Confounding Experimenter Effects in Conceptual Tempo Research

Recent attacks on measures used to assess conceptual tempo in children have pointed out a number of problems adhering in the techniques developed by Kagan and his colleagues (Kagan, Rosman, Day, Albert, & Phillips, 1964), including statistical, theoretical, and empirical issues (e.g., Block, Block, & Harrington, 1974). One point which seems to have escaped scrutiny is a possible confound resulting from differences among experimenters. The standard procedure in assessing conceptual tempo is to obtain latencies of response using a stop-watch and then to pool all subjects' data and perform a median split on latencies (and subsequently, on accuracy scores). For this technique to result in meaningful groups, before pooling one ought to perform a preliminary check for group differences between subjects run by different experimenters (even assuming random assignment). Unfortunately, if such tests have been performed, they are seldom mentioned in reports of conceptual tempo. Experimenter differences are found on many tasks (e.g., Ammons & Ammons, 1970) but are particularly likely to arise in the absence of instrumentation for measuring latencies-the personal equation problem in which individual differences were first considered (Anastasi, 1958, pp. 4-5). The empirical status of these differences on the tasks used to assess conceptual tempo must be determined by further research, but it certainly can be said that researchers working in this area are obligated to justify their failure to test for such differences prior to pooling data (which amounts to accepting implicitly the null hypothesis)

Cognitive psychology · Confounding · Statistics · Early Childhood Education and Development · Psychology

• Instructional Variations and Adults' Conceptual Tempo Performance

  Andrew R Gilpin•The Journal of General Psychology•1979

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• Information processing in the child

  Jerome Kagan, Bernice L Rosman et al.•The Psychological Monographs•1964

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• Some misgivings about the Matching Familiar Figures Test as a measure of reflection-impulsivity

  Jack Block, Jeanne H Block et al.•Developmental Psychology•1974

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