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Education Forum on Teaching Thinking Skills Report

Psychological Perspective

Bryan Kirkaldy, Fife Council

Bryan Kirkaldy, an educational psychologist from Fife Council, provided a psychologist's perspective on how current thinking in developmental psychology informs the debate about thinking skills.

Aim

Bryan Kirkaldy explained that the task of educational psychology is to apply the main findings from developmental psychology to everyday issues of learning at home and at school. By way of illustration, he would refer to evidence from infant interactional studies. In the first part of his presentation he explained the lessons to be learnt from studies of child/mother interactions - a 'synchronised dance' of social and communication exchanges - conducted at Edinburgh University.

Developmental psychology

The key findings from interactional studies are that from the early weeks of life infants are:

The thinking is 'visible' as exemplified in videos in which the pauses for reflection characteristic of adult conversation can be seen in very young infants' behaviour. These studies indicate that language, thinking and social interaction are not easily separable, but are intertwined to form part of a necessary whole.

Child development studies show a massive development in thinking capacity occurring from 0-5 years of age. There is growth both in the size of the brain and in thinking. The conceptual, thinking tools used in social interaction build up with practice and usage in a cumulative way. This provides the architecture of a conceptual framework and allows learning to accelerate. Although most learning during these early years is incidental and little is planned or taught, the role of adults is crucial in providing a 'scaffolding' to support the child's development. Thinking and learning can, however, be disrupted by various problems connected with, for example, sensory difficulties or ill health but also with disruptions to social interaction, resulting, for example, from social, family and mental health stresses.

Current child development experiments indicate that conditions that promote effective learning and thinking for children are similar to those required by adults. Namely:

Translated into classroom terms a number of features are conducive to developing thinking skills:

Thinking and learning in a social context

The presentation concluded by turning to a key issue for secondary teachers, based upon a broader perspective of the ways in which young people think. Bryan Kirkaldy cautioned against a reductionist view of thinking and learning. He firmly believed that thinking and learning are essentially social. Any attempt to reduce them to a set of specific teachable skills would run the risk of artificially focusing on one fragment of a holistic process; this would not be conducive to effective learning. He asked:

The big issue for many adolescents was expressed in the above - the choice they made between the personal investment of time, effort and self-image into aiming for scholastic success (and risking 'failure'), and the alternative subversive subculture of not pursuing scholastic success often described as disaffection. The choice is heavily affected by social variables, especially the peer group which assumes a great importance at this age. It was suggested that as adults we need to understand the psychology of thinking that goes into this choice and have more of an influence on the social motivations which determine it if we are to improve learning and teaching for those pupils who are most at risk of social exclusion.

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