Elements of Educational Psychology (Иностранный язык в профессиональной сфере — психология). Учебное пособие

Creativity differs from the kinds of abilities measured by standard intelligence tests. Creative people tend to have average or above-aver- age scores on IQ tests. Beyond an IQ of 120, there is little correlation between intelligence and creativity. J.P. Guilford first distinguished the thought processes of creative people from those of other people in terms of convergent and divergent thinking. Convergent thinking involves the application of logic and knowledge to narrow the number of possible solutions to a problem until one’s thoughts “converge” on the most appropriate choice. In contrast, divergent — the kind most closely associated with creativity and originality — involves the ability to envision multiple ways to solve the problem.

There are three essential criteria for creative achievement:

•expertise in a specific field that must be learnt;

•creative skills, including divergent thinking;

•the motivation to engage in creative thinking for its own sake regardless of external reward.

Creativity does not appear to be inherited. Studies with identical twins raised separately show that environment plays a great role in the development of creativity as intelligence.

Conception

What distinguishes man from animals is his ability to form concepts. He does not only retain mental pictures of concrete objects and experiences, but also builds on their basis general ideas denoting classes of objects. They are called concepts. A concept is a system of meaning.

The basis of concepts is perception. The several perceptions are compared, their common qualities are emphasized and abstracted and a general idea, which does not correspond to any one subject but is the cumulative result of many, is formed. Concepts are the result of comparison, relation, abstraction and generalization. The wider is the experience, the richer is the concept.

Concepts make for the mental economy through organization. They give us the power to think of the many in one. They help organize knowledge; separate, isolated facts of experience and knowledge

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are combined and retained under general heads. It is easier and more economic to use general ideas than to deal with each individual object.

Concepts make possible abstract thoughts and reasoning and the system of science is just classified knowledge, knowledge built of conceptsthatapplynotonlytothepastandthepresentbutalsotothe future.Theyaretoolsofthinkingandsincedifferentindividualsusetools for different purposes, besides, the meaning of concepts differs from individual to individual. The selection of essential qualities is relevant to the purpose and what is essential from one point of view may not be so from another. For example, paper may signify different things to a student, examiner, merchant, manufacturer or chemist.

Concepts may be of objects, relations or qualities. Children acquire concepts of abstract qualities and relations later and the main care of the teacher is to help them acquire most of their concepts themselves. He should make them discover relations and common qualities.

Words play an important role in conception. They help clarity of thoughts; the precise and accurate use of the language becomes clear and defines thinking.

Judgement

Conceptsdonothangalone;theyarealwaysrelatedtooneanother. Whenevertwoideas areconnectedanda relationof agreementordisagreement is asserted between the two, we have a judgement. To judge is to discover the relationship between these two ideas. The common meaning of judgement, as decision is true: we decide about the relation between ideas on the basis of perception and our interpretation of what we perceive.

Conceptionandjudgementinvolveeachother.Itisonlyforthe sake of distinction that is treated separately. In forming concepts, percepts are compared and this comparison involves judgement. Most often, such judgements are not expressed but they are understood.

Ideas previously formed are used and in judging relationship between ideas, ideas themselves grow richer, more accurate, and better

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defined. Fresh qualities or relations are recognized among concepts and new meanings are added. Making new judgements about education, planning our ideas about them grow richer.

Some judgements are made spontaneously and immediately; we call them intuitive judgements, for example, the child looks ill, telling lie s is bad. Intuitions are judgements made instantaneously without any effort of thought.When judgements are the result of reflection and deliberation, they are called deliberative, as for example, every man is equal before the law; rest is necessary during the examination days.

What are the common causes of failure of judgement?

The first is the lack of experience. When all the facts are not observed, when the evidence is insufficient when the same data is neglected, judgements go wrong.

Secondly, it may be due to the lack of reflection. All the implications of facts may not have been fully thought about.

Thirdly, emotional prejudices like jealousy often mar our judgements.

Lastly, the mental habit of depending on others or of borrowing opinions and echoing them is fatal to independent judgement. Blind acceptance of judgements from others makes mental parrots of all of us.

The teacher’s responsibility in training learners to judge for themselves is great. He should not only help them acquire knowledge but also turn it into wisdom by guiding them to attend to the bearing, the relationships and the applications of facts.

