David Messer | The Open University (original) (raw)
Papers by David Messer
Early Childhood Education Journal
Guided play activities were developed so that coding clubs could promote computational thinking s... more Guided play activities were developed so that coding clubs could promote computational thinking skills in preschool children. The clubs involved fifteen children aged between 2 and 4 years, including a group of children with communication difficulties. The children took part in an action-research scoping study over three coding clubs involving six 45–60-min sessions. The activities were developed to teach computational skills and, ultimately, concepts of programming and coding. The findings suggested that the children began to develop many of the skills necessary for programming and coding as well as computational thinking skills such as collaboration, logical thinking and debugging algorithms. However, they found programming specific algorithms into Bee-Bots complicated and they needed support from adults to direct the robots along routes on simple maps. Overall, the guided play activities could be used in nurseries and preschool establishments to teach early computational thinkin...
On account of the developmental relationship between motor ability and spatial skills. we investi... more On account of the developmental relationship between motor ability and spatial skills. we investigated the impact of physical disability (PD) on spatial cognition. Fifty-three children with special educational needs including PD took part. The children with PD were divided into those who were wheelchair users (N=34) and those who had independent locomotion (N=19). This division enabled us to additionally determine the impact of limited independent physical exploration on spatial competence (exploration is typically relatively restricted for wheelchair users). Performance of the PD groups was compared to that of typically developing (TD) children who spanned the range of non-verbal ability of the PD groups. Participants completed three spatial tasks; a mental rotation task, a Bee-bot route task and a desktop virtual reality (VR) navigation task. The PD groups broadly demonstrated lower levels of performance than the TD children. However, when performance was considered with reference...
Education and Information Technologies
This investigation concerns two questions: i). is simple educational programming with children, c... more This investigation concerns two questions: i). is simple educational programming with children, compared to working on mathematical tasks, more effective in increasing scores in mathematical abilities, spatial awareness and working memory? ii), is educational programming on a digital device, compared to similar paper and pencil programming activities, more effective in increasing mathematical abilities, spatial awareness and working memory? Forty-one 5 to 6 year olds from a UK infant school were randomly allocated to one of three groups: programming+iPad technology, programming using paper and pencils, and a comparison condition involving pencil and paper mathematical addition and subtraction tasks. Two 10-min intervention sessions took place each week, over a period of six weeks, with pre-intervention and post-intervention tests administered to assess children's mathematical abilities, spatial awareness and working memory. A series of mixed analyses of variance revealed that all three groups increased their mathematical abilities and spatial awareness. However, there were no significant increases in working memory, and there were no significant differences between any of the groups. These findings suggest that even a relatively short period of experience with programming can benefit other abilities and that the effects are similar to more directly targeted interventions. It was not found that programming using iPads resulted in higher scores than programming with paper and pencils.
Research in Developmental Disabilities
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Frontiers in psychology, 2018
There has been considerable debate and interest in the factor structure of executive functioning ... more There has been considerable debate and interest in the factor structure of executive functioning (EF). For children and young people, there is evidence of a progression from a single factor to a more differentiated structure, although the precise nature of these factors differs between investigations. The purpose of the current study was to look at this issue again with another sample, and try to understand possible reasons for previous differences between investigations. In addition, we examined the relationship between less central EF tasks, such as fluency and planning, to the more common tasks of updating/executive working memory (EWM), inhibition, and switching/shifting. A final aim was to carry out analyses which are relevant to the debate about whether EF is influenced by language ability, or language ability is influenced by EF. We reasoned that if language ability affects EF, a factor analysis of verbal and non-verbal EF tasks might result in the identification of a factor ...
