Abstracts - Earli

eflection. The latter were examined in ‘conventional’ adult-child interviews, and in peerinteraction situations. In addition, on the basis of CINDLE (Cambridge Independent LearningDevelopment Evaluation; Whitebread et al., 2005), the kindergarten teachers evaluated eachchild’s level of cognitive, emotional, motivational, and social competencies. The findingsindicated significant, but moderate correlations between cognitive, meta-cognitive and TOM. Thecorrelations ranged between .31 and .64, explaining less then 40% of the variances. Furthermore,all measures of learning strategies and reflection were significantly higher at the peer-interactionsituation compared to the ‘conventional’ adult-child interview. The peer interaction context wasfound to be more effective then the adult-child interaction context even after controlling for verbalabilities and TOM development. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings will bediscussed at the conference.F 329 August 2007 17:00 - 18:20Room: 0.87 MarxPaper SessionScience educationChair:Mary Dawn Ainley, University of Melbourne, AustraliaAnalogical reasoning and biology knowledge of 8th grade socially disadvantaged pupilsErzsébet Antal, University of Szeged, HungaryThis paper presents the results of a study carried out in 2004 that aimed to assess (1) the level andthe deficiencies of biology knowledge and (2) the development and the characteristics ofanalogical reasoning in 8th grade socially disadvantaged pupils in Hungary (N » 900) in thecontext of several background variables such as the attitude to subject, learning strategies and selfregulatinglearning. This study is closely linked to an earlier survey of 8th grade Hungarian urbanstudents in 2001 (N = 220). In both cases the same instruments were used (a Verbal analogies testto assess inductive reasoning, a Biology knowledge test, a Biology analogy test and aquestionnaire), thus it is possible to compare the performance and the characteristics of the twosamples, with subjects of the same age, but coming from significantly different socio-culturalbackgrounds. The results of the tests indicate that socially disadvantaged pupils have a very lowlevel of biology knowledge and they show poor domain-specific and domain-general analogicalreasoning. Their performance was much poorer (20-30%) than that of those who participated inthe 2001 survey, from better social backgrounds. However, the proportions of the test results aresimilar in the two samples. The analysis of frequency distribution showed that the achievements ofsocially disadvantaged pupils were shifted to the lower scores, but the characteristics of thedistribution curves were parallel in the two samples. The research suggests a clear link betweensocial disadvantage and knowledge acquisition as well as the development of reasoning abilities.Confirming that cognitive development follows a universal tendency, the results help to create aspecial developmental program that targets analogical reasoning and biology knowledge fordisadvantaged pupils.– 320 –