DON’T THROW THE BABY OUT WITH THE BATHWATER: HOW TO MAKE RESEARCH ON BASIC COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN CHILDREN BOTH RELIABLE AND PLEASANT

This article presents suggestions on how to adjust well-known cognitive tasks to make them appropriate for investigating basic cognitive processes (especially working memory) in primary school children. It is well-known that motivation or intelligence can influence scholastic performance of the children. These factors can be assessed by many standardized methods which are not only reliable but also well-adjusted to the possibilities and needs of the students at the certain age (e.g. Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). However, more and more research reveals that some rather elementary cognitive processes enable to predict scholastic achievements even better. One of the most influential factors of that kind is working memory - a system responsible for short-term storage and processing of information in mind. There are some standardized English language methods of assessment of some elementary processes in children but researchers, who want to investigate working memory in non-English speaking children, usually have to create and adjust suitable methods of their own. N-back or Operation span task are the procedures widely used to measure working memory functions in adults but after some modifications they can be suitable for children as well. However, experimental psychologists have to keep in mind that adjusting methods to the children's cognitive possibilities is as much important as making them interesting and the whole process of research enjoyable. Otherwise it might be difficult to engage students at the sufficient level of interest and the assessment may lack ecological validity. This article contains a brief presentation of the motivational system and cognitive tasks specially designed for the aims of the (recently finished) project on working memory training in children. None of the children participating in the aforementioned project resigned (despite about 20 hours of a cognitive measurement) and all of them declared the will to take part in some further investigations what is an argument that procedures used in the study have met the demand.