Dyslexia (Chichester, England), Jan 11, 2017
The executive function of fluency describes the ability to generate items according to specific r... more The executive function of fluency describes the ability to generate items according to specific rules. Production of words beginning with a certain letter (phonemic fluency) is impaired in dyslexia, while generation of words belonging to a certain semantic category (semantic fluency) is typically unimpaired. However, in dyslexia, verbal fluency has generally been studied only in terms of overall words produced. Furthermore, performance of adults with dyslexia on non-verbal design fluency tasks has not been explored but would indicate whether deficits could be explained by executive control, rather than phonological processing, difficulties. Phonemic, semantic and design fluency tasks were presented to adults with dyslexia and without dyslexia, using fine-grained performance measures and controlling for IQ. Hierarchical regressions indicated that dyslexia predicted lower phonemic fluency, but not semantic or design fluency. At the fine-grained level, dyslexia predicted a smaller numb...
Literacy Information and Computer Education Journal, 2010
The proposed project addresses the recently introduced claim that the socio-cultural relevance of... more The proposed project addresses the recently introduced claim that the socio-cultural relevance of parent-child engagement in home book reading needs to be at the heart of new interventions in this area. The rationale for this project was to offer a practical solution to concerns about the challenges posed by traditional shared book reading interventions and about the need to take account of multiple, rapidly changing home learning environments. The proposed project brings together this broad range of issues by evaluating the benefits and effectiveness of an intervention which uses selfmade personalised books, in various formats, languages and forms. As such, the project acknowledges the socio-cultural variety of home learning environments and taps into the motivational issues for parents' (non)participation in traditional early book intervention programmes. In this paper, we identify the project's core principles, concentrating on two major tenets of the study: Firstly, the importance of story book sharing being personally meaningful to both parents and children, and secondly, the socio-cultural and temporal relevance of a home book reading intervention.
... look beyond the form of communicative behavior to try to under-stand the important aspects of... more ... look beyond the form of communicative behavior to try to under-stand the important aspects of knowledge and representation which allow ... 1991) Morissette, Ricard, & Decarie (1995) Corkum & Moore (1995) Corkum & Moore (1998) Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello (1998) Deak ...
ABSTRACT Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determine... more ABSTRACT Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that they pay more attention to phonological cues present in nouns than to natural semantics when assigning gender to determiners (Pe rez-Pereira, 1991). This experimental work also demonstrated that Spanish children are more likely to produce the correct determiner when given a noun with phonological cues which suggest it is masculine, and more likely to assign masculine gender to nouns with ambiguous cues. In this paper, we investigate the phonological cues available to children and seek to explore the possibility that di#erential frequency in the linguistic input explains the priority given to masculine forms when children are faced with ambiguous novel items. A connectionist model of determiner production was incrementally trained on a lexicon of determiner--noun phrases taken from parental speech in [*] Andrew Nix was funded by a University of Hertfordshire Research Studentship. The work was also aided by a British Council travel grant as part of the British/Spanish Joint Research Programme (Acciones Integradas) 1995/96. The ordering of the second to fourth authors is completely arbitrary and not indicative of amount of input involved in the preparation of this manuscript. Address for correspondence : Professor David Messer, Division of Psychology, South Bank University, Southwark Campus, 103 Borough Road, London SE1 0AA, UK. e-mail : messerdj@sbu.ac.uk J. Child Lang. 30 (2003), 305--331. f 2003 Cambridge University Press DOI: 10.1017/S0305000903005622 Printed in the United Kingdom 305 a longitudinal study of a child between the ages of 1 ; 7 and 2 ; 11 (Lo pez Ornat, Fernandez, Gallo & Mariscal, 1994) preserving the type and token frequency information. An...
Research in developmental disabilities, 2016
Health Psychology, May 1, 2005
Comparative optimism has been studied extensively in adults and is a significant component of soc... more Comparative optimism has been studied extensively in adults and is a significant component of social- cognitive models about health. In contrast, little is known about comparative optimism in children or about the wider social- cognitive processes that underpin their health-related behavior. This study investigated comparative optimism for health- and nonhealth-related topics in 101 children 8 or 9 years of age, the youngest ages that have been investigated so far. Children were shown to be unrealistically optimistic for health and nonhealth events. The implications of these findings for understanding comparative optimism in children are discussed.
