Conceptual thinking to develop in younger students. Development of conceptual thinking of a younger student

thinking mental schoolboy

Primary school age is called the pinnacle of childhood.

In the modern periodization of mental development, it covers the period from 6-7 to 9-11 years.

At this age, there is a change in the image and style of life: new requirements, a new social role of the student, a fundamentally new type of activity - educational activity. At school, he acquires not only new knowledge and skills, but also a certain social status. The perception of one's place in the system of relations is changing. The interests, values of the child, his whole way of life are changing.

The child is on the border of a new age period.

Social situation in primary school age:

1. Learning activity becomes the leading activity.

2. The transition from visual-figurative to verbal-logical thinking is completed.

3. The social meaning of the teaching is clearly visible (the attitude of young schoolchildren to marks).

4. Achievement motivation becomes dominant.

5. There is a change of the reference group.

6. There is a change in the daily routine.

7. A new internal position is being strengthened.

8. The system of relationships between the child and other people is changing.

Thinking becomes the dominant function in primary school age.

The development of thinking in primary school age has a special role. With the beginning of schooling, thinking moves to the center of the child's mental development (L.S. Vygotsky) and becomes decisive in the system of other mental functions, which, under its influence, become intellectualized and acquire an arbitrary character.

Previously, it was considered that for children of primary school age, concrete-figurative thinking is the leading one, but at present, primarily thanks to the works of D. B. Elkonin, V.V. Davydov and their collaborators, it is proved that children of this age have much greater cognitive abilities, which allows them to develop the basics of theoretical forms of thinking.

The thinking of a child of primary school age is at a turning point in development. During this period, a transition is made from visual-figurative to verbal-logical, conceptual thinking, which gives the child’s mental activity a dual character: concrete thinking, associated with reality and direct observation, already obeys logical principles, but abstract, formal-logical reasoning for children is still not available.

A child, especially of 7-8 years of age, usually thinks in specific categories, while relying on the visual properties and qualities of specific objects and phenomena, therefore, at primary school age, visual-effective and visual-figurative thinking continues to develop, which involves the active inclusion of models in teaching different types (subject models, diagrams, tables, graphs, etc.)

Blonsky P.P. writes: "A picture book, a visual aid, a teacher's joke - everything causes an immediate reaction in them. Younger students are at the mercy of a vivid fact, the images that arise on the basis of a description during a teacher's story or reading a book are very bright."

Younger students tend to understand literally the figurative meaning of words, filling them with specific images. Students solve this or that mental problem more easily if they rely on specific objects, ideas or actions. Given the figurative thinking, the teacher accepts a large number of visual aids, reveals the content of abstract concepts and the figurative meaning of words in a number of specific examples. And primary schoolchildren remember not what is most significant in terms of educational tasks, but what made the greatest impression on them: what is interesting, emotionally colored, unexpected and new.

Visual-figurative thinking is very clearly manifested when understanding, for example, complex pictures, situations. Orientation is required to understand such situations. To understand a complex picture means to understand its inner meaning. Understanding the meaning requires analytical and synthetic work, highlighting the details of comparing them with each other. Visual-figurative thinking also involves speech, which helps to name a sign, to compare signs. Only on the basis of the development of visual-effective and visual-figurative thinking, formal-logical thinking begins to take shape at this age.

The thinking of children of this age differs significantly from the thinking of preschoolers: so if the thinking of a preschooler is characterized by such a quality as involuntariness, low controllability both in setting a mental task and in solving it, they more often and easily think about what is more interesting to them, what they captivates, then younger students as a result of studying at school, when it is necessary to regularly perform tasks without fail, learn to control their thinking.

Teachers know that the thinking of children of the same age is quite different; there are such children for whom it is difficult to think practically and operate with images, and to reason, and those for whom it is easy to do all this.

The good development of visual-figurative thinking in a child can be judged by how he solves the tasks corresponding to this type of thinking.

School education is structured in such a way that verbal-logical thinking is predominantly developed. If in the first two years of schooling children work a lot with visual samples, then in the following classes the volume of this kind of work is reduced. Figurative thinking is becoming less and less necessary in educational activities.

