This study aimes to analyze the relationship of the maternal behaviour and attitude with the mother's teaching strategies of control and. feedback.
The maternal behaviour was observed during she taught a two dimensional block sorting task to the child. The control and feedback types were rated by a trained rater on four scales and they were classified into five control types and four feedback types. The five control types were defined as the indirect, indirect-direct, direct, medium, and weak. The four feedback types were defined as the positive, positivenegative, negative, and weak.
As the maternal attitudes, the 26 composites wereobtained from the interview with the mother, the questionnaire filled by her and other measures of attitude toward child-rearing. They were grouped into three groups. The first group included indices of the preparation of the verbal environment, the direct teaching, and the emphasis of the child's intrinsic motivation. It was hypothesized that this first group scores will be closely related to the control teaching types. The second group was that of the mother's participation in the child's development, the concern for the child, the evaluation of the parental and natural ability factors in the child's performance in the school, the prediction of the child's future life, and the expectations of the child's development. This group was assumed to constitute the background for the first group attitudes, and to be related indirectly to the control teaching types. The third was the pattern in which the mother evaluated various forms of positive and negative reinforcements. This was assumed to be closely related to the feedback teaching types.
The relationships of the distributions over these control and feedback types to composite scores of the maternal attitudes were examined.
The samples were 58 mothers whose children were four years old at the time of the experiment of the Block Sorting Task.
The main results were as follows:
1 The control teaching types were more closely related to the child-rearing attitudes than the feedback teaching types.
2 The following maternal attitude scores were found to be related to the control types; the preparation of the verbal environment, the direct teaching, the emphasis of the child's intrinsic motivation, the emphasis of the parental factor to the child's performance in the school, and the general level of the predictions and the expectations of the child. Thus,the first group variables were related to the control types more closely than others.
3 Among the third group variables, only the verbal reinforcements were significantly related to the feedback teaching types.
These results suggest the consistency of the maternal behaviour and attitude, and the effect of these maternal consistent behaviour and attitude on the child's performance.
This study was conducted as a part of a crosscultural project “The cross-cultural study of influences of the upbringing style on the development of intelligence and educability” headed in the U. S. by Dr. R. Hess, Stanford University, and in Japan by Dr. H. Azuma, the University of Tokyo. The Japanese data collection and analysis were supported by the fund from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and Japanese Ministry of Education. While this report is concerned only with data collected in Japan, we owe the research methods and a part of methods of analysis to suggestions from Dr. Hess and f his staff members.
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