Research in Developmental Disabilities, 2016
The Open University's repository of research publications and other research outputs Developmenta... more The Open University's repository of research publications and other research outputs Developmental delays in phonological recoding among children and adolescents with Down syndrome and Williams syndrome
Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that t... more Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that they pay more attention to phonological cues present in nouns than to natural semantics when assigning gender to determiners (Pérez-Pereira, 1991). This experimental work also demonstrated that Spanish children are more likely to produce the correct determiner when given a noun with phonological cues which suggest it is masculine, and more likely to assign masculine gender to nouns with ambiguous cues. In this paper, we investigate the phonological cues available to children and seek to explore the possibility that differential frequency in the linguistic input explains the priority given to masculine forms when children are faced with ambiguous novel items. A connectionist model of determiner production was incrementally trained on a lexicon of determiner-noun phrases taken from parental speech in [*
Research in Developmental Disabilities, 2016
Background: Executive functioning (EF) deficits are well recognized in developmental dyslexia, ye... more Background: Executive functioning (EF) deficits are well recognized in developmental dyslexia, yet the majority of studies have concerned children rather than adults, ignored the subjective experience of the individual with dyslexia (with regard to their own EFs), and have not followed current theoretical perspectives on EFs. Aims and Methods: The current study addressed these shortfalls by administering a self-report measure of EF (BRIEF-A; Roth, Isquith & Gioia, 2005) and experimental tasks to IQ-matched groups of adults with and without dyslexia. The laboratory-based tasks tested the three factors constituting the framework of EF proposed by Miyake et al. (2000). Results: In comparison to the group without dyslexia, the participants with dyslexia self-reported more frequent EF problems in day-today life, with these difficulties centering on metacognitive processes (working memory, planning, task monitoring, and organization) rather than on the regulation of emotion and behaviour. The participants with dyslexia showed significant deficits in EF (inhibition, set shifting, and working memory). Conclusions and Implications: The findings indicated that dyslexia-related problems have an impact on the daily experience of adults with the condition. Further, EF difficulties are present in adulthood across a range of laboratory-based measures, and, given the nature of the experimental tasks presented, extend beyond difficulties related solely to phonological processing.
Early Childhood Education Journal
Guided play activities were developed so that coding clubs could promote computational thinking s... more Guided play activities were developed so that coding clubs could promote computational thinking skills in preschool children. The clubs involved fifteen children aged between 2 and 4 years, including a group of children with communication difficulties. The children took part in an action-research scoping study over three coding clubs involving six 45–60-min sessions. The activities were developed to teach computational skills and, ultimately, concepts of programming and coding. The findings suggested that the children began to develop many of the skills necessary for programming and coding as well as computational thinking skills such as collaboration, logical thinking and debugging algorithms. However, they found programming specific algorithms into Bee-Bots complicated and they needed support from adults to direct the robots along routes on simple maps. Overall, the guided play activities could be used in nurseries and preschool establishments to teach early computational thinkin...
On account of the developmental relationship between motor ability and spatial skills. we investi... more On account of the developmental relationship between motor ability and spatial skills. we investigated the impact of physical disability (PD) on spatial cognition. Fifty-three children with special educational needs including PD took part. The children with PD were divided into those who were wheelchair users (N=34) and those who had independent locomotion (N=19). This division enabled us to additionally determine the impact of limited independent physical exploration on spatial competence (exploration is typically relatively restricted for wheelchair users). Performance of the PD groups was compared to that of typically developing (TD) children who spanned the range of non-verbal ability of the PD groups. Participants completed three spatial tasks; a mental rotation task, a Bee-bot route task and a desktop virtual reality (VR) navigation task. The PD groups broadly demonstrated lower levels of performance than the TD children. However, when performance was considered with reference...