In this regard, the thinking of first graders is most revealing. It is predominantly concrete, based on visual images and representations. As a rule, an understanding of general provisions is achieved only when they are concretized through particular examples. The content of concepts and generalizations is determined mainly by visually perceived features of objects.

As the student masters learning activities and assimilates the basics of scientific knowledge, the student gradually becomes attached to the system of scientific concepts, his mental operations become less connected with specific practical activities and visual support. Children master the techniques of mental activity, acquire the ability to act in the mind and analyze the process of their own reasoning. The development of thinking is associated with the emergence of such important new formations as analysis, an internal plan of action, and reflection.

The younger school age is of great importance for the development of basic mental actions and techniques: comparisons, highlighting essential and non-essential features, generalizations, definitions of concepts, derivation of consequences, etc. The lack of formation of full-fledged mental activity leads to the fact that the knowledge acquired by the child turns out to be fragmentary, and sometimes just wrong. This seriously complicates the learning process and reduces its effectiveness. So, for example, if students are unable to distinguish between the general and the essential, students have problems with generalizing the educational material: summing up the mathematical problem under an already known class, highlighting the root in related words, briefly (highlighting the main) retelling of the text, dividing it into parts, choosing a title for the passage etc.

It should be noted that in some children the ability to generalize material of different content is equally developed - they generalize any material equally well or equally poorly. Other schoolchildren generalize mathematical material freely and quickly, while generalizing non-mathematical material they experience great difficulties. Conversely, some students easily and freely generalize non-mathematical material, and mathematical material only after many training exercises. Therefore, in order to judge the peculiarities of a child's thinking, it is necessary to analyze his performance (and repeated!) of tasks from different fields of knowledge.

The assimilation of any academic subject largely depends on how the child's ability to generalize the material is developed. Can he single out the general in the different and, on this basis, cognize the main thing hidden behind the variety of external manifestations and non-essential features, can he single out the essential general properties of objects, i.e. such properties without which an object cannot exist as such.

Possession of basic mental operations is required from students already in the first grade. Therefore, at primary school age, attention should be paid to purposeful work on teaching children the basic techniques of mental activity.

At the end of primary school age (and later), individual differences appear: among children, psychologists distinguish groups of "theorists" or "thinkers" who easily solve learning problems verbally, "practitioners" who need reliance on visualization and practical actions, and " artists" with bright figurative thinking. In most children, there is a relative balance between different types of thinking.

An important condition for the formation of theoretical thinking is the formation of scientific concepts. Theoretical thinking allows the student to solve problems, focusing not on external, visual signs and connections of objects, but on internal, essential properties and relationships.

In order to form a scientific concept in a junior schoolchild, it is necessary to teach him a differentiated approach to the features of objects. It should be shown that there are essential features, without which the object cannot be brought under this concept. A concept is generalized knowledge about a whole group of phenomena, objects, qualities, united by the commonality of their essential features. If students in grades 1-2 note the most obvious, external signs that characterize the action of an object (what it does) or its purpose (what it is for), then by grade 3, students already rely more on the knowledge gained in the learning process and allow them to identify essential features of the items. Thus, the concept of a plant includes such different objects as a tall pine tree and a small bell. These different objects are combined into one group because each of them has essential features common to all plants: they are living organisms, grow, breathe, multiply.

By the age of 8-9, the child undergoes a transition to the stage of formal operations, which is associated with a certain level of development of the ability to abstract (the ability to highlight the essential features of objects and abstract from secondary features of objects) and generalization. The criterion for mastering a particular concept is the ability to operate with it.

Third-graders should also be able to establish a hierarchy of concepts, isolate broader and narrower concepts, and find connections between generic and specific concepts.

The thinking of a junior schoolchild in its development comes from the ability to analyze the connections and relationships between objects and phenomena. By the end of grade 3, students should learn such elements of analysis as identifying relationships between concepts and phenomena: opposite (for example, a coward - a brave man), the presence of functional relationships (for example, a river and fish), part and whole (for example, trees - forest).

