因果的な説明に現はれた兒童の思考
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<I>Problem</I>: How do children explain strange physical phenomena? Are there any special types of explanations peculiar to children? Do age and environment influence children's causal explanations?<BR><I>Method</I>: The clinical method was used. Children watched the demonstration of the phenomenon; then they were asked to explain how such a phenomenon was caused. An assistant took an exact record of the children's answers.<BR><I>Series of Experiments</I>: I) The Bracken Toothpick (I. Huang) II) The Die on the Card (I. Huang) III) Blowing out of Candle (I. Huang) IV) Magnet (Ôsaki) V) Immersion of Paper without Wetting it (Ôsaki) VI) Bouyancy (Piaget, I. Huang) VII) Objects in a Turning Box (Piaget, J. Huang)<BR><I>Subjects</I>: Total number 406<BR>Kindergarten children, public nursery children, public school children.<BR><I>Results</I>:(1) Physical and Prelogical Causal Explanations:<BR>There were found two kinds of explanations one physical and the other, prelcgical. Of the answers given by school children 56 per cent were prelogical, and 27 per cent physical, causal explanations while 71 per cent of the answers of preschool children were prelogical and only 3 per cent physical. In the prelogical explanations there were found five types of causal relation. 1) Mere Naming 2) Mere Description of Attribute 3) Mere Description of Phenomenon and Action 4) Falsification of Experience (Perception and Memory) 5) One-sidedness of Experience.<BR>(2) The Influence of Age and Environment upon Children's Causal Explanations:<BR>a) The causa explanations of public nursery children are more prelogical than those of kindergarten children. Kindergarten children come from homes of higher intellectual level than the children of the public nursery.(See Fxperiment I Table 1) When children have no idea of the cause of the phenomenon, their explanations tend to be prelogical. The answers of I, II, III (Table 1) signify that their ideas of the cause of the phenomenon are not formed yet, while IV, V, VI show that an idea has been formed. According to Table 1, almost all of the public nursery children have given prelogical answers, while only 30 per cent of the explanations of the kindergarten children belong to the prelogical stage. Throughout the series of seven experiments, there is a greater number of prelogical explanations in the answers of the public nursery children than in those of the kindergarten children.<BR>b) The children who have had lessors in Science have a tendency to explain every phenomenon by such physical causes as they have already learned. They sometimes give a physicalcause which has no possible connection with the phenomenon concerned. Such failure means that their idea of the physical cause is not yet thoroughly formed.<BR>c) With the advan ement of age, children's explanations become less prelogical and physical explanations increase. While we see 71 per cent of prelogical and 3 per cent of physical explanations in preschool children's answers; in school children's we find 56 per cent of prelogical and 27 per cent of physical explanations.(See Table 6) To discover what influence age has on the type of explanation given, I compared the answers of children of the sixth year class (B) with those of the children in the first three years of primary school (A). See the percentages given in Table 5. The prelogical explanation still predominates in group A (57 per cent) while on the contrary, in group B, the physical explanation (60 per cent) predominates.<BR>J. Piaget has mentioned dynamic causality and magical causality among his seventeen types of children's causal relations; but Huang does not find such causal relations in his experiments. I suppose, however, these two different opinions depend upon how and from what view point they interpret childran's words.
- 公益社団法人 日本心理学会の論文