How children’s thinking develops

Children are, of course, often quite ingenious in their problem-solving abilities and highly original and creative – you only have to watch them at play on a computer game, effortlessly outscoring their olders and betters, or at play making up mythical adventures, inventing extraordinary games or building their own weird inventions and contraptions to realise that. Yet it is also clear that there are, in fact, huge individual differences in these kinds of highly valued abilities. It is also clear that teachers can have

a very powerful role in either encouraging and stimulating this kind of mental activity or, sadly, in discouraging and extinguishing it. In an exhaustive review of research Sternberg and Powell (1983) pinpointed the key developments in children’s learning and thinking which are now generally accepted among developmental psychologists. According to this analysis, as they develop children become:

• more exhaustive in their information processing; • more able to comprehend relations of successively higher orders; • more flexible in their use of strategies and information; • more sophisticated in their reflections upon and control of their own

thinking. Let us, briefly, take the various points in turn and look at their implications

for the use of ICT, particularly adventure games and simulations. More exhaustive information processing Children and adults who are better problem solvers have been found to

engage in more exhaustive processing of all relevant information and con- sequently to spend longer encoding and representing problems to them- selves before they start out on a solution (Sternberg and Rifkin 1979). Young children tend to be impulsive and to respond too quickly to a situa- tion or problem before they have had chance to assimilate all the relevant information. We will all have experienced the tendency of young children to do this. Sometimes when being given instructions about a new task they rush off (out of pure excitement!) and then have to come back to find out what it was exactly that they had to do. There are also, however, considerable individual differences in this area of ‘cognitive tempo’ and these can have important consequences for children’s learning. Borkowski et al. (1983), for example, demonstrated significant relationships between impulsivity–reflectivity, metamemory, strategy use and performance on a range of memory tasks.

In the light of this kind of evidence, it is perhaps worth reflecting on the balance which is struck in many primary school classrooms between encouraging children to get on quickly and complete tasks and then to take time to reflect carefully and systematically upon the task before attempting

GAMES AND SIMULATIONS IN THE EARLY YEARS

it. As we have seen, computer-based adventure games and simulations are very well designed to encourage children to be more systematic in the gathering of information. As teachers, it is well worth encouraging this element of problem-solving.

The ability to comprehend relations of successively higher orders There is also a clear and well documented progression in children’s think-

ing from being only able to consider the particular task, problem, object or incident at hand to being able to consider issues at a more abstract level, where a range of different instances might be taken on board simultaneously. As the work of Donaldson (1978) and others have shown children’s ability to reason is particularly context dependent. Primary school teachers are very familiar with this phenomenon: children can appear to understand an idea on one day, but then can be completely baffled by a slight change to the way it is presented on the next.

We have noted earlier that the use of powerfully ‘meaningful’ fictional contexts is a key element in adventure games which helps children to understand and make sense of problems. When using adventure games and simulations in the early years classroom it is, therefore, important to build on and support this characteristic. This can helpfully be done, for example, by developing a range of non-computer activities which use the same scenarios and characters and explore similar problems to those involved in the computer program (Underhay (1989) reviews some excellent projects along these lines).

The development of the ability to see relationships between different tasks would appear to be dependent upon the accumulation and continual restructuring of knowledge, driven by the processes of induction and anal- ogy. This issue of ‘transfer’ is a crucial one in learning. Research reviewed by Meadows (1993) indicates that children are more likely to be able to transfer understandings or processes from one task to another where, among other things, they encounter a range of examples with a common structure but different irrelevant characteristics. As we have seen, this is another common and very valuable feature of computer-based adventure games.

The ability to deal with higher order and more abstract relationships is also dependent upon the use of language and other forms of symbolic representation. These enable information to be ‘chunked’ into larger units which can then be processed and manipulated more easily. The work of Vygotsky (1986) on tools, signs and symbols in the development of human thinking, and Bruner (1973) on the development of enactive, iconic and symbolic modes of representation, has been most significant in this area. Non-computer activities which require children to represent their knowledge and understandings about the scenarios, characters and problems involved in particular games are, therefore, clearly indicated.