Some difficulties were noted among younger schoolchildren in mastering such a mental operation as comparison. At first, the child does not know at all what it is to compare. To the question: “Is it possible to compare an apple and a ball,” we often hear the answer: “No, you can’t, you can eat an apple, but the ball rolls.” If you ask the question differently, you can get the correct answer. You should first ask the children how the objects are similar, and then how they differ. Children must be led to the correct answer.

Particular difficulties arise in younger students in establishing cause-and-effect relationships. It is easy for a younger student to establish a connection from cause to effect than from effect to cause. This can be explained by the fact that when inferring from cause to effect, a direct connection is established. And when inferring from a fact to the cause that caused it, such a connection is not directly given, since the indicated fact can be the result of a variety of reasons that need to be specially analyzed. Thus, with the same level of knowledge and development, it is easier for a younger student to answer the question: "What will happen if the plant is not watered?" than to the question: "Why did this tree wither?"

By the end of the third grade, the student must learn such elements of analysis as identifying the following connections: location, sequence, opposite, the presence of certain functional relationships, part and whole.

The development of theoretical thinking, i.e. thinking in concepts, contributes to the emergence of reflection by the end of primary school age (reflection is the process of self-knowledge of one's internal acts and states), which, being a neoplasm of adolescence, transforms cognitive activity and the nature of their relationship to themselves and other people.

Pelageina G.I.

Development of conceptual thinking of younger schoolchildren.

A feature of the development of the cognitive sphere of children of primary school age is the transition of the cognitive mental processes of the child to a higher level. During this period, all spheres of the child's personality are qualitatively changed and rebuilt. This restructuring begins with the intellectual sphere, primarily with thinking. In the requirements of new educational standards, one of the urgent tasks is the formation of conceptual thinking

A child is not born with a developed conceptual thinking, it does not mature on its own as it grows up. As shown by L.S. Vygotsky, conceptual thinking is formed in the process of learning, when the child has to master scientific concepts, when he is taught this in elementary school.

From the standpoint of a system-activity approach to teaching, the indicator of a student’s possession of conceptual thinking is not only knowledge of a large number of concepts, but his ability to work with any concept (O.M. Kolomiets), the ability to activate search activity in a problem situation, to structure the acquired knowledge. The child's transition from describing the properties of an individual object to finding and identifying them in a whole class of similar objects, correlating them with distinguished features that are common to a number of phenomena leads to the mastery of a word-term, a concept. The concept is abstracted from the individual features and attributes of individual perceptions and ideas and is thus the result of a generalization of the perceptions and ideas of a very large number of homogeneous phenomena and objects. As a result of this activity, the student develops a psychological orientation in terms of:

How and what concept in what place of the practical task and by what aspect (attribute, combination of attributes or connection) can be updated;

What is the structure and content of a single concept;

What external backbone links unite separate concepts into a coherent system;

In what subordination are the concepts to each other, are there system-forming connections between them or not, i.e. concepts belong to different areas, etc.

The cognitive development of a schoolchild, the formation of cognitive, regulative, personal and communicative universal educational actions depends on the formation of the foundations of operational, conceptual, theoretical thinking.

However, many children of primary school age have an insufficient level of formation of conceptual thinking, vocabulary is poor. There are also migrant children and children with bilingualism among the students of schools in which this program has been tested, with an average and low rate of adaptation. All of them have a low level of intellectual development, verbal intelligence. Despite the fact that many of them grew up in an environment where there was bilingualism, the assimilation of scientific information is very difficult for them, there are difficulties in learning, serious problems in adaptation.

We believe that conceptual thinking turns out to be the main psychological characteristic, the presence of which, with other developmental deficiencies, including serious physiological and neurological defects, provides the possibility of learning, and the shortcomings in its formation, with other developmental advantages, gradually complicate learning and eventually make it impossible. Moreover, our practice has shown that the emotional and personal problems of schoolchildren (anxiety, low self-esteem, disruption of relationships in the family and class team, unwillingness to study) in most cases are secondary formations that arise when difficulties arise in learning and are strengthened as a result of unsuccessful educational activities. .

That is why correctional and developmental work with younger students who experience difficulties in learning and development is so relevant.

The developed correctional and developmental program "Development" consists of:

Part 1. Introductory.

