On Wednesday 24 February 2010 05:53:26 am Edward Cherlin wrote: > On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 11:42, K. K. Subramaniam <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tuesday 23 February 2010 09:13:59 pm Edward Cherlin wrote: > >>We also know that simply asking the question and making careful > >>observations also gives astonishing results, as, for example, in the > >>careers of Maria Montessori and Jean Piaget. Also Jerome Bruner > >> > > Yes. But these people followed the child. Jean Piaget discovered that > > children in the 2-7 age group do not comprehend conservation of quantity > > or use logical thinking. Children don't come with fast forward buttons > > :-). > > It is easy to demonstrate what children are capable of, when you can > see them do it. It is much harder to demonstrate what they are not > capable of, or what some can do but not others, or what is dependent > on development or prior experience. Maria Droujkova pointed out earlier that conservation of small quantities is innate. We also find this in birds and mammals. If you hide a few M&Ms from a packet of 10, most first graders can figure out how many you "stole" by looking into the remaining ones. Symbolic arithmetic is not required. But what happens when quantities have no simple imagery; say 10,000? The conceptual structures required to deal with such quantities and generalizing them using symbols (stones/seeds) take time to develop.
I am not an expert in child learning and I will defer the larger question to the practicing teachers and researchers. As community volunteers, our challenge in large scale education is not so much in deciding what children are capable of (or not) but in setting up an environment where each child can follow his/her own learning curve. I don't rule out the necessity for guidance but the assistance needs to be tuned and timed to the immediate needs of the child. To me, software like Etoys is interesting not because it is blackboard for lessons but because it is a blank paper for children to express what they know. I have had many teachers tell me that they got a much better idea of their students' capabilities after seeing their independent Etoys projects, so now they could tune their lessons effectively. It inverts the conventional model where the teachers tells the child to one where the child tells the teacher, "This is what I know. Will you now help me reach the next level?" Subbu _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
