Psychological Aspects of Learning and Teaching

Kevin Wheldall, Richard Riding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138723849
• eBook ISBN: 9781351756266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Educational psychology has much to offer teachers and trainee teachers which can be of help to them in their work. In this book, originally published in 1983, leading experts look at a number of important topics in educational psychology. The chapters present detailed overviews of these key issues, survey recent research findings and advances in the subject at the time, and discuss innovative techniques and approaches which are particularly relevant for classroom practice.

This book, much needed at the time, will still be extremely useful to mature teachers and to all students of educational psychology.

PART THREE - THE DEVELOPING CHILD

When you look out of a window at a garden, what do you see? A lawn with neat lines on it in shades of green, a border with shrubs behind and flowers in front, a tree set in the lawn with birds in its branches, a sparrow, a starling and a blackbird. You turn to someone in the room and say that the dahlias are doing well and that the pears on the tree are getting larger. You look back at the garden and feel that there is something about the shape, texture and pattern that personally, you find satisfying. You contrast it with the one next door that is informal, a bit overgrown, that somehow you find irritating.

How much there is in that response to the garden that we take for granted. Have you ever stopped to consider the processes involved in such a response and how they developed? Suppose a young baby were held up to survey the scene. What would its response be, and how would it differ from that of the adult? Would it perceive the textures, the pattern, the objects? Would it have the concepts of “tree”, “bird” and “flower"? Would it be able to communicate its thoughts in language? Would it have personal tastes about styles and achievements?

No, clearly, the responses of a young baby would be very different from those of an adult, because a lot of development takes place between birth and adulthood. The nature of this development and just how it takes place is important to the teacher. In this section three fundamental areas of this development are considered: thinking, language and personality.

In chapter six, Geoffrey Brown, traces the development of perception from birth onwards and describes how from an initial inability to differentiate between sight and sound, children begin to see an object as being the same, even when it is moved to a different position, and how visual-motor coordination are established. The formation of concepts and development of thinking are then considered. Finally, metacognition or thinking about thinking, is discussed.

In the following chapter Ruth Clark explores the question of how children learn to talk. Since almost all children appear to develop language without too much trouble it was taken for granted for many years. It is only relatively recently, over the past twenty years or so, that psychologists have begun to take serious interest in what turns out to be an intriguing topic the task of explaining how young children acquire language has turned out to be as complex, difficult and time consuming as the young child typically finds it straightforward, simple and rapid to do Such is the complexity of this task that psychologists could be forgiven for flinging up their arms in despair of ever discovering the “truth” (indeed many have) but Ruth Clark shows in her careful analysis of the evidence produced so far that we have made some progress. To take just one example, it has been shown that young children do not grasp language as a result of hearing the babble of adult language which surrounds them. It now appears that one of the keys to language acquisition is the remarkable facility which human beings have for moderating the quality and style of the language they produce so as to mesh with the child's current state of knowledge of language. Even children have shown to adjust their language to an appropriate level when talking to a language learning infant.

This chapter, in short, is particularly valuable because it helps us to see how what appears to be a simple, obvious process is considerably more complicated than we might at first suspect. She emphasises, moreover, that children may arrive at the same developmental end point by means of quite different routes and strategies.

In the final chapter the development of personality is described by David Fontana. An important, and much disputed question, is what influences the sort of people we grow up to be. Is it what we inherit from our parents or is it the environment in which we are brought up? The first section of the Chapter considers the evidence for the relative effects of these influences in some detail since an understanding of them is important for the teacher. The second part describes how differences in personality are likely to show themselves in children of school age and indicates ways in which personality may be assessed. Finally this chapter looks at the relationship between personality and academic achievement and also with styles of learning.

Chapter 6

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THINKING

Geoffrey Brown

This chapter is concerned with the developmental changes which occur in the child's interactions with his environment; changes which denote an increasing ability to comprehend events and to function effectively within the environment.