The purpose of the introductory part of the lesson is to set up the group for joint work, to establish emotional contact between all participants. The main work procedures are greetings, exercises to improve brain activity.

Part 2. Main.

This part accounts for the main semantic load of the entire lesson. It includes tasks, exercises, games aimed at developing personal, regulatory, cognitive, communicative UUD.

Part 3. Final.

The task of the final part of the lesson is to sum up the results of the lesson, discuss the results of the students' work and the difficulties that they encountered when completing the assignments. The essential point here is the students' answers to the question of what they did and what they learned in this lesson.

The tasks presented in the classroom allow solving all three aspects of the educational goal: cognitive, developing and educating.

Cognitive aspect

the formation and development of various types of memory, attention, imagination.

the formation and development of general educational skills and abilities (the ability to independently work with a book at a given pace, the ability to control and evaluate their work).

Developmental aspect

The development of speech when working on a word, phrase, sentence.

The development of thinking in the course of assimilation by children of such methods of mental activity as the ability to analyze, compare, synthesize, generalize, highlight the main thing, prove and refute.

The development of the sensory sphere of children (eye, small muscles of the hands).

Development of the motor sphere.

Educational aspect

Education of the system of moral interpersonal relations (formation of "I-concept")

In order to achieve positive results in working with children with developmental disabilities, various methods, techniques and techniques are combined: tasks, games, visualization, and practical work of children. The content of the classes is reflected in the thematic plan, they include tasks:

On the development of thinking (non-verbal, verbal, mathematical aspect of logical thinking)

To develop the ability to analyze, synthesize, classify

On the development of cognitive aspects: attention, memory, speech, vocabulary, etc.

Allowing to use the resources of visual and kinesthetic channels of perception of information, due to which a high level of understanding of the studied material is achieved (“Euler circles”, “arranging in the correct order”, compiling a semantic chain, logical chains, recoding information, etc.

The "Development" program became the winner of the regional competition of psychological and pedagogical programs.

The specificity of thinking in primary school age. Mastering the basic mental actions. Formation of an internal plan of action. The development of reflection.

Specificity of thinkingin primary school age

At the beginning of primary school age, the mental development of the child reaches a fairly high level. All mental processes: perception, memory, thinking, imagination, speech - have already come a long way in development. And therefore, a child of 6-7 years old can already do a lot: he is well oriented in the world around him and already knows a lot about it, easily remembers information of various content, numerous poems and fairy tales, knows how to guess riddles, solve problems, the conditions of which are given in a visual plan , can invent small stories, quite coherently express his opinion about various events, knows how and loves to draw, sculpt, construct, sometimes he is quite good with a computer, etc.

Recall that the various cognitive processes that provide the diverse activities of the child do not function in isolation from each other, but represent a complex system, each of them is connected with all the others. This relationship does not remain unchanged throughout childhood: at different periods, any one of the processes acquires leading importance for general mental development. So, in early childhood, the development of perception is of primary importance, and in preschool age, memory.

What side of mental development ensures the further improvement of the child's psyche at primary school age?

Psychological studies show that during this period, further development of thinking. It is precisely this, thanks to the inclusion of the child in educational activities aimed at mastering the system of scientific concepts, that rises to a higher level and thereby entails a radical restructuring of all other mental processes, primarily perception and memory.

With the beginning of systematic schooling, thinking moves to the center of the child’s mental development (L.S. Vygotsky) and becomes decisive in the system of other mental functions, which, under its influence, become intellectualized, acquire a conscious and arbitrary character.

The thinking of a child of primary school age is at a turning point in development. During this period, a transition is made from visual-figurative thinking, which is the main one for a given age, to verbal-logical, conceptual thinking.

Recall that visual-figurative thinking makes it possible to solve problems in a directly given, visual field or in terms of representations preserved in memory. In this case, a person imagines a real situation and acts in it in his imagination, acts not with real objects (as happens in a situation of visual-effective thinking), but with their images.

The further way of development of thinking lies in the transition to verbal-logical thinking, the basis of which is the operation of concepts. The transition to this new form of thinking is associated with a change in the content of thinking: now these are no longer specific ideas that have a visual basis and reflect the external signs of objects, but concepts that reflect the most essential properties of objects and phenomena and the relationship between them, this is a new content of thinking at primary school age it is set by the content of the leading educational activity.

