Psychological Study of Pre-Operational Fifth-grade Children
The article I will be summarizing is entitled, Making conservationists and classifiers of preoperational fifth-grade children, and was written by Linda Bakken, Johnnie Thompson, and Frances L. Clark. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development assumes that mental development is a process that is directed by maturation and experiences like the environment. Piaget also suggests that, as children get older, genetic factors play a decreasing role, however the environments impact on cognitive development rises. Also, Wadsworth proposed that children who are raised in surroundings with limited opportunities to explore will develop more slowly than will children raised within a more provoking environment; their ultimate development also will remain lower. The goal of the study at hand was to analyze children who were identified as cognitively preoperational and, through the use of hands-on experiences, determine if their mental development could be raised to concrete operational level performance.
The Term Paper on Show How Cultural Factors Can Influence Child Development
... ] Available http://WWW.wdb.org/multcult.htmlShow How Cultural Factors Can Influence Child Development And Why It Is Important For Children’s Services ... cultural values and life conditions affect the environments of children, as do political and economic conditions ... early childhood. Many families raise their children bilingual. Families who do so raise their children bilingual for many different ...
Piaget called the second stage preoperational thinking because a mental operation involves logical thought, and children at this stage do not yet have this ability to think logically. Instead, children develop the ability to deal with the world symbolically or representational. That is, they develop the ability to imagine doing something, rather than actually doing it. For example, a child in the sensori-motor stage of development learns how to pull a toy along the floor. A child reaching the preoperational stage of development develops a mental representation of the toy and a mental picture of pulling the toy. If the child can use words to describe the action, it is accomplished mentally and symbolically through the use of words. One of the major accomplishments during this period is the development of language, the ability to think and communicate by using words that represent objects and events. The elementary school years are crucial for developing successful cognitive functioning.
In 1994 Webster and Ammon found that both classification and serration are relevant in reading and writing performance. Pasnak, Holt, Campbell, and McCutcheon said that concrete operational tasks of number conservation, classification, and serration generalized to “increased academic achievement in mathematics concepts and verbal comprehension,.” and Arlin concluded that the operations of conservation, classification, and serration are positively related to reading and mathematics achievement.
The hypothesis for this study I read about was that elementary fifth-grade students who were diagnosed as cognitively functioning at the preoperational level would expand their thinking to the level of concrete operations after they participated in hands-on activities that supported its use. The experimenters used a ‘quasi-experimental’ study in which the research team identified the cognitive-stage level of fifth grade students. The research team included 4 fifth-grade classroom teachers, a preserves teacher, and three college faculty. They identified two experimental groups and two control groups. The four classroom teachers administered the assessment instrument at the beginning and end of the experiment. The two control-group teachers continued to teach their classes as usual. Some statistics of the students involved in the experiment are: 48 kids all together, 28 boys and 20 girls. The 48 students ranged in age from 10 to 12. Ethnically speaking, 59% were Hispanic, 23% were African American, 14% were European American, and 4% were Asian American. They concluded that there was no significant demographic differences between the experimental and control groups.
The Term Paper on Jean Piaget Cognitive Development
... used to understand the concepts of cognitive development better.Piaget's ideas on identifying the stages of cognitive development carry more information pertaining to ... methods and materials consistent with the student's level of development that the child can and will adjust to the ... the child. It is also advisable for a teacher to pay careful attention to the interaction of the students and ...
According to Piagetian theory, play is an important experience for cognitive development. Four learning centers were set up at each 30-min session. Two of the centers supplied hands-on activities to promote operational thinking, whereas the other two centers provided language arts and mathematics experiences. The Kood-aid experiment was one used here.
In conclusion, There were four main results resulted from this research. First, if current stages of cognitive development are identified, teacher effectiveness for planning developmentally appropriate activities could be enhanced. Research indicates that students must be able to connect experiences to words and objects before meaning can be constructed Second, what the child already knows, or does not know will affect what new information he or she is able to grasp. New knowledge is always built on and transformed from existing knowledge. Learning is a continuous process rather than a series of individualized, non-related steps. So, awareness of each child’s current stage of development allows teachers to predict what the student may or may not be ready to learn. Third, active engagement on the part of children is important for cognitive change to occur. According to Piaget, children must be actively involved in their learning. Finally, cognitive advances are more likely to occur when new activities are slightly different from those that the child has already experienced. When new activities build on previous experiences, children must revise existing schema, accommodating or assimilating the new information. This project has offered a provocative look at a very real way that educators can influence and enhance student learning. This study provides a meaningful technique for helping those elementary school children who have not made the shift into operational thinking.
The Research paper on Empowering Children’s Cognitive And Emotional Capacity
... children to build strong cognitive archives. For this it is necessary to give children as many experiences as possible related to what they are learning, ... activities, students place hands and feet on sheets of paper to be displayed on an artistic mural (value of organisation). 2. TRANSFER * Children ... a final identification activity. Process assessment Picked at random, students will perform individual ...
