How Do Mental Models Affect Children

During this stage, the child can engage in symbolic play, and have developed an imagination. This child may use an object to represent something else, such pretending that a broom is a horse. An important feature a child displays during this stage is egocentrism. This refers to the child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. To test whether or not children are egocentric, Piaget used the ‘Three Mountain Task’. Piaget concluded that the four-year olds thinking was egocentric, as the seven year olds was not. Children, at this stage, do not understand more complex concepts such as cause and effect, time, and comparison.

Jean Piaget investigated how children think. According to Piaget, children’s thought processes change as they mature physically and interact with the world around them. Piaget believed children develop schema, or mental models, to represent the world. As children learn, they expand and modify their schema through the processes of assimilation and

Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionary scientist, in his essay “Women’s Brains” (1980), argues that previous claims about the intellectual superiority of men over women are based on misinterpreted experimental results and therefore hold no scientific significance.

As per research ‘gender’ provides a perspective from which one could examine the biases that exist in the larger society. Some believe that to arrive at a more eloquent understanding of the problems of women in science , one should begin by asking what is the nature of science space that leads to under-representation and marginalisation of women rather than questioning the situation of a woman’s life that makes it difficult for her to pursue science.

Mildred Parten and Jean Piaget are two theorists that have had great influences on the way we understand children. Piaget constructed the idea that a person’s thinking passes through four stages and as the person grows, their way of thinking changes thus entering a different stage. He emphasized mostly the preoperational stage, which is for ages two to seven years old. In this stage children are seen as illogical thinkers but they do engage in make-believe games by using objects for purposes other than their actual intended use. Between the ages of four and seven, they still do not think logically but they become interested in games that have rules, structure, and social interaction. Unlike Jean Piaget, Mildred Parten did not see types of

As children get older egocentric thinking will begin to dominate in a non-logical and non-reversible way, and this will give a more developed imagination and will improve memory. The child grows into adolescents and the operational stage of cognitive development with the use of symbols and abstract concepts grows and shows more

Piaget and Binet conducted research into the role of cognitive schema and it’s involvement in the process of learning. They carried out an experiment where they conducted a series of intelligence tests on both children and adults. From this research, Piaget found that children and adults look at the world differently, which as a result causes children to build upon their own schemata on their own term. This is because their reasoning differs from that of adults, so they need to make sense of the world using their own rational.

Kimura’s scientific article Sex Differences in the Brain provides an excellent scientific basis and intermingles social implications with scientific discoveries. It’s use of graphs and tables allow for readers to easily understand each point being driven and makes excellent use of past references to allow a full scope of comparisons. Borchers’ social science article Sociological differences between women and men: Implications for autoimmunity gives genuine insight into the differences of men and women’s abilities regarding everyday tasks and duties but falls short in it’s delivery and scope. I suffers from confusing in text statistics and poorly places graphs that make it difficult for a reader to understand. While of the same topic, the Kimura’s scientific article does a better job of not only presenting ideas but creating them as well. Bringing several different approaches to understanding how men and women function, the scientific article is the superior of the two for this

Most of this gender disparity starts early. As early as in grade school. Young girls are rarely motivated to take Math and Science. This can be problematic because studies show that a lack in intellectual belief can in turn inhibit intellectual growth. There is also that persistent unconscious bias that Science and Math are male fields while females tend to do well

Piaget believe that children are active thinkers. He recognized that the mind develops through a series of irreversible stages. He also acknowledged that a child’s maturing brain builds schemas that are constantly assimilating and accommodating to the world around them. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is split into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. The sensorimotor stage occurs from birth to nearly two years of age. At this stage, infants learn about the world around them by sensing it and interacting within it. It is also in this stage that the idea of object permanence develops, that is, the awareness that things continue to exist even when they are not being observed. In my personal life, I am certain that in this stage of development I would have enjoyed peek-a-boo, because if I didn’t see it, to my developing mind, it wasn’t there at all. The second stage, preoperational, lasts from two years of age to seven years of

Research concerned with early cognitive development has shown that children in their early years generally find it hard to grasp the scientific concept that the earth is spherical (e.g. Nussbaum & Novak, 1992; Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992). Vosniadou (1994) states that young children initially possess a naïve theoretical framework with ‘entrenched presuppositions” which is based on their interpretation of their daily experiences.

There are a vast amount of psychological theories which have been established and aid in a child’s

found the study of physics interesting (Tamir, Levine, Lewy, Chen, & Zuzovsky, 1988). Shemesh (1990) found that Israeli junior high school girls tended to be more interested in languages, social studies, and humanities, while boys were more interested in science and technology. Furthermore, boys' interest in science and technology increased with age, while older girls became less interested. Likewise, the USA Department of Education (1997) reported that, while male and female seventh and tenth graders had similar positive attitudes toward science, high school seniors demonstrated a greater difference in these attitudes. Unfortunately, these less favourable attitudes of

In today’s society, there are more men engaged in the science fields than women. With that being said, this could cause the commonness of gender stereotypes. For instance, science is there for men and not women. Besides the social life of others, these stereotypes can also be shown in during the education process. Stereotypes are mainly visible by the use of language, the methods of teaching, gender and the attitude that is given. The main goal of this article was to tell whether the science education contained gender biased. This analysis thoroughly explains men are more into science profession and women are more likely to become teachers. In this article, men and women shows a stereotypical representation in online science education

The procedure of this study began with students being split up into groups and assigned different studies by Moreno (1998) including computer-generated animations, summaries containing short captions with illustrations, general texts and detailed texts; all based on lightning. Afterwards, disregarding gender, participants were assigned to treatment groups, they then analyzed three tests done to the students. To begin, all students’ SAT scores were analyzed in correlation with their genders to determine whether their gender had an impact on their overall scores. Second, they analyzed the students’ answers for whether they believed they can change a natural phenomenon such as lightening. And lastly, the retention and the total scores were recorded from each study. This study measured the participants retention and transfer that was measured, because it provides an understanding of the material and how they connect it to open-ended questions as well as how much was learnt. The independent variable is the open-ended questions and information provided to them and the dependent variable is the subjects. Overall, there was a significantly greater amount of females who responded with the fact that they cannot control nature when asked if they could change a natural phenomenon such as lightening, compared to males. First, this study suggests that males are significantly better at scientific problem-solving in comparison to females, however when the experiment was further