In one condition, we presented all the items together in a spatial array; in another, we presented them one at a time in a temporal sequence. Deaf children performed as well as the hearing children in the temporal tasks, but outperformed their hearing counterparts in the spatial task. These results suggest that preschool deaf children's number representation is at least as advanced as that of hearing children, and that they are actually better than hearing children at representing the number of objects in spatial arrays. We conclude that deaf children's difficulties with mathematical learning are not a consequence of a delay in number representation. We also conclude that deaf children should benefit from mathematical instruction that emphasizes spatial representation.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed2004

Does the cue help? Children's understanding of multiplicative concepts in different problem contexts.

BACKGROUND: Understanding arithmetical principles is a key part of a conceptual understanding of mathematics. However, very little attention has been paid to children's understanding of multiplicative, as compared to additive, principles. AIMS: This study investigated (a) children's ability to use commutative and distributive cues to solve multiplication problems, (b) whether their ability to use these cues depends on the problem context, and (c) whether separate mechanisms might underlie children's understanding of commutativity and distributivity. SAMPLE: Twenty-seven 9-year-olds (Year 5) and thirty-two 10-year-olds (Year 6). METHODS: Forty-eight multiplication problems (with a multiple-choice response format) were presented to children. There were four types of problem: Commutative, Distributive, Combined commutative-distributive (all preceded by a cue) and No cue problems. Each type of problem was presented in three different contexts: Isomorphism of measures, Area, and Cartesian product. RESULTS: Children demonstrated a good understanding of commutativity but a very poor understanding of distributivity. A common mistake in the distributive problems was to select the number that was one more, or one less, than the answer in the cue. Children's understanding of distributivity (but not commutativity) seemed to depend on the problem context. Factor analysis suggested that separate factors underlie the ability to solve commutative and distributive problems. CONCLUSIONS: Nine- and 10-year-olds understand commutativity, but are unable to use the distributive principle in multiplication. Their errors suggest that they may confuse some of the principles of multiplication with those of addition. When children do begin to understand the principle of distributivity, they most easily apply it in the context of Isomorphism of measures multiplication problems. The implications for mathematical education are discussed.

Child↗

PubMed2002

The influence of sharing on children's initial concept of division.

We report three studies that investigate young children's ability to solve partitive division problems when presented with a concrete model of a problem. In the studies, 5- to 8-year-olds were given problems about sharing "sweets" between dolls, and the sweets were grouped in one of two different ways. When the sweets were grouped by the divisor, the number of groups coincided with the number of dolls (divisor) and the number in each group was the answer (quotient). When the sweets were grouped by the quotient, the reverse was true. In all three experiments, children found it much easier to solve the problems in the Grouping-by-Divisor condition than in the Grouping-by-Quotient condition (although there was some evidence of a developmental improvement in the tasks). It is suggested that the Grouping-by-Divisor condition is easier because it coincides with the end point of sharing. The findings are discussed with reference to schemas of action in children's mathematical understanding.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed2002

It doesn't matter whether onset and rime predicts reading better than phoneme awareness does or vice versa.

Hulme et al. argue against our hypothesis that there are two routes from onset and rime awareness to reading: an indirect route whereby onset-rime awareness feeds into the development of phoneme awareness which in turn affects children's reading, and a direct route by which onset-rime awareness makes an independent contribution to children's reading. The evidence that Hulme et al. present against this hypothesis is not convincing, partly because our hypothesis actually predicts most of their results and partly because of weaknesses in the design of Hulme et al.'s study and in the unusual procedures that they employed.

Awareness↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Do beez buzz? Rule-based and frequency-based knowledge in learning to spell plural -s.

There has been much discussion about whether certain aspects of human learning depend on the abstraction of rules or on the acquisition of frequency-based knowledge. It has usually been agreed, however, that the spelling of morphological patterns in English (e.g., past tense -ed) and other languages is based on the acquisition of morphological rules, and that these rules take a long time to learn. The regular plural -s ending seems to be an exception: Even young children can spell this correctly, even when it is pronounced /z/ (as in bees). Reported here are 3 studies that show that 5- to 9-year-old children and adults do not usually base their spellings of plural real-word and pseudo-word endings on the morphological rule that all regular plurals are spelled with -s. Instead, participants appeared to use their knowledge of complex but untaught spelling patterns, which is based on the frequency with which certain letters co-occur in written English.

Child↗