Understanding Of Thinking Research Articles

The countryside of childhood: A hermeneutic phenomenological approach to developmental psychology.

Abstract Young children's thinking has frequently been dismissed as pre‐operational, magical, participatory, and irrational. This paper re‐examines children's understanding of thinking by placing it into the context of their experience and by taking it on its own terms. The forms of children's “wild” thinking are vindicated as a form of rationality, albeit one that has different parameters than the operational thinking that characterizes the western scientific thinker: young children's experience is marked by the absence of Cartesian dualisms. In the process, Husserl's concept of the lived world is reintroduced and reinterpreted within a hermeneutic framework, which in turn allows for a critique of and a constructive collaboration with experimental developmental psychologists.

Le développement de savoirs intuitifs à propos des expériences mentales

Development of intuitions about mental experiences Although children have acquired some basic understanding of thinking and other mental experiences by the end of the preschool period, recent research indicates that development is still far from complete. Among other things, preschoolers at this age tend not to realize that a stream of consciousness flows incessantly in the waking mind, that attention is selective and limited, that people do not have conscious thoughts when unconscious, and that mental experiences vary considerably in controllability. They also appear to have very limited introspective skills. We speculate that schooling may improve these skills and that this improvement may, in turn, help to promote additional understanding of mental experiences.

Using Photography to Heighten Critical Thinking

The process of photography can contribute to a better understanding of thinking. Because the camera's lens often reveals nuances and detail commonly overlooked, it can promote critical thinking, particularly constructing, identifying, and assessing the dimensions of an issue; appreciating point-of-view; and weighing conclusions, inferences, and interpretations.

Young Children's Knowledge about Thinking

What do pre-schoolers know about thinking? How do they develop from the notion that ideas indeed pop into their heads to the true introspection that can be seen in later childhood? Using 14 case studies of differentiation, situations and introspection, this book explores these issues. The contributors find that pre-schoolers may regard thoughts as mysterious, isolated mental events; in general, a young child has difficulty determining both when a person (either self or other) is thinking and what the person is thinking about, even if given clear clues. The implications of this limited understanding of thinking and some of the factors that influence the development of this understanding should be of interest to child development specialists and cognitive scientists in general.