The Development Of Children's Conception Of Slope-From Constructivist Prespective

The physical knowledge activity is the most valuable application of constructivist theory in the preschool education. It unifies Piaget's theory of the knowledge of classification and the cognitive constructivism, and plays an important role in children's preschool education. The "Ramps and, Pathways " activity, designed by Dr. Rheta L. DeVries, the contemporary US renowned constructivist psychologist and educationalist, focuses on children's cognitive and spatial logical development. It has regarded as a model of the constructivist education and cognitive psychology. The basic materials are a set of wooden track boards. The lengths of these track boards consist of 1 ft (x 2), 2ft (x 2), 3ft (x 4), 4ft (x 4). In this activity, children will create rollways and slopes for all kinds of marbles by using ramps of varying lengths and blocks or tables of varying sizes available. In this open-end activities, three play elements( marbles, ramps and blocks)provide children with inexhaustible opportunities to construct plentiful relationships. In a word, the ramps activity can be justified in terms of both the value of studying children's physical knowledge and of the contest for development of cognitive structure.As the first stage of Chinese and American cross-Cultural research, the nationality research, this research devotes to discuss 3-6-year-old children's development in incline conception in China. The entire paper consists of seven parts. The first part is an introduction, which defines basically the constructivist perspective of this research. The second part elaborats the important rationale: Piaget's theories of cognitive stage and knowledge classification, and Kammii and DeVries education of these theories in preschool education. On this basis, the author introduces in the third part this origin and the practical significance of the research, and relates "the shadow" , a similar research 20 years ago, to deeply analyze the whole development and changes of constructivist education in preschool education in several dozens years. The fourth part defines the research question and method specifically, which follow mainly the Geneva model of the cognitive research. With the clinical method and the video recording research, the researcher has tested the activities for 136 children (the Shanghai area). The fifth part summarizes the research, in which, two main kinds of research are summarized and discussed. One is the children' s cognition development and the cause inference research, and the other is the constructivist research of the correlation between the children' s force and the movement domain. These researches also is the important foundation to the analysis of children' s cognitive structure level which is to be carried out later. The sixth part is the result and analysis of the research, which is the most important part. The author has completed three kinds of analysis: physical structure analysis of the'Ramps and Pathways' activity, analysis of the incline concept and that of Guttman scale. The author has divided the Chinese 3-6-year-old children' s into five stages with eight levels according to the incline concept, and has made the corresponding occurrence epistemology explanation. Development of conceptions about slope seems to be constituted by the progressive coordination of these relation. Level 0: Being little aware of the slope.Level I :Having limited consciousness of the property of slope. Children could differentiate the force and the direction of the object movement. 1A:Being able to recognize the direction of the movement on slope; 1B: Being able to predict the distance of marble travels in some degree. Children could coordinate the relationships between the release point of marble and the distance of marble travels into a spatial relation of proximity.Level II: Being aware of the relationship between marble' s release point on slope and the distance of marble travels.2A: Focusing on the length of slope .Having limited consciousness of the relationships between the length of slope and distance the marble travels; 2B: Being aware of the height of the slope, but this kind of awareness is just based on intuition or empirical abstraction. Neither could children at this level differentiate the height and the length of the slope clearly, nor could they coordinate the relationship between them. 2C:Forming the basic conception of the height of the slope. Children start to coordinate the relationships between the slope and the marble' s movement. LevelIII: Forming the conception of the height of the slope very clearly.Children could coordinate the relationship between the slope and themarble' s movement.3A: Being little aware of the active consciousness of the slope. Childrencould slove problems at the level of practical intelligence.3B: Coordinating in a precise way with the height of the slope and thedistance the objects travel. Children could slove this kind of problemsflexiblly.LevelIV: Being aware of deducting the relationships involved in the slope.The seventh part focuses on the classroom application of the ramps and pathways. The limitation of the research time and the ecology of practices prevents us through carrying out this activity fully. But from classroom activity observation, we still get so much information, and we have discussed the problems of the application of the incline and the orbital activity in the Chinese Kindergartens. It is actually the proof and the practice development of the research of first stage, also is a significant attempt for the successive research.