精神薄弱児の分類反応における教示条件の効果

抄録

It is a important problem to establish more effective teaching methods of various tasks in educating the retarded children. This study was carried out to gain some sources of this kind. Namely, exploring both the effect of experimental condition (verbal instruction, material situation) and it's developmental aspects in colorform sorting tasks were the aim of this study. In present experiment, sorting tasks consisted of 1) sorting according to a vague instruction, 2) color or form selection in simplified material situation, 3) "color" oriented-selection, 4) "form" oriented-selection, 5) sorting according to an example, and 6) color and form naming test.Ninety six mentally retarded from 2 years to 9 years of mental age and 98 normal children from 3 years to 5 years of chronological age were used as subjects in this experiment. Some results indicated that performances of the retarded were facilitated by concrete verbal instruction and simplified material situation. But some limitations existed in effects of verbal instruction to the retarded with lower mental age (or lower IQ) They were able to say carelessly "phonetic" name of the object, but they could not use properly the name as symbol of the object. Their inadequate performances would also occur from that they often understand more general concept ("color", "form", …etc.), but they do not understand correctly it's sub-concept ("blue", "yellow", …etc.). Especially, the retarded from 2 years of MA were not oriented by "color" or "form" and also were not oriented correctly by it's sub-concepts ("red", "blue", …"triangle" "square" etc.). Even in 5 and 6 years of MA level, difficulty of shifting from "color" response to "form" response vice versa was found. This is a matter of rigidity, but in the present paper the author did not intentionally discuss on it the mentally retarded with more than 7 years of MA were able to perform according to verbal instructions. Normal children with same MA were superior to the retarded in all conditions. However, it was suggested that we need to investigate the complex relation between intelligence levels (IQ, MA) and various performances of these tasks.