Education and Information Technologies
This investigation concerns two questions: i). is simple educational programming with children, c... more This investigation concerns two questions: i). is simple educational programming with children, compared to working on mathematical tasks, more effective in increasing scores in mathematical abilities, spatial awareness and working memory? ii), is educational programming on a digital device, compared to similar paper and pencil programming activities, more effective in increasing mathematical abilities, spatial awareness and working memory? Forty-one 5 to 6 year olds from a UK infant school were randomly allocated to one of three groups: programming+iPad technology, programming using paper and pencils, and a comparison condition involving pencil and paper mathematical addition and subtraction tasks. Two 10-min intervention sessions took place each week, over a period of six weeks, with pre-intervention and post-intervention tests administered to assess children's mathematical abilities, spatial awareness and working memory. A series of mixed analyses of variance revealed that all three groups increased their mathematical abilities and spatial awareness. However, there were no significant increases in working memory, and there were no significant differences between any of the groups. These findings suggest that even a relatively short period of experience with programming can benefit other abilities and that the effects are similar to more directly targeted interventions. It was not found that programming using iPads resulted in higher scores than programming with paper and pencils.
Research in Developmental Disabilities
For guidance on citations see FAQs.
Frontiers in psychology, 2018
There has been considerable debate and interest in the factor structure of executive functioning ... more There has been considerable debate and interest in the factor structure of executive functioning (EF). For children and young people, there is evidence of a progression from a single factor to a more differentiated structure, although the precise nature of these factors differs between investigations. The purpose of the current study was to look at this issue again with another sample, and try to understand possible reasons for previous differences between investigations. In addition, we examined the relationship between less central EF tasks, such as fluency and planning, to the more common tasks of updating/executive working memory (EWM), inhibition, and switching/shifting. A final aim was to carry out analyses which are relevant to the debate about whether EF is influenced by language ability, or language ability is influenced by EF. We reasoned that if language ability affects EF, a factor analysis of verbal and non-verbal EF tasks might result in the identification of a factor ...
Dyslexia (Chichester, England), Jan 11, 2017
The executive function of fluency describes the ability to generate items according to specific r... more The executive function of fluency describes the ability to generate items according to specific rules. Production of words beginning with a certain letter (phonemic fluency) is impaired in dyslexia, while generation of words belonging to a certain semantic category (semantic fluency) is typically unimpaired. However, in dyslexia, verbal fluency has generally been studied only in terms of overall words produced. Furthermore, performance of adults with dyslexia on non-verbal design fluency tasks has not been explored but would indicate whether deficits could be explained by executive control, rather than phonological processing, difficulties. Phonemic, semantic and design fluency tasks were presented to adults with dyslexia and without dyslexia, using fine-grained performance measures and controlling for IQ. Hierarchical regressions indicated that dyslexia predicted lower phonemic fluency, but not semantic or design fluency. At the fine-grained level, dyslexia predicted a smaller numb...
Literacy Information and Computer Education Journal, 2010
The proposed project addresses the recently introduced claim that the socio-cultural relevance of... more The proposed project addresses the recently introduced claim that the socio-cultural relevance of parent-child engagement in home book reading needs to be at the heart of new interventions in this area. The rationale for this project was to offer a practical solution to concerns about the challenges posed by traditional shared book reading interventions and about the need to take account of multiple, rapidly changing home learning environments. The proposed project brings together this broad range of issues by evaluating the benefits and effectiveness of an intervention which uses selfmade personalised books, in various formats, languages and forms. As such, the project acknowledges the socio-cultural variety of home learning environments and taps into the motivational issues for parents' (non)participation in traditional early book intervention programmes. In this paper, we identify the project's core principles, concentrating on two major tenets of the study: Firstly, the importance of story book sharing being personally meaningful to both parents and children, and secondly, the socio-cultural and temporal relevance of a home book reading intervention.
... look beyond the form of communicative behavior to try to under-stand the important aspects of... more ... look beyond the form of communicative behavior to try to under-stand the important aspects of knowledge and representation which allow ... 1991) Morissette, Ricard, & Decarie (1995) Corkum & Moore (1995) Corkum & Moore (1998) Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello (1998) Deak ...
