A Study On The Relationship Between Role Play And 4 - Year - Old Children 's Theory Of Mind

Theory of mind is the study for cognitions of individuals to the mental states of others’and their own, and the causal prediction and interpretation of relevant behavior based on theircognition. Foreign scholars have undertaken a lot of research on theory of mind and they findthat theory of mind has a significant influence on children’s academic development and sociallife. Among the studies of the influence on children’s social development exerted by theory ofmind, foreign scholars find that role-playing has very important influence on development oftheory of mind. Role-playing is that according to other’s idea and using them as a reference,with the cognitive abilities of the relationship between certain specific social roles, childrenimitates others behavior who he is pretending himself to. While, there is few relevantresearches in this fields at home. The research, which is from a development perspective, onthe interactive relationship between theory of mind and role-playing is not too many.Therefore, the goal of this study is to approach role-playing’s influence on4-year-oldchildren’s theory of mind based on the foreign and domestic studies in attempt to make thestudy of theory of mind richer in our country and, also, provide theoretic guidance forchildren’s parents and teachers which in turn benefit the development of their socialcompetence.This study adopts education psychology experiment method, with the method ofcompare the data from pretest and posttest to explore the effect of role-playing games to thechildren’s theory of mind. This study randomly selected thirty4-year-old children from apreschool in Dalian and gets the condition of their theory of mind through the educationalexperiment. The children are separate in groups and every group has4or5children. Measurethe level of children’s theory of mind after forty times group training. The study explore thedata from pretest and posttest through Paired-Sample T Test.The result of the study shows that: through role-playing training, the levels ofdevelopment of children’s theory of mind pretest and posttest have significant differences, thelevel of development of children’s theory of mind has significantly increased.