Abstract
Cognitive skills are important as a 21st century skills (Peterson, & Bentley, 2015) and questions are a powerful tool to develop student cognitive skills including students reasoning skills (Säre, Tulviste, & Luik, 2017). Philosophical discussion with children according to the programme Philosophy for Children leads to growth in the learners’ argumentation and reasoning skills. Reasoning skills enable children to give explanations of opinion, behaviour, and make decisions. The aim was to find out the emergence of 5-to-6-years-old Estonian pre-schoolers’ reasoning via their responses to questions asked by the adult. The results indicate that pre-schoolers who participated in philosophical group discussions over 8 months performed higher in their thinking skills and were more talkative than the control group. The results also reveal which questions asked by the adult discussion leader have more potential to support the development of reasoning skills. The aim was to investigate where teacher’s skills to compose questions come from; also which questions teachers compose based on a text in order to develop students reasoning skills during group-discussion. In sum 216 teachers’ questions were analysed. Results show that teachers composed 71% questions which mainly guided to describe the situations in text, describe own opinion, to narrate or control the memory if the teachers were pleased to compose questions to encourage learners´ reasoning skills. Only 29% of questions had the potential to activate higher cognitive skills assuming to support reasoning skills. Also 69% of teachers confirmed the fact that they had never studied how to compose questions.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
Learner Diversity and Identities
KEYWORDS
Reasoning, Discussion, Philosophy For Children, Questions, Teacher Education