Verbal-logical, conceptual thinking is formed gradually during primary school age. At the beginning of this age period, visual-figurative thinking is dominant.

In this regard, the thinking of first graders is most revealing. It is indeed predominantly concrete, based on visual images and representations. As a rule, the child begins to understand general provisions only when they are concretized with the help of particular examples. The content of concepts and generalizations is determined mainly by visually perceptible features of objects. The thinking of a first-grader is closely connected with his personal experience, and therefore in objects and phenomena he most often highlights those aspects; who talk about their application, action with them.

The foregoing does not mean that a child of 6-7 years old cannot think logically: he is able to compare individual facts, draw the simplest conclusions, etc. However, the main form of thinking of children of this age is thinking based on visualization. The thinking of a child at the beginning of primary school age has a peculiar character. Due to the lack of systematic knowledge, insufficient development of concepts, it is captured by perception, the child becomes dependent on what he sees.

J. Piaget, who studied the stages of development of children's thinking, found that the thinking of a child of 6-7 years old is characterized by two main features: firstly, the unformed ideas about the constancy of the main properties of things - misunderstanding of the conservation principle; secondly, the inability to take into account several signs of an object at once and compare their changes - centering: children tend to pay attention to only one, the most obvious characteristic of an object for them, ignoring the rest. The phenomenon of centration determines the inability of the child to take into account the point of view of other people; his own view of the world seems to him the only true one (childish egocentrism).

These features of children's thinking are clearly demonstrated by the classical experiments of J. Piaget using preservation tasks. For example, a child is shown two identical glasses (Fig. 13), each of which is filled with the same amount of liquid. After the child realized that the liquid was poured equally, the experimenter poured the contents of one glass into another - taller and narrower. Naturally, the level of liquid in a narrow glass rises. Then the child is asked which glass contains more liquid. Children who do not yet master the principle of conservation usually indicate the one in which the level of liquid is higher. Children who understand this principle and are able to take into account the ratio of the width and height of the vessel, answer that the amount of liquid has remained the same.

Rice. 13. Three types of conservation tasks for the study of the child's thinking at the stage of concrete operations

Another experience. Two absolutely identical balls are laid out in front of the child. He establishes that these balls are equal in the amount of the plasticine substance contained in them. After that, the experimenter, in front of the child, changes the shape of one of the balls, rolling it into a cake or sausage. If after that you ask where there is more plasticine, the child can answer that in a flat cake or sausage.

In another experiment, two rows of buttons are laid out in front of the child, one under the other, so that the buttons of one row correspond exactly to the buttons of the other. After the question of which row has more buttons, the child answers that there are the same number of buttons in both rows. Then the buttons of one row are pushed apart in front of the child's eyes, increasing the distance between them. If the question is repeated, the child will point to a longer row, considering that now there are more buttons in it.

According to J. Piaget, children who cannot cope with conservation tasks are at the preoperational stage of thinking. The correct solution of these problems indicates that the child's thinking corresponds to the stage of concrete operations. It is this type of thinking that is typical for children of primary school age. The main characteristic of this stage is the ability to use logical rules and principles in relation to specific, visual material. At this stage, children are able to carry out operations that are the reverse of those performed, i.e. own the principle of conservation. They understand that if, for example, a liquid is poured back into another glass, its level will remain the same; if a ball is rolled up again from a plasticine cake, its mass will not change.

In addition, at this stage, children come to understand two important logical principles:

1. The principle of equivalence, according to which:

if A=B a B=C then A=C.

2. Objects have several measurable characteristics, such as weight and size, which can be in various ratios: a pebble is small and light, a balloon is large but still light, and a car is large and heavy.

At the stage of pre-operational thinking, children take into account only one, the most obvious and conspicuous characteristic of the object, for example, they pay attention only to the height of the vessel, ignoring its width. Precisely because they are unable to keep two characteristics of an object at once and correlate them with each other, children are unable to cope with preservation tasks.

Mastering the principle of conservation just happens at the age of about 6-7 years. Some children learn it earlier, others later. At the same time, the experience of practical actions of the child himself, as well as special developmental training, which involves the use of various measures and aids for estimating values, is of great importance.