ABSTRACT Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determine... more ABSTRACT Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that they pay more attention to phonological cues present in nouns than to natural semantics when assigning gender to determiners (Pe rez-Pereira, 1991). This experimental work also demonstrated that Spanish children are more likely to produce the correct determiner when given a noun with phonological cues which suggest it is masculine, and more likely to assign masculine gender to nouns with ambiguous cues. In this paper, we investigate the phonological cues available to children and seek to explore the possibility that di#erential frequency in the linguistic input explains the priority given to masculine forms when children are faced with ambiguous novel items. A connectionist model of determiner production was incrementally trained on a lexicon of determiner--noun phrases taken from parental speech in [*] Andrew Nix was funded by a University of Hertfordshire Research Studentship. The work was also aided by a British Council travel grant as part of the British/Spanish Joint Research Programme (Acciones Integradas) 1995/96. The ordering of the second to fourth authors is completely arbitrary and not indicative of amount of input involved in the preparation of this manuscript. Address for correspondence : Professor David Messer, Division of Psychology, South Bank University, Southwark Campus, 103 Borough Road, London SE1 0AA, UK. e-mail : messerdj@sbu.ac.uk J. Child Lang. 30 (2003), 305--331. f 2003 Cambridge University Press DOI: 10.1017/S0305000903005622 Printed in the United Kingdom 305 a longitudinal study of a child between the ages of 1 ; 7 and 2 ; 11 (Lo pez Ornat, Fernandez, Gallo & Mariscal, 1994) preserving the type and token frequency information. An...
Research in developmental disabilities, 2016
Health Psychology, May 1, 2005
Comparative optimism has been studied extensively in adults and is a significant component of soc... more Comparative optimism has been studied extensively in adults and is a significant component of social- cognitive models about health. In contrast, little is known about comparative optimism in children or about the wider social- cognitive processes that underpin their health-related behavior. This study investigated comparative optimism for health- and nonhealth-related topics in 101 children 8 or 9 years of age, the youngest ages that have been investigated so far. Children were shown to be unrealistically optimistic for health and nonhealth events. The implications of these findings for understanding comparative optimism in children are discussed.
Research in Developmental Disabilities, 2016
The Open University's repository of research publications and other research outputs Developmenta... more The Open University's repository of research publications and other research outputs Developmental delays in phonological recoding among children and adolescents with Down syndrome and Williams syndrome
Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that t... more Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that they pay more attention to phonological cues present in nouns than to natural semantics when assigning gender to determiners (Pérez-Pereira, 1991). This experimental work also demonstrated that Spanish children are more likely to produce the correct determiner when given a noun with phonological cues which suggest it is masculine, and more likely to assign masculine gender to nouns with ambiguous cues. In this paper, we investigate the phonological cues available to children and seek to explore the possibility that differential frequency in the linguistic input explains the priority given to masculine forms when children are faced with ambiguous novel items. A connectionist model of determiner production was incrementally trained on a lexicon of determiner-noun phrases taken from parental speech in [*
Research in Developmental Disabilities, 2016
Background: Executive functioning (EF) deficits are well recognized in developmental dyslexia, ye... more Background: Executive functioning (EF) deficits are well recognized in developmental dyslexia, yet the majority of studies have concerned children rather than adults, ignored the subjective experience of the individual with dyslexia (with regard to their own EFs), and have not followed current theoretical perspectives on EFs. Aims and Methods: The current study addressed these shortfalls by administering a self-report measure of EF (BRIEF-A; Roth, Isquith & Gioia, 2005) and experimental tasks to IQ-matched groups of adults with and without dyslexia. The laboratory-based tasks tested the three factors constituting the framework of EF proposed by Miyake et al. (2000). Results: In comparison to the group without dyslexia, the participants with dyslexia self-reported more frequent EF problems in day-today life, with these difficulties centering on metacognitive processes (working memory, planning, task monitoring, and organization) rather than on the regulation of emotion and behaviour. The participants with dyslexia showed significant deficits in EF (inhibition, set shifting, and working memory). Conclusions and Implications: The findings indicated that dyslexia-related problems have an impact on the daily experience of adults with the condition. Further, EF difficulties are present in adulthood across a range of laboratory-based measures, and, given the nature of the experimental tasks presented, extend beyond difficulties related solely to phonological processing.