Developing Thinking and Understanding in Young Children

An Introduction for Students

Sue Robson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429890772
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The third edition of this essential book presents a comprehensive and accessible overview of contemporary theory and research about young children's developing thinking and understanding. Sue Robson's detailed exploration of the ideas and theories is enlivened by transcripts of children's activities and conversations taken from practice and contemporary research, helping readers to make links between theory, research and practice. This new edition brings together up-to-date research into neuroscience and digital learning, combining theory with discussions for best practice. Each chapter also includes ideas for further reading and suggested activities.

Key chapters explore the following:

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• Theories of cognitive development

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• The social, emotional and cultural contexts of children's thinking

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• Developments in brain science and young children

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• The central roles of play and language in young children's developing thinking

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• Children's conceptual development; visual thinking and thinking in music

This book is crucial reading for all those interested in how young children develop through their thoughts and actions, including students of Early Years studies, teachers and early years practitioners.

Chapter 1

How can we think about young children’s thinking?

Where do the days of the week come from? Do they come from the sun or from the clocks?

(Isabella, aged 3.7)

Who would not be intrigued by Isabella’s thinking? The puzzling mind of a young child comes through loud and clear in her question as she tries to understand an everyday (literally!) event. It makes a fitting opening for a book which is about young children as active, persistent thinkers, driven by a desire to make sense and meaning in their lives, to connect what they know and understand to what they do not yet understand. In this first chapter some fundamental, underpinning ideas about thinking are considered, posed as questions which set a context for the book as a whole. In considering these questions links are also made to many other parts of the book, emphasizing a model of thinking as an activity which connects every part of young children’s experience.

What is thinking?

Thinking is a fundamentally human characteristic, an activity in which we all engage from before we are born. As a child in Fisher (2005: 1) says: ‘If we didn’t think there’d be no us’. What, though, do we mean when we use the language of thinking, for example, when we say ‘I’m thinking about it’? How do we feel when we get a card that says ‘thinking of you’? Bartsch and Wellman (1995) identify three different uses of ‘I think.’ First, they suggest, think is effectively a synonym for belief, such as ‘I think she’s a nice person’. Second, they suggest thinking is a form of imagination. Their final meaning is the main, though not exclusive, focus here, that of thinking as an activity. As Sam (aged 4.10) said to me: ‘I thinked in my head and then I done it’.

White sets out four characteristics of thinking. First, he says, thinking is intentional, it is always ‘of or about something, or thinking that something is the case’ (2002: 101; emphasis in original), which suggests the important role of knowledge and experience for thinking. Second, he says, it is an activity. We engage in it deliberately; it does not happen to us. Sometimes thinking is directed towards an end, and at other times it may be an end in itself. White’s third proposal is that thinking employs concepts, whatever the context or activity in which the thinking is happening. His final suggestion is that thinking is a skill. As we shall see later, however, particularly in Chapter 11, and as White himself emphasizes, it is not just a skill, important though this is. Equally important is the development of the disposition to make use of this skill, to want to be a thinker and to enjoy thinking.

What does thinking mean to you, and how would you describe it? Practitioners in one nursery identified words such as predicting, representing, recalling, wondering, deciding and evaluating as useful words related to the practice of thinking. They also suggested other, perhaps initially less likely, words, including pretending, playing, picturing and dreaming (Ann Bridges and Pat Gura, in collaboration with the staff, children and parents of Vanessa Nursery School). Let us take three possible words that often come up in discussions about thinking, and consider them in a little more depth: ‘intelligence’, ‘learning’ and ‘knowing’.

Intelligence

The idea that thinking is related to intelligence is pervasive. It finds its expression in approaches to intelligence testing and IQ scores, considered in more detail in Chapter 6. For the public, ‘intelligence’ has often assumed the role of a badge of social approval (White 2002).

