So far this summer I have worked two jobs involving the care of children. One job involved a residential of looked after teens, and the other was working in a nursery for a week while completing an NVQ. Each job gave me different experiences, both of which interested me in this part of psychology further.
Now those of us who are familiar with child psychology know that the limitations of children have been defined by such influential psychologists as Piaget. Of course there are many factors in psychology which present limitations to all research, however Piaget's work gave the world of developmental psychology an insight into what is capable of a child at a certain age- therefore giving us the tools to work on a curriculum for learning.
However time has gone on and theories have been developed and therefore changing the focus of the curriculum. Despite these changes, people responsible for any development of a child should be fully aware of physical and mental potentials and should always be reaching for it (Such as the Zone of Proximal Development by Vygotsky).
When attending training for the week of work at the nursery, I was amazed by how little I felt our manager was suggesting the children could do. Yes there were things she was right about- such as their attention span, but their ability to carry out tasks were much greater than I believe she was giving them credit for. Maybe she was just being difficult for the sake of being difficult (that was kinda her character) but then that is rather limiting a child's development.
On the other hand you had a mother arrange a meeting because she was concerned that her two year old daughter wasn't learning anything at the nursery. She believed that the children her age should be doing two hours or literacy and numeracy learning and writing a day. This you could say, is a bit extreme for a two year old. The aim of the company I worked for was to develop the children through forms of play and therefore the managers thought this mothers request was absurd.
I guess my opinion is in the middle of these two. I believe our society has become quite slacked when it comes to education and more teachers are becoming non-influential and lazy.
What do you think?
Children need the encouragement of developing new skills, and if they're not encouraged than their attention span will be short and will find it less interesting in the future to independently choose learning. Much psychology has taught us how our childhood influences our adulthood and therefore our educational experience needs to be one of attainable challenges, comfortable support and social learning.
The brain is most like a sponge when younger and still developing, and therefore if people limit a child too quickly now then that person could have more significant limits in their adult life.
This lends itself to another very important point of labelling children in groups and classes. This is called the Pygmalion effect (Rosenthal 1968) where teachers were told of made up capabilities of children in their classes and then it was observed how the children falsely labelled with higher capabilities performed better in tests at the end of the experiment. These children were of the same capability and therefore the conclusion is that because a teacher believed some children to be more gifted than others, they got paid more attention too and given more appraisal for their work.
Can you see how dangerous this could be in a class at school? How this could determine the academic future of some children?
Research likes this really makes me want to be in a position as a psychologist where I can change things like that.
Any thoughts?
Till next time
Take care
x
