TAFAKKOR VA KUDAK (THINKING AND CHILDREN)
Year:2012 | Volume:3 | Issue:1 (5)|Papers Count:7

Moral judgment refers to an individual’s understanding of how people think and perceive regulations, customs, traditions, and norms that should be respected in the course of interactions. To examine a group of preschoolers’ moral judgments, which was the main purpose of the study, 108 children aged between five and six in Faruj, Iran were randomly selected and were subsequently interviewed on four moral concepts including lying, financial loss, theft, and justice taken from four stories. The results showed that with regard to lying, financial loss, and theft the preschoolers paid more attention to internal motivation; however, in case of justice they believed in unfairness. As the results signified, attention to internal motivation increased with age whereas attention to effects of deeds decreased with it. In their moral judgment against all concepts, the six-year old children paid more attention to internal motivation. Moreover, in the concepts of lying, financial loss, and theft girls paid more attention to the outcome as compared to boys; conversely, boys were more attracted towards internal motivation. Concerning the concept of justice, girls’ belief in fairness significantly differed from that of boys; that is, boys were more inclined towards equality in working. The findings, in line with Piaget, showed that as children grew older, they paid more attention to internal motivation. Nevertheless, attention of boys to internal motivation and their superiority in moral development over girls contradicted Piaget’s findings.

Teaching Philosophy for Children as a dialogue-based educational approach aiming at fostering caring, creative, and critical thinking has been the focus of some local studies in recent years. Meanwhile, critical education with its great impact on educational areas in the last decades of the twentieth century has not received enough attention. While reviewing the origins, nature, and characteristics of critical education, this paper attempted to explain Freire’s- a prominent critical educator- viewpoints regarding this approach. The inferences obtained from the study suggested similarities between critical approach and teaching Philosophy for Children Program including development of critical thinking and awareness, problem-posing, community of philosophical inquiry and cultural circle, and dialogic teaching, Moreover, the study indicated that both approaches oppose rote memorization, emphasize students’ active participation and freedom of action in the process of learning, encourage self-reflection and reflective thinking and consider teachers as facilitators.

Thought as an inherent capacity enables human beings to think about a variety of things and discover their truth. Thinking logically and using one’s insight are leading factors in helping a thinker to find the truth. Thus thought is a necessity that bestows sight to human beings. For visually impaired children, thought serves as an inner light which can guide them to attain a better, clearer, and more logical understanding of the world. The purpose of the present article was to assist visually impaired students in improving their thinking process and becoming reflective-centered. It was argued that in order to achieve this goal, the philosophy for children (P4C) program should be performed in the schools for blind students since it fosters reasoning and thinking skills. Moreover, the main features of the program including community of inquiry, story textbooks, and teachers with altered roles could contribute to the thinking process of these children. Finally, it was concluded that though some slight modifications should be made, P4C program is applicable for blind students.

The main purpose of the present study was to examine to what extent the features implied in Philosophy for Children program were observed in the contents of the elementary school text books, Reading and Writing and Devine Gifts published in academic year of 1389-1390. Content analysis was used as the method of the study and a checklist including the criteria of teaching Philosophy for Children was utilized for data collection. The criteria included the concepts of reasoning, conceptualization, and judgment and their 12 related components. The statistical universe encompassed the Reading and Writing and Devine Gifts textbooks in 14 volumes and the sampling population comprised the whole society. Descriptive statistics were used for data analysis. Analyzing contents of the books, 986 components related to the concepts of philosophical thinking were identified. The results indicated that reasoning enjoyed the highest frequency whereas the least frequency belonged to making judgments. Also, Reading and Writing included more philosophical thinking features as compared to Divine Gifts.

The present study aimed to investigate whether P4C program could have any significant impact on the development of creativity of first grade high school boys. In this quasi-experimental study with a pretest-posttest non-equivalent groups design, the participants were selected based on multi-level cluster sampling and the population included all first grade high school boys in zone 14 of Tehran, Iran in the academic year of 1390-1391. A total number of 60 students were selected and divided into an experimental and a control group with 30 students in each group. In order to collect data, Abedi’s creativity test (CT) was utilized and paired samples t-test was used to examine the difference between the means of the two groups. The findings verified the validity and reliability of P4C program in developing children’s creativity and its four components including continuity, extension, creativity, and flexibility.

With regard to the effect of bilingualism on cognitive processing and especially intelligence, two different approaches including additive and subtractive bilingualism can be introduced. The present study aimed to investigate the differences bilingual and monolingual children possess in terms of their cognitive processes in general and intelligence in particular. In order to achieve the purpose of the study, 25 children aged between 8 and 10 years old studying at a primary school in Tehran were selected and took the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R). The test was performed separately for each child. Bilingual children had proficiency in Azari and Persian, whereas; monolingual children were only proficient in Persian. An independent samples t-test was run to compare the performances of the two groups the results of which indicated that there was no significant difference between the means of the two groups on the test and thus the null hypothesis was not rejected. Based on the findings of this study, it seems that monolingual and bilingual children do not have any significant difference in terms of cognitive processing (intelligence).

The rapid development of technology in the twenty-first century and increasingly common human problems, Makes us sensitive to the knowledge that we will give to children, and better accomplish this knowledge with spiritual and rational skills. Recently, spiritual realm is considered as a domain of intelligence. Researchers believe that as one of the most valuable achievements in the past few years, spiritual intelligence is capable to uncover mysteries of humans’ complex mind and find the origins of human behavior. While one of the major concerns of Iranian society and its educational system is the negligence of spirituality in nurturing children, the extensive literature on spiritual intelligence signifies that research in this domain is limited to adults’ attitude and children are almost disregarded. There is much evidence concerning the advantages of the development of spiritual intelligence during childhood. While defining spiritual intelligence, this paper intended to clarify the necessity of developing spiritual intelligence and examining the possible accessibility of this purpose via Philosophy for Children Program.