There are two aspects of this process, perception and cognition. The former refers to the ways in which the child attends to, and makes sense of, information coming in via the sense organs. The latter is concerned with the ways in which knowledge is stored and processed. Clearly the division is an arbitrary one. When a child first experiences a stimulus in his environment, such as a toy, his sense organs transmit messages to the brain indicating its appearance, texture, weight, etc. Yet in the absence of any stored information with which to compare these messages they will probably mean little. Only when the percepts can be related to previous experiences is the child in a position to recognise the toy as familiar, identify its colour, class it as toy, attach a verbal label “toy” to it. So the processes of perception are in many respects the same type of processes as those which would be used if a child was thinking about toys. They are different only in as far as the nature of the incoming signals and the adequacy of the sensory organs are limiting factors governing the data which the child's cognitive processes receive.

PERCEPTION

The Functioning of the Senses

The sensory organs of the body consist of highly specialised cells which, when stimulated by a specific external event, transmit electrical impulses to the brain. When light falls upon the retina of the eye it will cause a pattern of cells to be activated. The pattern will correspond to the pattern of the external source, and the specific cells which “fire” will be those which are sensitive to the wavelengths being received. Similar mechanisms operate for hearing, touch, smell, taste, etc.

This suggests that the messages going to the brain are already analysed, in that they come from specific types of receptors in particular bodily locations, and because they are transmitted to specific specialised sites in the brain. Yet there is some evidence that in the infant this is not so.

It seems that an infant of a few weeks is less likely to react to a change in sensory modality than to a change in position of a stimulus. (Bower, 1977). For instance, if he is presented with lights flashing to left and right of him, he will attend to them, but then quickly lose interest. If the lights are replaced by two clicking sounds his interest is unlikely to be recaptured. But if they are replaced by another two lights in different positions his interest is renewed. So it seems that he is not particularly influenced by the type of receptors being activated, but is influenced by the position of the external source of stimulation.

This lack of differentiation between the senses only lasts for a few weeks. After this time the infant is able to differentiate between sensory modalities, but this does not mean that they will function entirely independently. Although he knows that hearing and sight are different ways of obtaining information, with this differentiated sensory awareness comes an expectation that sensations may be associated in a behavioural way. So when a baby sees or hears something he expects to be able to touch it too, and so the act of looking or listening is accompanied by reaching and grasping behaviour. At an even later stage, around 6 months or so, the infant will have learned that not all visible or audible events are tangible, and the reaching behaviour will become detached.

Object Constancy

It has already been noted that information received by the sense organs needs to be processed and classified in terms of previous experiences if it is to be recognised. Yet is is very probable that the phenomenon being perceived may never have been experienced in quite the same way before. Nevertheless we are able to recognise it. A red car remains a red car, whether seen head-on at dusk, from the side in bright sunlight, or from above in artificial light. We are able to make allowances for variations due to light, position and distance and still recognise the constancy of the object.

The infant must learn that some features of his environment do not change, though perception may suggest otherwise. Earlier we noted that the projection on the retina of the eye indicates the size and position of the object in view. When someone walks away from us we do not believe them to be growing shorter, and it does not seem that the infant believes his mother to periodically shrink either. It is likely that the infant learns of the constancy of objects from very early experience.

By setting up experiments which monitor the eye fixation or heart-rate of young babies it is possible to estimate what they are looking at, where they expect to see things, and how surprised they are at what they see or do not see. When they are very young they seem unable to understand the relationship between identity and motion as we do. That is, they do not recognise that an object is the same one if moved to another place, nor that motion is needed to produce this event.

If an object is placed in the centre of an infant's field of vision, and is then moved off to the right and back to the centre, a baby of about 3 months is able to learn to track back and forth quite efficiently. But if the object is now moved to the left he will tend to sweep his gaze back to the right. This has been interpreted as indicating that the baby thinks he is seeing two objects, one in the centre and one on the right. He does not see that the motion converts the percept, and that only one object is involved.

“One might say that for an 8-12 week-old infant an object may exist in a place or an object may move continuously, but an object cannot move from stationary place to stationary place.” (Bower, Broughton and Moore, 1971).

By 20 weeks most babies can co-ordinate place and movement, though the exact reasons for this are still unclear.

