Psychology 2800E Lecture Notes - Longitudinal Study
Document Summary
Running head: gender differences in children"s attention span. Here the authors studied and compared gender differences within attention among children. Observations of these children, aged between four to five years, were made at a laboratory school located at the university of western ontario. Throughout the course of a month, four observers went in to observe a set of 8 children (2 per observer), containing 4 boys and 4 girls, during their daily story time". A child losing his/her attention during story time was operationally defined into separate categories: standing/walking around, distracting others, being distracted themselves, looking around (for a substantial amount of time 3-5+ seconds) and talking. Each time one of the observers two children would lose their attention towards the story in any one of the manners listed above, it would be recorded. The data collected over two observation sessions of each child were compiled and compared between genders.