Effects Of Pilot Task Types On Children’s Following Task

In our daily life, people often need to simultaneously or successively completetwo or more different tasks. For example, after reading, we want to watch televisionor surf the Internet. Everyone will carry out several tasks every day. Task switching isa fundamental phenomenon in the process of human cognitive activities. Taskswitching is so frequent in real life, and good command of this skill is ratherimportant for human beings to adapt to the environment and survive. As a crucial partof executive control study, task switching has seen much progress in recent years. Butthese studies are mostly adults-targeted theoretical research. Children’s task switchinghad been seldom touched upon, let alone practical studies in this regard that wouldcarry some guiding significance. Existing studies have shown that different orderarrangements of tasks will produce different effects, which may mean differentefficiency in completing tasks if arranged differently in order.Based the summary and evaluation of research on task switching at home andabroad, this study aims to explore whether there are differences in children’scompleting efficiency of two tasks of different interest level if arranged in differentorders. This research adopts the situational experiment method to test239pre-schoolchildren. The following two studies have been conducted in detail:Research I Situational experiment to examine the effect of different types of pilottasks on tasks of low interest.Research II Situational experiment to examine the effect of different types ofpilot tasks on tasks of high interest.The above research gives the following results:(1)High-interest pilot task can prompt children to complete the following tasks.When children face two different tasks of high and low interest respectively, theyshould be made to complete the task of high interest in the first place and then thelow-interest task in order to improve their efficiency.(2)The factor of class shouldn’t affect the order arrangement of different tasks ofhigh and low interest. Kids of different classes and grades should be made to complete the task of high interest first, and then that of low interest.(3)For girls and boys, the task arrangement of high and low interest should bedifferent. For girls, high–interest task should be arranged first to improve theirefficiency. While for boys, tasks of low interest should put at the first place, andhigh–interest tasks in the second.