Thinking at the stage of specific operations characterizes. It is also based on the ability to rank objects according to some attribute (size, weight, etc.), to classify them. When a child develops a system of operations and he masters the generalized principle of conservation (in relation to discrete quantities, the amount of liquid, the amount of substance, weight, volume), he is ready to have full-fledged scientific concepts formed.

Modern psychological research shows that Piaget's phenomena, which testify to the unformedness of mental operations, begin to disappear by about 8 years. However, some of them, for example, related to the understanding of maintaining weight, volume, can last up to 10-11 years.

As he masters educational activities and assimilates the basics of scientific knowledge, the student gradually joins the system of scientific concepts, his mental operations become less connected with specific practical activities or visual support. On the basis of this, schoolchildren form the foundations of conceptual or theoretical thinking. Recall that such thinking allows us to solve problems and draw conclusions, focusing not on the visual signs of objects, but on internal, essential properties and relationships. In the course of training, children master the techniques of mental activity, acquire the ability to act "in the mind" and analyze the process of their own reasoning.

New forms of thinking that arise in primary school age become a support for the future. The development of thinking is associated with the emergence of such neoplasms of primary school age as analysis, an internal plan of action, and reflection.

2.1 Features of thinking of a younger student

The peculiarities of the thinking of younger schoolchildren cannot be considered without taking into account the peculiarities of the thinking of preschool children. As you know, children of 5-6 years old already have visual-figurative thinking. Older preschoolers operate in their reasoning with specific ideas that they have in the process of playing and in everyday life practice. The preschooler has the beginnings of verbal and speech thinking (they already build the simplest forms of reasoning and discover an understanding of elementary cause-and-effect relationships).

Consequently, elementary education “picks up” and uses the form of thinking that arose even in preschool children.

As already mentioned, thinking includes a number of operations, such as comparison, analysis, synthesis, generalization and abstraction. With their help, penetration into the depths of a particular problem facing a person is carried out, the properties of the elements that make up this problem are considered, and a solution to the problem is found. Each of these operations in primary school age has its own characteristics, considered by B. S. Volkov:

* Analysis. Practically effective and sensuous analysis predominates; the development of analysis proceeds from the sensory to the complex and systemic.

* Synthesis. Development proceeds from a simple summation to a complex broad synthesis; the development of synthesis is much slower than the development of analysis.

* Comparison. Replacing the comparison with a simple juxtaposition of objects: first, the students talk about one object, and then about another; children have great difficulty in comparing objects that cannot be directly acted upon, especially when there are many signs, when they are hidden.

* Abstraction. External, bright, often perceived signs are sometimes taken as essential signs; it is easier to abstract the properties of objects and phenomena than the connections and relationships that exist between them.

* Generalization. Replacing generalization by combining into groups according to some cause-and-effect relationships and according to the interaction of objects; three levels of development of generalization: practical-effective, figurative-conceptual, conceptual-figurative.

Primary school age contains, as R. S. Nemov notes, a significant potential for the mental development of children, but it is not yet possible to accurately determine it. Various solutions to this issue offered by scientific educators and practicing teachers are almost always associated with the experience of applying certain teaching methods and diagnosing the child's abilities, and it is impossible to say in advance whether children will be able or not able to master a more complex program if perfect teaching tools are used. and methods for diagnosing learning.

During the first three or four years of schooling, progress in the mental development of children can be quite noticeable. From the dominance of visual-effective and elementary figurative thinking, from the pre-conceptual level of development and thinking poor in logic, the student rises to verbal-logical thinking at the level of specific concepts. The beginning of this age is associated, if we use the terminology of J. Piaget and L. S. Vygotsky, with the dominance of pre-operational thinking, and the end - with the predominance of operational thinking in concepts.

The complex development of children's thinking at primary school age proceeds in several different directions: the assimilation and active use of speech as a means of thinking; connection and mutually enriching influence on each other of all types of thinking: visual-effective, visual-figurative and verbal-logical; separation, isolation and relatively independent development in the intellectual process of two phases: preparatory and executive. At the preparatory phase of solving the problem, an analysis of its conditions is carried out and a plan is developed, and at the execution phase this plan is implemented in practice. The result obtained is then correlated with the conditions and the problem. To all that has been said, one should add the ability to reason logically and use concepts.

