Browsing by Author "Vaalasranta, Merja"

Involvement measures the quality of activity. By evaluating a child's involvement in an activity, we can gain information about how the child experiences the activity. According to previous research, children who are involved in an activity are working at the limits of their abilities. The purpose of this study is to establish how preschoolers are involved and perform in cognitive tasks and furthermore, whether involvement in a task is related to task performance. This research was conducted as a case study. The research material consists of video footage and documents gathered 2008 in Vantaa as part of Laulua arjessa, a project by the University of Helsinki on promoting children's emotional well-being in daycare centers. The subjects of the study are three preschool girls from the same daycare preschool group. The video material consists of the girls performing cognitive tasks. These tasks were selected from NEPSY ll, a neuropsychological test for children ages 3-16. The documents consist of the girls' task papers, ten from each girl. The video material was analyzed using the Leuven Involvement Scale for Young Children (LIS-YC). The cognitive tasks were scored in accordance with NEPSY ll guidelines. The present study found variation in involvement between the preschool girls. The involvement of the first girl included a multitude of intense periods and occasional persistent periods. The second girl managed periods of intense involvement in one task, but was only involved to some extent in the others. The third girl's involvement was somewhat divided between periods of sustained and intense involvement, with emphasis on intense and even persistent periods. The overall performance of one of the girls was mostly good. The other two girls performed relatively poorly in two of the four tasks. One of the girls displayed a relation between involvement and performance in all of the tasks and one task in particular, while another girl showed no such relation, but performed mostly well. And in one girl's case, the relation between involvement and performance was evident in one task. With preschoolers, the quality of the task is relevant to task involvement.