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A Study On The Characteristics Of Children's Trait Understanding And The Corresponding Educational Strategies

Posted on:2007-09-06Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y H DuFull Text:PDF
GTID:1115360185962227Subject:Pre-primary Education
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Children's trait understanding refers to children's acknowledgement and understanding of an individual's traits, and predicting, judging, understanding, explaining an individual's behaviors and mental world according to his/her traits. Specifically, children's trait understanding implies that on the one hand, children can make proper predication because they have not only come to realize the stability and consensus of the across-situation but also come to know the continuity and consistency of the spanning time as well. On the other hand, it shows that children are already capable of distinguishing the different traits showed by different people under the similar circumstance, thereby they are able to make out a reasonable and intrinsic inductive explanation of people's series of behaviors and psychological state. In this sense, children's trait understanding is a vast field of study in terms of children's social cognitive development, and it is closely related to and mutually advancing research on theory of mind and peer relations. Recently, research on children's trait understanding has become a hot topic in children's psychological development and education.In China research on children's trait understanding is lagging behind other countries. Past research in this area cannot fully and systematically reflect the characteristics of Chinese children's trait understanding development and lacks relevant practical investigation. By means of the combined experimental and investigative approaches, this study aims to have a survey of the characteristics and regular patterns of our Chinese kids' trait understanding, so that some principles and strategies based upon the teaching practices can be, therefore, put forward. It so hopes to combine theory and practice to provide guidance for kindergarten's education and practice and promote the development of children social cognition and socialized education.The first part of the dissertation summarizes current research of children's trait understanding. First, relevant basic concepts including personality, trait, and trait understanding are analyzed and defined. Second, through analyzing current research on children's trait understanding in and outside China, the paradigm, areas, and development course of children's trait understanding are discussed. In particular, some of the previous drawbacks and something inadequate are prescribed. Based upon all these, the study at last builds up the framework of the research project, including some concrete issues concerned and the specific ways of working.The second part of this paper is to investigate the characteristics and rules of Chinese children's trait understanding through experiment. Preliminary study is conducted before the formal experiment and its purpose is to understand the vocabulary usage of children's trait. The results indicate that children can use certain trait vocabulary to describe and explain an individual's behavior and mind, which provides a base for further research. The first task is to examine whether the children can have a stable and integrate understanding about the traits. The results reveal that children starting from 5 years old can begin to understand trait stability and consensus.
Keywords/Search Tags:trait understanding, development characteristics, educational principles and strategies, children
PDF Full Text Request
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