Defining what we mean by intelligence is, however, tremendously difficult, although this has not stopped people from trying. Siegler et al. (2017) suggest that one of the difficulties in defining intelligence is that it is possible to describe it in three different ways: as a single trait, as a few basic abilities or as many things. The single trait perspective rests on the idea that we each possess a certain amount of so-called general intelligence, or g, a term coined by Charles Spearman (Siegler et al. 2017), and analogous to IQ. This general intelligence influences all aspects of cognitive functioning, and is common to all intellectual tasks. The idea of intelligence as a few basic abilities is most simply reflected in a view that there are two types, described as crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence refers to factual knowledge about the world (Cattell 1971; Sternberg 1985) or the ‘accumulation of schooling, acculturation and other learning experiences’ (Meadows 2006: 217), whilst fluid intelligence involves the ability to solve novel problems, and to think on the spot (Cattell 1971; Sternberg 1985). Recent research supports a distinction between the two (Nisbett et al. 2012). The third way of describing intelligence is to see it as composed of numerous cognitive processes such as remembering, planning, reasoning, solving problems and so on, all drawn upon in the performance of cognitive tasks such as reading, or arithmetic (Siegler et al. 2017). In an attempt to reconcile these three differing perspectives, Carroll (2005) proposes the three-stratum theory of intelligence, which features g at the top, with a number of basically general abilities, including fluid and crystallized intelligence in the middle, and a lower tier of specific processes such as visualization, memory span and language comprehension.

Francis Galton, developing mental testing in the nineteenth century, saw intelligence as fixed, inherited and underlying all cognitive activity. Those who came after him, including Eysenck and Burt, thus defined it as ‘innate, general cognitive ability’ (Burt in White 2002: 78). This looks very different to Claxton’s definition of intelligence as ‘knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do’ (1999a: 4). As he emphasizes (2015), this will be dependent upon the world you are living in, and what is valued and needed at that place and time. Thornton suggests that intelligence is ‘the capacity to solve problems and interact with the world in adaptive ways’ (2002: 179), a wide-ranging definition that, as she says, views intelligence as the product of all of an individual’s knowledge, strategies and ‘mental tools’.

Sternberg’s triarchic theory (1985) proposes three types of intelligence: analytical (similar to standard ‘IQ’ definitions), creative (the ability to pose interesting questions and to come up with novel solutions) and practical (the ability to solve real-life problems). Gardner (1983), as we shall see, argues for the existence of multiple intelligences (MI), identifying a number of forms of ‘intelligence’, not just one.

How we view intelligence will have implications for what we value. Nunes (2005), for example, records teachers in her studies assessing and defining the children’s intelligence almost exclusively in relation to their verbal and literacy ability. In Chapter 2 a range of theorists is looked at, all of whom have ideas about intelligence.

Learning

In thinking about thinking, it can be difficult to steer a clear path between it and learning, and the two are sometimes used interchangeably, as if they were one and the same. In addition, there is disagreement about how learning happens and where (for example, is it solely in the mind, does it happen as a dynamic interaction between people and the tools and artefacts of their environments or is learning embodied?). What influences learning and how can we know if it has occurred?

Learning can be defined as ‘change brought about by an experience’ (Mercer 2018: 114). Such change may or may not be deliberate, thus learning can be unintentional as well as intentional, but to qualify as learning the change must be relatively permanent. What, though, is changed? In Chapter 2 we will look in more detail at this, in particular whether the change is to knowledge or behaviour. What is clear is that learning begins before birth (Mercer 2018) and takes a number of forms, including habituation, perceptual learning, statistical learning, imitation and active learning (Siegler et al. 2017). These terms will be returned to throughout the book.

In recent years there has been considerable interest in what has been termed the ‘science of learning’ (SoL) (see, inter alia, Hattie and Yates 2014; Horvath et al. 2017; Meltzoff et al. 2009), an interdisciplinary field that brings together findings from disciplines such as social, developmental and cognitive psychology, neuroscience and education. Much of this is aimed particularly at improving learning experiences in formal contexts – schools and nurseries – and thus focuses as much on teaching as on learning. From meta-analyses of a range of studies, Hattie identifies over 250 ‘influences on student achievement’ (Corwin Visible Learning plus 2018).