The first of these areas is associated with the formation of speech in children, with its active use in solving various problems. Development in this direction is successful if the child is taught to reason aloud, to reproduce the train of thought in words and to name the result.

The second direction in development is successfully implemented if children are given tasks that require both developed practical actions, and the ability to operate with images, and the ability to use concepts, to reason at the level of logical abstractions.

If any of these aspects is poorly represented, then the child's intellectual development proceeds as a one-way process. With the dominance of practical actions, visual-effective thinking develops predominantly, but figurative and verbal-logical thinking may lag behind. When figurative thinking predominates, one can detect delays in the development of practical and theoretical intelligence. With special attention only to the ability to reason aloud, children often lag behind in practical thinking and the poverty of the figurative world. All this, in the long run, can hold back the overall intellectual progress of the child.

Thus, from the foregoing it is clear that the thinking of a younger student is formed in the process of learning, that is, in the process of acquiring certain knowledge by children.

Summarizing all of the above, it should be noted that primary education uses the form of thinking that arose in preschool children. Most child psychologists call visual-figurative thinking the main type of thinking in primary school age. By the end of primary school education, there is a transition from visual-figurative thinking to verbal-logical. This transition is carried out through the learning process, that is, in the process of acquiring certain knowledge by children.

The specificity of thinking in primary school age.Mastering the basic mental actions.Formation of an internal plan of action. The development of reflection.

4.1. The specificity of thinking in primary school age

By the beginning of primary school age, the mental development of the child reaches a fairly high level. All mental processes: perception, memory, thinking, imagination, speech - have already passed a fairly long way of development. And therefore, a child of 6-7 years old can already do a lot: he is well oriented in the world around him and already knows a lot about it, easily remembers information of various contents, numerous poems and fairy tales, knows how to guess riddles, solve problems, the conditions of which are given in a visual plan, can to invent short stories, to express one's opinion about various events in a coherent way, knows how and loves to draw, sculpt, design, sometimes works quite well with a computer, etc.

Recall that the various cognitive processes that provide a variety of activities of the child do not function in isolation from each other, but represent a complex system, each of them is associated with everything.

us the rest. This connection does not remain unchanged throughout childhood: at different periods, any one of the processes acquires leading significance for general mental development. So, in early childhood, the development of perception is of primary importance, and in preschool age, memory.

What side of mental development ensures the further improvement of the child's psyche at primary school age?

With the beginning of systematic schooling, thinking moves to the center of the child's mental development (L.S. Vygotsky) and becomes decisive in the system of other mental functions, which, under its influence, become intellectualized, acquire a conscious and arbitrary character.

between them. This new content of thinking in primary school age is given by the content of the leading educational activity.

Verbal-logical, conceptual thinking is formed gradually during primary school age. At the beginning of this age period, visual-figurative thinking is dominant.

In this regard, the thinking of first graders is most revealing. It is indeed predominantly concrete, based on visual images and representations. As a rule, the child begins to understand general provisions only when they are concretized with the help of particular examples. The content of concepts and generalizations is determined mainly by visually perceived features of objects. The thinking of a first-grader is closely connected with his personal experience, and therefore in objects and phenomena he most often singles out those aspects that speak of their application, action with them.

The thinking of a child at the beginning of primary school age has a peculiar character. Due to the lack of systematic knowledge, insufficient development of concepts, it is captured by perception, the child becomes dependent on what he sees.

J. Piaget, who studied the stages of development of children's thinking, found that the thinking of a child of 6-7 years old is characterized by two main features: firstly, the unformed ideas about the constancy of the basic properties of things - misunderstanding of the conservation principle; secondly, the inability to take into account several signs of an object at once and compare their changes - centering: children tend to pay attention to only one characteristic of an object that is most obvious to them, ignoring the rest. The phenomenon of centration determines the inability of the child to take into account the point of view of other people; his own view of the world seems to him the only true one (childish egocentrism).

