Individual Differences in Cognitive Flexibility: Kelly Cartwright
1. How did you become interested in cognitive ability?
> I have always been interested in language and how we understand language, how we use it. Even from a small child I just loved playing with language. And so as I entered psychology, those kinds of things were just very interesting to me. Even when I graduated as an undergraduate I wasn't certain what direction I wanted to go. And then I ended up applying for a graduate program that focused on language and cognitive development. Cognitive development is thinking development, how our thinking changes as we get older, and I was very interested in how that related to language development. And then my interests also developed in the direction of literacy or reading development because it's another use of language. And so my interests are in that intersection.
2. What is your current area of research?
> I am interested in how cognitive development can help us better understand children's reading development. And we know that children who struggle with reading tend to be inflexible. They focus on the sounds of the words, or letters and sounds and how they correspond -- what your mom and dad might have called sounding out. And being inflexible is something that we know that children are early in cognitive development. They tend to focus on one aspect of a situation. And so what I thought might be useful is to apply what we know about children's flexibility in their thinking to our understanding of their reading development. And Piaget, he had a taskcalled the Multiple Classification Task. And it's a task that requires children to sort objects, like pictures of objects, two ways at the same time maybe by color and shape. And that shows how good children are at thinking about both aspects at the same time. Well, when we look at print as an object, printed words, they have two aspects. Print has two aspects as well, how it sounds, but also the more important part for reading, how it means or what it means. And so what I did was adapt Piaget's Multiple Classification Task for the aspects of reading that kids seem to have difficulty coordinating the signs, which they focus on a lot very inflexibly, and the meanings, which they tend to ignore. And when children sort those two ways, sort printed words by sounds and meanings, their flexibility in thinking about those aspects relates to their reading comprehension. But more importantly, if we train children to sort two ways at the same time like that, if we train them to think about the sounds and meanings of words, what I found in my research is that that actually improves their reading comprehension. So we can apply what we know about cognitive development to improve thinking in a particular area like reading.
3. Can you provide an example of your adapted multiple-classification task?
> A good example of this is having children sort sets of words. Usually the sets of words included 12 words, and they could be sorted by how they sound the beginning sound, like boat and bread both start with a "b" sound, and cake and car both start with a "c" sound. So children would have to sort those two ways at the same time. Boat and car are both vehicles, and bread and cake are both foods. And so the vehicles would be sorted along one dimension and the foods would be sorted along another dimension, and then the "b" words would be on one side and the "c" words would be on the other side.
4. What questions were you hoping to answer with your research on cognitive flexibility?
> Well, specifically, I was very interested in whether inflexible readers, children who thought inflexibly about reading tasks, could be taught to think more flexibly using what we know about cognitive development. And what my research has shown is that we can do that, but teaching children to think more flexibly with a general task, say, having them sort pictures of instruments and tools by color into brown and yellow piles, even if we teach them that task, and they can think more flexibly about those things, that doesn't improve their reading skill. It's teaching them to think more flexibly about the aspects of the reading task, the sounds and meanings of words that improve their flexibility and thinking about reading, and that's, that was really the question that I wanted to answer.
5. Are children with larger vocabularies more flexible in their approach to reading than children with smaller vocabularies?
> Not necessarily so. In some of my work I've shown that even if children have a big vocabulary, if they're not flexible, that vocabulary knowledge doesn't impact their reading comprehension. They have to be able to flexibly think about meanings of words and the print in order to be able to let that vocabulary knowledge affect their comprehension. So, children with high vocabularies may be inflexible in how they approach reading and children with high vocabularies could be very flexible so it doesn't necessarily relate to their vocabulary level.
6. How might your research findings benefit teachers who work with struggling readers?
> Teachers in classrooms can really use this research to help struggling readers think more flexibly about print. And recently, I adapted this task. When I originally did this work, I did it individually with students in schools. And that's not very practical for teachers. But recently, we adapted it for teachers to administer in small groups to students, because very often, reading interventions happen in small group settings. And so, the teachers that worked with these particular struggling readers in second to fifth grade worked with these children over five sessions, over five weeks, so five different sessions, one session per week. And those children improved in their reading comprehension over that five week span on school base measures, but also on the researcher measures of comprehension. So, it seems like it's got great applicability in a classroom, at least for these reading resource teachers, because they're using this task developed from cognitive development work to help reading in a school setting.
7. How might your research findings help parents as they teach children to read?
> Parents tended to focus on sounding out and a lot of focus is in the media on phonics and letter sound correspondences but if we only talk to our children about those aspects of print, they'll only think about print in that one way. And we need to remember that print has meaning and that meaning is important for conveying messages and so we need to think about the meanings of words and the sounds of words. So when we're talking to kids about stories, ask them questions about meaning. And when we're reading rhymes to them we might you know read a nursery rhyme or a Dr. Seuss book has may have a lot of rhyme in it, we can talk about the sounds and how words sound alike but also focus on the meaning of the story so that we're not just teaching our children to think in one way about print.
8. Where do you see your research heading in the future?
> Reading is a very complex task and it requires that we as grown-up readers coordinate lots of features and the features that I really focused on in my original work were the sounds and the meanings but we have to coordinate many more things than that. And so in the future I would like to investigate other kinds of things like syntax, position in a sentence, maybe coordinating meanings of words and and where they are in the sentence that also plays a role in reading skill. And also I'd like to look at computerized interventions because, even though this works in a classroom it's still difficult for a teacher to manage having several children sort cards at once and so if we could computerize this task, and make it work well for teachers in classrooms I think that that would have a broader impact.