Qualitative Changes in Conceptions of the World around Us as an Educational Outcome: Pre-school Student Teachers’ Way of Apprehending Children at Play

Abstract

An alternative model for describing effects of education is argued for. This model is based on the conceptualization of learning as a qualitative change in our way of understanding some aspect of the world around us; and it follows from this that, when describing educational effects, we should aim at finding out what changes have taken place and to what extent. This particular research approach is illustrated by an empirical study of how pre-school student teachers’ apprehensions of children at play change as a function of their education. There were four distinctively different ways of apprehending discerned:fragmentary (enumeration of various details without any coherence); partialistic (focus is on one part of the whole scene depicted, the rest is left out); chronological (events are ordered in a temporal sequence); and abstracting (the scene is seen as illustrating a superordinate idea). There was a developmental pattern observed going from either a fragmentary or a partialistic apprehension to a chronological one and from there to an abstracting apprehension.