Research On The Pre-scientific Conceptions Of Urban And Rural Children Aged 4-6 Years

Jean Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory holds that the stage of cognitive development is universal in different fields. Children in the pre-operation stage possess neither deductive reasoning nor inductive reasoning. Children's cognition is not from certain characteristics of things and their internal relations. Animism is shown in children, which is restricted by Perceptional Similarity and egotistic thinking. The naive theory and domain-specific theory criticizes such underestimating of young children's cognitive ability. Young children are capable of organizing the world into a meaningful category. The concept of young children not only relies on the appearance of perception, but also reflects deep relationships among those members in a certain category, which is not so obvious. Children have relatively rich pre-scientific conceptions in terms of life science, which form a knowledge system. The system is not an authentic scientific theory, however, with its theoretic features and functions, it can be used to explain and predict phenomenon in a particular field.Pre-scientific conceptions of Children refer to their Naive concept, Spontaneous concept or daily concept, which is the understanding, classification, interpretation and prediction of the objects, events and phenomena children have formed through various ways in daily life. It is mainly about intuitive thinking, and reflects the initial development of abstract thinking. Pre-scientific conceptions can help children to transform specific, rich, scattered and isolated scientific experience into a conceptual cognitive structure. Pre-scientific conceptions are the primary forms of concepts. A clear dividing line is hard to draw because the distinction between Pre-scientific conceptions and scientific conceptions is a relative one.Studies on the Pre-scientific conceptions play significant roles in the researches on children's cognitive development and scientific education. By studying on Pre-scientific conceptions, it brings advantages to understand the development level and characteristics of children's scientific cognition better, which provides important inspirations on the enlightenment of children's scientific qualities.The thesis selects four basic concepts that represent life process:inheritance, growth, illness and death as well as three types of living entities:animals, plants and humans. The study designs 12 clinical interview questions combining with pictures and certain situations. 159 children aged 4-6 years from three urban kindergartens and three rural kindergartens are selected as the interviewees.The study attempts to explore the level of Children's development of the Pre-scientific conceptions from the standards of judgment and interpretation. According to the understanding degree and preciseness of children's cognition toward life, Children's interpretations can be divided into five levels:0 to 4 points from low to high. The development level of the Pre-scientific conceptions is analyzed and compared from differences between urban and rural areas, the differences in ages, cognitive differences of sub concepts, and differences of life forms.Some discoveries from this study are as follows:The overall level of children's pre-scientific conceptions range differently in each age stage. Despite the small differences between city and country, the level of explanation on the phenomenon of illness between city and country is quite distinctive. Although no significant differences were observed in children's level of cognition between animals and plants, their cognitive level on human bodies is remarkably higher than that on animals and plants. Young children's cognition on life is not synchronous. The scores of cognition on growth are the best, followed by death; illness and inheritance rank the lowest.The common features of children's pre-scientific conceptions in urban and rural areas are as follows:Children's Pre-scientific conceptions are restrained jointly by domain-specific and domain-general thinking. There are misconceptions in Pre-scientific conceptions. Children use multiple methods to explain the phenomenon of life, including the vitalistic causality, the essentialism, the environment theory, the behavior theory and the Teleology. Children are able to choose different the leading interpretation methods according to different life phenomena, and the rest are supplemental. The differences of living environment between urban and rural areas produce influences on the development level and characteristics of Pre-scientific conceptions of children. Pre-scientific conceptions of urban children are mainly from indirect experience, while Pre-scientific conceptions of rural children are from direct experience. Compared with rural children, urban children have more obvious anthropomorphic thinking.As a result of the comprehensive influence of development ecosystem, the way to get pre-scientific conceptions is pluralistic. The most important is from daily life experience due to their crucial influences. TV network media assert both positive and negative effects on the Pre-scientific conceptions. Teachers and parents have a certain impact on young children's pre-scientific conception and the efficiency of scientific education needs to be improved. The influence of children's own characteristics cannot be ignored. Among them, the characteristics of children's scientific thinking, knowledge experience and cognitive potentials are important factors affecting the Pre-scientific conceptions.Based on Early Learning and Development Guidelines for Children Aged 3-6, the thesis organizes questionnaire of parent self-assessment and teacher self-Assessment for children's life science education. The study discoveries that:the total scores of teachers in city are obviously higher than those of rural teachers, however, differences of young children's pre-scientific conceptions between city and country were observed. The efficiency of teachers'scientific education needs to be improved. The total scores of the parents are not closely related to the overall level of children's pre-scientific conceptions. Parents'occupation and family income hardly influence the overall level of children's Pre-scientific conceptions, while parents'academic credentials and care takers have significant effects.The development of children's Pre-scientific conceptions needs to protect and improve the conditions of Child Science Education:to make sure the content of the TV network is scientific and educational; to improve of parents'scientific qualities; to promote the integrated development of urban and rural preschool education properly; to enhance the efficiency of teachers'science education and to strongly support science education resources in communities.Based on theoretical and practical research, the value orientation of children's life science is put forward in the thesis:the integration of educational aims, the sustainability of development, the permeability of various fields, real-life orientation, the cooperation between kindergartens and families and exploratory values.Based on its studying process and conclusion, the thesis proposes the strategies of children's life science to develop the pre-scientific conceptions:respect and exploration for Pre-scientific conceptions, the combination of formal science curriculums and informal science curriculums, proper use of conceptual change strategies, balance between scientific experience and the development of scientific concept, guidance for children to understand the interdependence of human, animals, plants and environment, Reasonable treatments for anthropomorphic thinking in scientific cognition.