The Development of Thinking Processes

Abstract

CHAPTER II of this issue of the REVIEW gives the characteristics of children as one of the main influences on the curriculum. The present chapter develops further one area of children's characteristics and draws from them some implications for school programs. It emphasizes the intellectual activities of preschool and school children, not as isolated behavior but as functioning intelligence and a part of total behavior in different situations involving thinking. Research studies on children's thinking as such are relatively meager. Mental tests are concerned with products rather than the process. Most psychological studies of perception, concept formation, and creative thinking have used college students or adults as subjects. There are at least three reasons for this neglect of direct study of children's thinking: (a) The term thinking as frequently used is an omnibus term. We say a child may be thinking as he cries for his cereal, urges his peers to build with blocks, or writes a paragraph for a school report. Because the term is diffuse, it has been difficult to study in an organized way. (b) Thinking, like other psychological processes, can be studied only indirectly by observing behavior, recording language, or keeping laboratory records (33). A child's language and thinking are closely related but not identical (36). All we can know about thinking must be a product of inductive inference. (c) No well-rounded theory of children's thinking has been presented as a guide to experimental work. The many accounts of thinking in books on logic, including Dewey's famous statement (19), are idealized pictures rather than factual accounts of what happens in children's everyday thinking. The logician states errors in thinking, for example, but gives us no data on their frequency. Recent psychological accounts of thinking, such as those of Humphrey (36), Johnson (39, 40), Leeper (45), Symonds (63), and Vinacke (71), give small place to genetic aspects of thinking.