Claxton argues for an approach which he calls learnacy, or learning to learn. Crucially, for Claxton, this learning is not confined to ‘the articulate, the numerate, the explicit and the measurable’ (1999a: 11). Rather, it is about taking a broad view of learning, which includes the use of the imagination, a playful disposition, persistence and the ability to learn with and from others.

The relationship between play, learning and thinking is an important topic throughout the book. Broström (2017), for example, draws attention to the long-standing debate which he characterizes as play versus learning. Many early childhood curricula, including the Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage in England (DfE 2017) are underpinned by the idea of play for learning (Nilsson et al. 2018). These authors argue for what they term play as learning, arguing that young children’s engagement with the world is predominantly focused on play and exploration. Children themselves have clear ideas about what they see as play and learning (Goodhall and Atkinson 2017; Ólafsdóttir and Einarsdóttir 2019; Robson 1993), including evidence that they may see digital technologies as sites for play rather than learning, for example (Oliemat et al. 2018; Sulaymani et al. 2018). They also have views about how they learn. Sobel and Letourneau (2018), for example, found that the 3 and 4 year olds in their study believed that they learnt through their freely chosen actions, whilst the older 4 and 5 year olds had a more nuanced view, of learning through both action and instruction.

Much attention has been focused in recent years on the idea of learning styles, and the view that we all have preferred ways of learning. In particular, approaches such as VAK (Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic) and VARK (Visual, Auditory, Read/write and Kinaesthetic) (Fleming and Baume 2006) have gained popularity in early childhood settings, to the extent that Howard-Jones (2014) found that over 90 per cent of teachers in five countries (including the UK) believed that children learnt better when they received information tailored to their preferred learning styles. These ideas have also sometimes been linked to Gardner’s multiple intelligences (MI) theories, something which he is keen to refute. He asserts that linking the two is a confusion of ability (MI are essentially descriptions of ability traits) and style (Gardner 2013). As Hattie and Yates (2014) point out, having different abilities does not, of itself, imply that strengths in one area are matched by weaknesses in others, but learning style theory suggests a hierarchy of strengths and weaknesses in a preferred style.

What is the evidence for the claims of those who advocate learning styles approaches? Coffield et al. (2004) identify 71 different approaches. Much of the evaluation of these is small-scale, often concerning older children and adults, and conducted by the programme developers themselves. They suggest that there is considerable variability between the different learning styles approaches, and that it is difficult to be clear about the impact of any of them. Indeed, they go further to stress the low reliability, poor validity and negligible impact of many of the instruments (usually questionnaires) used to assess learning style, and recommend their use be discontinued. Rogowsky et al. (2015) conclude that there was no relationship between the expressed learning style preferences (in this case either visual word or auditory) of the adult participants in their study and aptitude, that is, their performance on reading or listening comprehension tests. In fact, the visual learners performed best on all kinds of tests. With regard to VAK, Howard-Jones (2007) cites evidence suggesting that presenting material in three different styles, targeted at the supposed learning styles of ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 How can we think about young children’s thinking?
• 2 Theories of cognitive development: learning to think and thinking to learn
• 3 The social, cultural and emotional contexts of thinking and understanding
• 4 The brain and the body: neuroscience and embodied cognition
• 5 Knowing about the mind: executive function, theory of mind, self-regulation and metacognition
• 6 Observing, describing and documenting children’s thinking and understanding
• 7 Language, communication and thought
• 8 Knowing about the world: the development of children’s concepts
• 9 Young children’s visual thinking
• 10 Young children’s thinking in music
• 11 Approaches to developing young children’s thinking and understanding
• Bibliography
• Index