Understanding Children's Learning

A Text for Teaching Assistants

Claire Alfrey

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136744808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Structured to support teaching assistants, this pioneering textbook provides an academic underpinning to each of the key topics studied. The book: develops the theoretical knowledge needed to enhance work in the classroom; encourages students to reflect on their own practice; is in an ideal textbook format - full of tasks, questions, summaries and reading lists; and covers both primary and secondary years. Practical, easy-to-read and written specifically for teaching assistants, this book is also applicable for any trainee teachers or students of education.

1How Children Think and Learn

Margaret A. Alfrey and Jackie A. Durell

The more condescention is made to a childes capacity, by proceeding orderly and plainly from what he knoweth already, to what doth naturally and necessarily follow thereupon, the more easily he will learn.

Hoole (19 13: 6)

Introduction

This chapter will provide an introduction to how children come to understand the world they live in. It will consider cognitive, social and cultural development, giving a framework for understanding how children grow and develop. Through your own remembered experiences, observations, reading and discussion, the ways in which theories of development and learning explain and account for processes in development will be explored. By the end of the chapter you should have:

• enhanced your understanding of the development of children’s thinking and learning through the theories of Vygotsky, Piaget, Bruner and Donaldson;

• understood the need to observe and assess in order to understand the development and needs of children;

• become aware of a range of strategies, including identification of appropriate theoretical perspectives and their practical application in assessing children’s activities and developed the ability to use them to promote children’s development and learning;

• considered the contexts in which the process of social and cultural awareness takes place and reflected on a range of possible influences on children’s development.

The educator’s role

This section explores the development of children’s thinking and learning mainly through the theories of Piaget, Bruner, Vygotsky and Donaldson. No theorist has all the answers in respect of explaining the development of children’s understanding. Each casts some light on the problem and offers a slightly different emphasis. Some have been more influential than others and, in due course, new theorists will come along with new perspectives on human understanding.

What we are concerned with is how children come to understand the world they live in and their understanding of their social world as well as the cognitive and cultural nature of their world and with their understanding of themselves as people. It is helpful to consider this in relation to stages of development, although we must remember that we are talking about continuous development and that any attempt to relate stage to age can only be approximate. It is also important to remember that, although we may consider strands of development – physical, emotional, social and cognitive – in fact, the strands are interrelated. What we are concerned with is a developing personality.

We, as educators, need to think and reflect with academic rigour, depth and imagination on the nature of learning and above all on how children learn and how we might participate most effectively to support and enhance that process. To do this we need to recall work done with children – observing them, working with them, hearing them read, carrying out activities and other tasks – and then focus our understanding on the ways children work and interact with the theories presented, so that through sharing reflection, discussion and practice we can extend and expand the children’s learning and understanding of their world.

For educators the most crucial skill is the ability to find the right ‘match’ between the curriculum in school and the stage the child has reached. We need two kinds of understanding for this:

1 An understanding of the subjects in the school curriculum and how teaching can be matched to the needs of the child.

2 An understanding of the way children develop and this means considering:

(a) how far their understanding depends on their past and present experiences;

(b) what the quality of their thinking is;

(c) how they interact through language;

(d) their personality, socialisation and the way they mix and act with others.

Obviously, we cannot think about everything but we are always thinking about something. What we want the children to do is to think more about that ‘something’. We frequently hear phrases such as ‘Don’t think about it,’ ‘I can’t think about it now.’ Children, however, have a natural curiosity about the world around them and to make sense of their world, they need help in responding to, and processing, information they gather.

So how do theories of cognitive development help? Before we consider some theories it is useful to define what we mean by cognition and a theory. Cognition is a collective term for the processes involved in organising, handling and using knowledge and referring to all the processes of the mind that lead to knowledge, such as remembering, understanding, problem-solving, relating, imagining, creating, fantasising, and so on. A theory seeks to explain and predict and is usually based on systematic observation and experimentation. Educational theories are often based on beliefs and values about the learner, about learning itself, about the nature of knowledge and about the educator’s role.

To help inform and guide us to a situation where, through planned intervention, we can provide a solid foundation of knowledge in such a way that it demands enquiry, challenge and a search for new understanding, we can draw on the work of four main theorists: (1) Piaget who refers to stages of development; (2) Vygotsky who writes of the importance of social interaction and the zone of proximal development (ZPD – what a child might achieve given the right help and support); (3) Bruner who refers to the nature of intellectual growth as equalling cognitive conflict; and (4) Donaldson who believes thinking is limited by the need for tasks and activities to make what she terms, ‘human sense’. For a general introduction to these theorists, see Lee and Gupta (1998).

