Scientific journal
European Journal of Natural History
ISSN 2073-4972
ИФ РИНЦ = 0,301

WAYS AND MEANS OF THINKING DEVELOPMENT IN PRIMARY SCHOOL AGE

Artemenko O.N., Bakunova I.V., Demidenko O.P.

The problem of learners´ thinking development and perfection is one of the most important problems in psycho-pedagogical practice. It is fairly considered that the main way to solve it is the rational organization of the whole academic activity. A specially organized game training of thinking can be considered as a supplementary, auxiliary way.

The weight of evidence suggests that a general base for any sound mental activity behaviour is the presence of three universal components of thinking as a minimum:

  1. A high level of elementary mental operations formation: analysis, synthesis, comparison, segregation of the essential and other operations appearing as most divided elements of thinking;
  2. A high level of activity, thinking unreservedness and plurality, manifested in production of a great amount of various hypotheses;
  3. A high level of thinking organized and purposeful nature, manifested in a clear orientation to segregation of the essential in phenomena and use of generalized analysis outlines.

The main task of primary school is to guarantee the personality development of a child at a higher level compared to the pre-school period.

A source of the sound development of a primary school child is two kinds of activity. First, any child develops according to the past experience digestion of the mankind due to the inclusion into its contemporary culture. At the heart of this process there is educational activities aimed at the digestion of the knowledge necessary for the life in the society. Second, any child in the process of development realizes its possibilities independently due to its creative activity. As distinct from academic one, creative activity is not aimed at the digestion of general knowledge. It evokes self-activity and self-actualization in the child, the embodiment of its own ideas aimed at the creation of the new.

Performing the specified kinds of activity, children solve many problems and do it for different purposes. So, in academic activity training problems are solved to master any skill or digest one or another rule. In creative activity intellectually demanding creative tasks are solved to develop children´s abilities. That is why, if a general ability to learn is formed in the process of educational activity, then within the framework of creative activity a general ability to search and find new solutions, unusual ways to achieve the required effect, fresh approaches to the offered situation consideration. If we speak about the present state of modern primary school in our country, then the central place is still taken by academic activity. At the lessons of the two main classroom disciplines - language and mathematics - children almost always solve training routine tasks. Their purpose is to reduce gradually children´ searching activity with every following task of one and the same type and finally make it disappear at all.

The state of modern primary school one cannot call a normal one. On the one hand, the existed dominant influence of the knowledge and skills digestion activity thwarts children´s intellect progress and creative thinking, first of all. In connection with such a system of teaching children accustom to solve the problems having always ready-made solutions, a single one, as a rule. That is why children become embarrassed, when a task has no solutions or, vice versa, has a set of them. Besides, children get used to solve problems on the basis of the already learned rule, so, they are not able to act independently to find any other new method.

On the other hand, constant solving routine problems impoverishes the child´s personality, its attitude to itself, in particular. Little by little, children start evaluating themselves, their possibilities only through the prism of a successive or non-successive settlement of routine problems, which depends on the corresponding rule or definite knowledge digestion. Often it results in the fact that a positive self-esteem of a child depends not on the display of its invention or quick understanding, but on the diligence and carefulness in mastering rules and knowledge. However, that is not to say that in modern primary school there are no problems of searching character at all. But, first, the settlement of such problems is far from being intelligible to all children, but the most quick-witted ones; and, second, to solve these problems is not obligatory.

Thus, intellectual upbringing, thinking development is an important side in the primary school child personality development, in its cognitive sphere, in particular. An active search for relations between different events is typical of human reasoning. It is the orientation to the reflection of directly non-observed relations, segregation of principal and unequal, essential and non-essential details distinguishes thinking as a cognitive process from perceptions and sensations. The study of thinking is referred to the number of the most difficult and poorly developed problems of psychology.

The work was submitted to international scientific conference «Modern education. Problems and solutions», Thailand - Cambodia, February 18-28, 2009, came to the editorial office on 10.12.2008.