Learning to Learn. A study of Swedish preschool children

• The present study is based on previous research into children's conceptions of learning, which were traced and described in terms of qualitatively different forms of thinking about what they learnt and how learning came about. Another earlier study was devoted to discovering ways of influencing the children's conceptions of their own learning, and positive results were obtained. The purpose of the present study has been to find out if children can learn better (in a qualitatively different way) after being involved in a programme with a specific didactic approach than children involved in more common preschool preschool programs do. The assumptions are that learning is a question of taking the children's perspective and of focusing on developing their conceptions of the various phenomena that are brought up for discussion throughout the preschool year. The specific didactic approach is based on using everyday situations, created by the children or the teacher, and reflecting on them in ways expected to develop the children's conceptions. The children's reflections were encouraged on three levels of generality: about the content, about the structure of the content (many types of "content" or themes have a common basic structure, which has to be conceptualised in order to understand the phenomena), and about their own learning. The didactic approach may be described in terms of a vertical variation in the level of thinking. It is a vertical alternation between the specific and the more general and vice versa. Metacognition is focused on at each of the three levels, that is, how they think about the content, the structure and their learning of the content. This "descriptive-experimental" study comprised four groups of preschool children (in total 76 children between 5 and 6 years of age), with their teachers. Two of the groups, A and B, were experimental, that is, they worked in accordance with the purpose of the study and two, C and D, served as control groups. The method of the study is based on qualitative analysis of clinical interviews (similar to the Piagetian ones), where the purpose is to find similarities and differences in children's understanding of the phenomena discussed. The children's conceptions of learning that were identified from interviews at the beginning of the year were the basic starting point. At the end of the year all groups participated in three learning experiments, involving a story or a lesson and followed by interviews, to see what development, measured in relation to qualitative changes in children's thinking and understanding, had taken place. The results show that the children in the experimental group not only developed their conceptions of learning to a large extent, but also understood the meaning of the messages conveyed in the learning experiments in a better way. The differences are outstanding between the experimental and control groups. In other words, children involved in the specific didactic approach adopted here developed the skill to learn.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Små barns lärande

pedagogik

metodik

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

bok (ämneskategori)