Shiyan O.A., Belolutskaya A.K., Le-van T.N., Zadadaev S.A. Cognitive Development of Preschoolers: the Relationship of Normative, Transformative and Symbolic Abilities
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Abstract
The relevance of the topic of the article. For the wide educational practice of kindergartens, the question of the psychological mechanisms of creative thinking is fundamental, since their formation begins precisely at the age of three to five years. If during this period of a person’s life the educational process is structured in such a way that the child’s creative thinking is not supported or even suppressed, then it will be very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to compensate for gaps in cognitive development at later life stages. It should be emphasized that, as a rule, teachers do not support creative thinking or even act to the detriment of it precisely because of a lack of understanding of the key principles of its development, which, in particular, are related to ensuring a balance of activities that actualize formal-logical, dialectical and symbolic structures of thinking.
The aim of the study. The work is aimed at identifying the features of the structure of cognitive abilities that make up the complex mechanism of creative thinking, which is one of the basic problems of psychology of cognitive development today. The question is posed of how dialectical thinking, formal logic and the ability to symbolize are related in preschool age. The assumption is verified that the use of Piaget’s tools, focused on fixing reversibility relations and the formation of the phenomenon of preservation, will reveal new aspects of the relationship between formal-logical and dialectical thought structures.
Description of the research progress. 272 preschoolers from Moscow and other regions of the Russian Federation were individually diagnosed. For data processing, methods of correlation analysis and verification of the independence of parameters according to the Pearson’s chi-squared criterion were applied.
Research results. The results of the study showed that the connection between the three lines of cognitive development of preschoolers is traced more consistently in relation to formal and dialectical thinking. With regard to symbolization, the connections are less consistent. The article concludes that normative, transformative and symbolic abilities are relatively independent lines in the cognitive development of preschoolers.
Conclusion. The data obtained indicate the complexity and heterogeneity of the mechanism of creative thinking and the heterogeneous structure of relationships between formal-logical and dialectical structures, as well as the ability to symbolize. Therefore, the program for the development of creative thinking for preschoolers should have a balanced character: by influencing one type of structures, we cannot expect that the rest will also develop as a result of this influence. To actualize the complex mechanism of a child’s creative thinking in the pedagogical terms, it is necessary to design problem situations together with the children, the resolution of which requires both the use of formal and dialectical logic and the ability to invent symbols, images, metaphors.
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