CHILDHOOD COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Childhood Cognitive Development



Abstract

In this research our main focus is on how children responds if they would asked different questions related to the shape of earth, basically main focus is on the childhood cognition as many of the apparent differences between children's theories and the corresponding scientist's theories result from a comparison of the work of a single individual with the products of a cultural institution. Clearly, the individual child does not yet share the enormous body of knowledge that is part or the institution of science.

Childhood Cognitive Development

Introduction

In recent years, in the areas or science education, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, a number or researchers have taken the position that, in the course of their everyday interactions with the natural world, children construct theories that are in many ways similar to those constructed by scientists. However, other researchers have argued that children's theories are very different from scientific theories.

In this research, we argue that children's theories embody the fundamental characteristics or scientific theories. Our argument takes the following form. First, we give some recent evidence about children's theories in the domain of observational astronomy that shows that children can develop very impressive theories of the natural world. Next we re-evaluate the characterization of children's theories by those investigators who have argued that these theories arc very different from scientific theories. We suggest that a knowledge-based approach to child development allows a reinterpretation or earlier findings, and we review a range or recent data that support this reinterpretation. We note that, in these discussions, many researchers have contrasted theories constructed by the individual child with positivist accounts of cultural achievements, such as Newtonian physics.

We suggest that this is not an appropriate comparison and point out the importance of distinguishing between the child as theory constructor and science as a historical institution. Then we shift the argument to the characterization or scientific theories and suggest that the idealized description of scientific theories used in these debates is not supported by recent work in philosophy and history of science. Next we examine the claim that children's reasoning process arc different from those of adult scientists and that it is these differences that produce the differences in children's theories and scientific theories. We argue that recent, historical and experimental work on the reasoning processes or scientists did not support the idealized picture of scientific reasoning given in these discussions. In addition, we examine the nature of the reasoning processes in young children and argue that these processes are very similar to those of adults. Below mentioned questions are considered as the research and methodology question in this research.

Q. Why children theories are considered as fragmented theories?

Q. Would children raised in a culture not so dramatically influenced by the institution of science also give mechanistic, explanatory accounts of the same phenomena?

Overall, we conclude that the child can be thought of as a novice scientist, who adopts a pragmatic approach to dealing with the physical world, but lacks the knowledge ...