ICT IN THE EARLY YEARS

Models can be built, drawings made, stories retold and so on, all to great benefit.

Two key aspects of the way in which language helps learning in the context of social interaction have also emerged from research stimulated by Vygotsky’s and Bruner’s work. First, it is clear that we come to understand ideas better through the process of articulating them in social or group problem-solving situations. As anyone who has ever taught knows, being required to explain something to someone else is often the best way to come to understand it oneself. Second, language is used in social contexts to ‘scaffold’, support and guide problem-solving processes and pro- cedures. This kind of research has been partly responsible for a resurgence of interest during the last few years in the use of collaborative groupwork in primary classrooms (Dunne and Bennett 1990).

In this context, it is interesting to note that, although initially thought of in terms of individualised learning, computers have generally been used by groups in classrooms, and the view of many teachers is that learning to work in groups is one of the main advantages of computer use in schools (Jackson et al. 1986). Crook (1994) has reviewed the extensive range of work being carried out in schools involving collaborative learning with computers. Interestingly, as we noted earlier, adventure games and simulations have been found to be particularly powerful in generating collaborative talk and discussion. Organizing children into collaborative groups when they are working with adventure games and simulations is thus clearly indicated.

Flexibility in the use of strategy or information and the development of more sophisticated control strategies (metacomponents)

The last two key areas of development identified by Sternberg and Powell (1983) are very much interlinked and so we can deal with them together. We now know, through the work of neuroscientists, that unlike

a computer, the human brain carries out several processes simultaneously. As a consequence, we are capable of carrying out intellectual or physical tasks and simultaneously monitoring what we are doing. That this is fun- damental to human learning, has been established by a huge amount of research in the last 20 years or so concerned with the development of what have become known as ‘metacognitive’ processes and abilities. What emerges from this literature is a three stage process whereby we become increasingly able to construct, select and customise cognitive strategies to enable us to carry out even more different and demanding tasks with maximum mental efficiency. This process consists of:

• monitoring and evaluating our cognitive processes; • building up metacognitive knowledge about tasks and our own intel-

lectual processes and abilities;

GAMES AND SIMULATIONS IN THE EARLY YEARS

• constructing and selecting even more appropriate strategies. Developing these kinds of abilities is crucial to children’s development as

thinkers and learners, precisely because they enable children to take what they have learnt in one area and use it in another. A wide range of evidence has shown that it is in these abilities that many children with learning difficulties are particularly weak (Sugden 1989). As we have seen, developing and reflecting upon strategies and plans of action is a central element in many adventure games, and can also be developed through requiring children to ‘interrogate’ some kinds of simulations and databases.

The other point to note here is that the development of human thinking is characterised by increasing flexibility. Uniquely, as human beings, we are capable of dealing with new situations, of solving new problems and of being genuinely creative. Within neuroscience this flexibility of thought is commonly referred to as the ‘plasticity’ of the human brain (Greenfield 1997). We are unlike any other species in the extent that our brain grows after birth (it roughly quadruples in size in the first four years and con- tinues growing well into our teenage years). This enables us to adapt to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and to continue to adapt to changing circumstances, to a degree far beyond the capacity of any other species.

This growth in size is not accommodating the growth of new cells; rather it is accommodating the growth of new connections. We are born with all (or, according to the very latest research, the vast majority of) the brain cells we are ever going to have, but throughout life these cells con- tinually form literally hundreds of thousands of connections with other cells. However, the connections made in the first few years are overwhelm- ingly important because they construct the basic neural architecture upon which further learning will be imposed.

This finding has contributed to the increased recognition of the importance of early years education over recent years. It has also lead to the increasing recognition of the importance of children’s play for their intellectual development, as we have discussed above. Playfulness and the flexibility of thought which lead human beings to create and enjoy games, puzzles, jokes, stories and so on are not just fun, they are funda- mental characteristics of the human brain and all our scientific and artistic achievements. Engaging young children in the challenges posed by computer-based adventure games can, in my view, make an important contribution to these kinds of abilities.

How children’s thinking develops