Drawing on these four, we might sum up learning as ‘resolving cognitive conflict’. This, it is argued, is the key to achieving the aim of enabling all children to reach their potential.

Piaget

Let us start with Piaget whose theory of cognitive development is probably the best known. Although some aspects of his work are being re-examined today, his work is still of major importance to the understanding of child development. His work can be thought of as providing stepping-stones: a developmental timetable that gives approximate dates to cognitive achievements.

Piaget’s stages of development

• The sensory motor stage: from birth to about two years (pre-conceptual). The child comes to know the world in terms of the physical actions she can perform. The stage ends with the acquisition of thought and language.

• The pre-operational stage: from 2 to about 7 years (intuitive). So-called because, according to Piaget, the pre-school child has yet to acquire fully logical (operational) thinking.

• The concrete operational stage: from about 7 to about 12 years. Typical of the primary school age child, who can think logically about ‘concrete’ problems in the here and now. With the acquisition of concrete operations, thought becomes ‘reversible’.

• The formal operational stage: from about 12 years onwards. ‘A form of thought acquired by adolescents … who can think about abstract or hypothetical problems, especially in the realm of scientific reasoning, proceeding by systematic deductions from hypotheses’ (Butterworth and Harris 1994, in Lee and Gupta 1998: 7).

Piaget thought children solve problems on different levels – the difference between older and younger children was not that older children have more knowledge but that they have knowledge of a different sort and a wider experience of their world. He believed children are not born with understanding ready made but that they have to construct understanding from experiences and that they have mental structures that enable them to cope with the complicated world of people and events. These structures he called schemas and the simplest of these are present at birth. For example, a baby takes in information by objects he acts on – his own fingers, toes, toys, and so on. As the baby acts on his world, he assimilates, that is, he takes in objects and events to his schemas, thereby building a store of understanding, of knowledge, for example, of faces, events, routines, food. Assimilation is, then, the process that enables children to deal with new situations and new problems by using their current stock of schemas. Children, and adults, are constantly restructuring their experiences. For example, young children may find all toys cannot easily be grasped, some won’t fit in the mouth or taste tolerable, and as adults we may still be surprised at the variety of ways in which containers may be opened!

The necessary changes and modifications to our previous ways of acting on these things, Piaget described as a process of accommodation. Through accommodation existing ideas or schemas (at whatever age) become modified to fit in with the present experience and these processes of assimilation and accommodation continue throughout our life, becoming ever more complex. In a way, we construct more complex schemas by using simpler ones. This means accommodation is always the process where we undergo a mental change in order to manage problems that were at first too difficult to solve. Further assimilation and accommodation have to fit in with each other so that adaptation, or learning, can take place.

Piaget’s stages

Pre-conceptual or sensory motor stage

This is not saying young children cannot form concepts. They can, and do, of shape, size, food, animals. For example, young children may work out that a dog has four legs; therefore all four-legged animals are dogs until they are told, ‘No, it’s a cow’. Their thinking, then, may tell them all small four-legged animals are dogs and all large four-legged animals are cows. Only later will they be classified into mammals, and so on. Equally, the usual, embarrassing or humorous example of calling all men daddy: it’s not, of course that young children don’t recognise their father, it’s the only word they have rather than the general term male or men – a classification problem they have yet to resolve!

Intuitive or pre-operational stage

According to Piaget, children at this stage are egocentric – they are unable to see anything from a point of view other than their own. They are unable to reason in any logical way. Thinking is closely shaped by experiences without reasoning, that is, they are bound by what they see. Therefore thinking is based on perceptions and not on reasoning; it is intuitive. Parents might well turn this to their advantage: for example, when children say. ‘He’s got four pieces of toast, I’ve only got two.’ By cutting the two pieces of toast in half, both children now have four pieces and all is fair! Piaget is arguing that children at this age are bound by the number of pieces of toast, always recognising that someo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 How Children Think and Learn
• 2 Key Skills: Managing Change through Study
• 3 Factors Influencing Motor Development
• 4 Out of the Mouths and Minds of Babes: Language Acquisition and Development
• 5 Children and Numeracy
• 6 An Introduction to Science and Technology
• 7 'Mind the Gap': Creativity and Learning
• 8 Educating All: Towards Inclusive Classroom Practice for Children with Special Educational Needs
• 9 Managing Behaviour for Learning
• 10 Gender Issues in Education
• 11 Citizenship
• Index