The converse of this phenomenon is the concept of the unique object. That is, when do babies begin to realise that Mummy is unique, and that simultaneous viewing of two identical Mummies is disturbing? By setting up an array of mirrors Bower (1974) was able to present multiple images to infants. Again it was at about 20 weeks that they found the display disconcerting. Thus the infant has not only learned of the permanence of objects, but he is beginning to classify them according to their appearances as well as their positions. And he has begun to anticipate concepts which will include multiple instances and those which are unique.

There are many other instances of perceptual organisation in the first year of life. Gibson and Walk (1960) set up a visual cliff apparatus in which part of the floor on which a child is placed is normal and the rest is glass with a space beneath. Although the babies could safely crawl over the glass, the perception of the drop of 3 feet prevented most of them from doing so, even when encouraged by their mothers. So it seems that by the age of 12 months most babies can detect depth. Bower (1974) suggested that distance estimates occur earlier. He arranged objects of two sizes, one close to the eye and one some distance away, but such that the angles subtended by the objects was the same (that is, the retinal image was the same size). When they were moved towards the face of a young baby only the near one caused a defensive reaction. So, clearly, babies are developing estimates of movement and distance quite early. Whether they learn these, or whether they embellish some basic inborn capacity, is not known. What is certain is that enormous strides are being made in the organisation of perceptual and cognitive processes during the first year of life.

Perceiving Distinctive Features

We have already seen that by the age of 20 weeks the baby is not only conceiving of object permanence, but also of the distinctive features of objects such as mummy's face. Much interest has been shown in whether there is any particular type of feature to which human babies are particularly sensitive.

Fantz (1961) presented pairs of visual displays to babies, and estimated their preferences by the amount of time they spent looking at each. The displays consisted of different shaped cards painted with various patterns in different colours. The babies spent considerably longer looking at the more complex patterns, and the author concluded that they preferred them. However, one needs to be cautious in inferring preference, and commentators have pointed out that more complex patterns simply take longer to scrutinise. Whether they actually preferred the complex patterns is therefore open to doubt, but we are probably safe in assuming that the babies could dicriminate between the displays.

Similar work by Ruff and Birch (1974) using complex arrays of straight and curved lines suggested that 13 week-old babies had preference for curved, concentric configurations. In this case all the arrays were complex, though it may still be the case that the infants took longer to scan some patterns than others.

In a subsequent experiment (Fantz, 1963) the patterns were made up of a stylised human face, or the same elements in scrambled form. They were presented to very young infants, just 5 days old, but they still spent longer looking at the face-like display than the others. It is tempting to conclude that the babies had some innate mechanism which reacted to the human face, but the author resisted such an interpretation, suggesting only that patterns which are similar to social objects have particular attraction as stimuli. However, other studies (eg. Koopman and Ames, 1968) failed to find this preference with very young infants.

Active Perceiving

Active engagement in dealing with the environment is thought to be fundamental to an optimal development of perceptual and cognitive processes. A series of experiments related to the object constancy studies already described emphasises this view, but before looking at it we should note a much earlier study by Held and Hein (1963).

Kittens were raised in a darkened environment for ten weeks, so that their visual development was retarded. This retardation resulted in an inability to discriminate the depth of the visual cliff, and a tendency to wander onto the “dangerous” side. They were then placed in a “carousel”, which comprised a circular compartment in which one was constrained and the other free to move around at will. By this means both obtained the same visual stimulation, though in one case it was related to action and in the other case it was purely passive. After 30 hours in the apparatus the active kittens showed a marked improvement on the visual cliff, the passive kittens did not. Whilst the visual system of these passive kittens was apparently normal, their passivity in the experiment had led to a failure to link visual perception with action.

About a decade later the relationship of visual perception and action has again been noted in the baby. The notion of object permanence, to which reference has already been made, implies the idea that when an object disappears from sight it does not cease to exist. It is commonly held that this is not so for the infant, that “out-of-sight is out-of-mind”, and this is in keeping with the views of Piaget (1954). Piaget argued that if a toy was placed in full view of an infant, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section One: Classroom Management
• Section Two: Communication, Cognition and Individual Differences
• Section Three: The Developing Child