These features of children's thinking are clearly demonstrated by the classical experiments of J. Piaget using conservation tasks.

For example, a child is shown two identical glasses (Fig. 13), each of which contains the same amount of liquid. After the child realized that the liquid was poured equally, the experimenter poured the contents of one glass into another - taller and narrower. Naturally, the level of liquid in a narrow glass rises. Then the child is asked which glass of liquid contains more. Children who do not yet master the principle of conservation usually indicate the one in which the liquid level is higher. Children who understand this principle and are able to take into account the ratio of the width and height of the vessel, answer that the amount of liquid has remained the same.

LIQUID PRESERVATION

The child is shown two identical glasses with equal levels of liquid.

Experimenterpours liquid from one glass into another, higher and narrower

CONSERVATION OF SUBSTANCE

The child is shown two identical balls of plasticine

The experimenter changes the shape of one of the balls

SAVE QUANTITY

O O O O O

oh oh oh oh

The child is shown two rows of buttons.

O O O O O

oh oh oh oh

Experimenter pushes apartbuttons in one of the rows

Rice. 13. Three types of conservation problems for research

child's thinking at the stage of specific operations

(see: Development of the child's personality. - M., 1987)

Another experience. Two absolutely identical balls are laid out in front of the child. He establishes that these balls are equal in the amount of plasticine substance they contain. After that, the experimenter, in front of the child, changes the shape of one of the balls, rolling it into a cake or sausage. If after that you ask where there is more plasticine, the child can answer that in a flat cake or sausage.

In another experiment, two rows of buttons are laid out in front of the child, one under the other, so that the buttons of one row correspond exactly to the buttons of the other. After the question of which row has more buttons, the child answers that there are the same number of buttons in both rows. Then the buttons of one row are moved apart in front of the child's eyes, increasing the distance between them. If the question is repeated, the child will point to a longer row, believing that now there are more buttons in it.

According to J. Piaget, children who cannot cope with conservation tasks are at the preoperational stage of thinking. The correct solution of these problems indicates that the child's thinking corresponds to the stage of concrete operations. It is this type of thinking that is typical for children of primary school age. The main characteristic of this stage is the ability to use logical rules and principles in relation to specific, visual material. At this stage, children are able to carry out operations that are the reverse of those performed, i.e. own the principle of conservation. They understand that if, for example, a liquid is poured back into another glass, its level will remain the same; If a ball is rolled again from a plasticine cake, its mass will not change.

In addition, at this stage, children come to understand two important logical principles:

1. The principle of equivalence, according to which:

if A=B a AT- Hundred A=C.

2. Objects have several measurable characteristics, such as weight and size, which can be in different ratios: a pebble is small and light, a balloon is large but still light, and a car is large and heavy.

At the stage of pre-operational thinking, children take into account only one, the most obvious and striking

the eyes of a characteristic of an object, for example, pay attention only to the height of the vessel, ignoring its width. Precisely because they are unable to keep two characteristics of an object at once and correlate them with each other, children are unable to cope with preservation tasks.

Mastering the principle of conservation just happens at the age of about 6-7 years. Some children learn it earlier, others later. Of great importance here is the experience of practical actions of the child himself, as well as special developmental training, which involves the use of various standards and auxiliary means for estimating values 1 .

Thinking at the stage of specific operations is also characterized by the ability to rank objects according to some attribute (size, weight, etc.), classify them.

When a child develops a system of operations and he masters the generalized principle of conservation (in relation to discrete quantities, the amount of liquid, the amount of matter, weight, volume), he is ready for full-fledged scientific concepts to be formed in him.

Modern psychological research shows that Piaget's phenomena, which testify to the unformed mental operations, begin to disappear by about 8 years. However, some of them, for example, those related to the understanding of maintaining weight, volume, can last up to 10-11 years.

New forms of thinking that arise in primary school age become the basis for further

1 See: Obukhova L. F. Jean Piaget's concept: pros and cons. - M., 1981.

improvement and development of other mental processes: perception, memory, speech.

The development of thinking is associated with the emergence of such neoplasms of primary school age as analysis, an internal plan of action, and reflection.

Portal for the student. Self-training

Specificity of thinkingin primary school age

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