Young people should be encouraged to think independently. They should be asked questions, which demand earnest thinking.The aim of the teacher should be “not a uniform knowledge, but multiform thinking”.Muchofourcommonteachingismeretellingeitherbythe teacher or the textbook. What is needed is the creation of such social situations as the solution of an urgent problem, discussion of a burning topic, the criticism of a story written by a learner and so on, so that learners may have no other alternative but to search their minds and form judgements. In the study of science they should discover facts for themselves or verify those that are already known. In art and music, they should distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, the harmo-

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nious and the jarring. Good taste and live for the truth will stimulate independent judgement.

Reasoning

Reasoning is super quality thinking meant for solving a problem or making a decision. The reasoning that is based on experiences is called deductivereasoning.The one, that develops some new principle and is nourished by it, is called inductive reasoning.

Reasoningconsistsofmakinga judgement(or judgementsalready formed) and is commonly defined as “perceiving relations among judgements” or seeing agreement or disagreement among judgements already made. Reasoning is generally associated with formal rules and formulae of logic, but all the people, even young people, reason without consciously realizing that they are doing so.

Training in Thought and Reasoning

In modern education, nothing is considered more important than teaching children to think and reason for themselves. Stress is laid on theall-round changes taking place in our manifold environment and on the impossibility of educating theyounger generation for adult social living whose pattern is uncertain.The best that can and should be done is to equip learners with an ability to think for them and successfully meet thechanging situations of a changing world.

The teacher has to play a more difficult role in achieving this aim. He is not to be an initiator, a leader whose mental footstep learners are to walk into, but throwing himself into the background, he is to stimulate them to become their own leaders, to meet each difficulty as if it were a battle to be won. Young people should be encouraged to stand on their own legs, to be self-reliant and resourceful in study and thought. Teaching should be dynamic, presenting new material and a new standpoint and challenging the young intellect. Learners should be guided to think and study.

Should teaching be inductive or deductive? Should the teacher start with a particular instance and, through comparison, help pupils to obtain general rules, or should he give them the rule or definition

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straightaway and ask them to apply it to particular instances? Older teaching was mostly deductive. The teacher offered the rule or definition asked the class to commit it to memory and then gave examples to illustrate it. Definitions of parts of speech, rules of grammar etc. were boldly printed in the textbooks, transcribed on the blackboard and ceremoniously repeated by the teacher so that the pupils may memorize them for mechanical application. This method was no doubt economical for both the teacher and the taught, but it gave no opportunity for independent thinking. The lesson lacked vigor; the concepts formed were not so suggestive.

On the other hand, the method of induction takes the mind through the same steps which would it follow naturally if left to it. It helps establish intimate contact between study and experience. The teacher takes half a dozen sentences of daily use. He presents each sentence one by one and asks what person or thing is talked about in it. Individual learners achieve the rule and develop skills in the use of knowledge. But the inductive method is long and, with complex topics, may prove cumbersome and confusing.

The best method of teaching is neither inductive nor deductive, but a wise combination of both. The teacher should use the inductive method to make knowledge systematic and comprehensive. All subjects can be taught both ways and each should be taught to some extent each day.

The General Nature of Imagination

Imagination consists of picturing objects in their absence. It is a process of forming images. We get a sensation or a perception of an object when the latter is presented to the senses but what we recall when we think of it without its being present to the senses is an image. Sometimes, when only one of the sense qualities is present, a more or a lessvividpictureoftheobjectcomestothemindinsteadofthe whole object. The picture of the object, when the object is not present is commonly known as an image, a mental image or a memory image. An image is a mental counterpart of the object in its absence.

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Itispossibleforeveryexperiencetohaveitscounterpartinan ima­ ge. We may have images of lights, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. As we cannot have a pure sensation and only a perception, that is, sensation plus the meaning it has acquired in the course of experience, so we also cannot have pure images apart from their meaning. Thus, we have ideas. Images in comparison to ideas are the same as sensations are to perceptions.

As for F.R. McDouglas and James Drever there are two types of imagination, namely, perceptive imagination and creative imagination. Creative imagination is further bifurcated as pragmatic and aes­ thetic. The pragmatic type of imagination is theoretical or practical. Similarly, aesthetic imagination may be artistic or fantastic in nature.

Education can make imagination stronger and diverse.The learner should be encouraged to write poems and stories, to act, to draw, to paint, to go out for rich and varied experiences etc. which can notably stimulate the process of imagination.

Sensation and Image

Images being incomplete pictures or copies of sensations are naturally inferior to the sensations “both in the enjoyment they afford and in the uses that can be made of them”. Let us consider several ways in which images can be inferior to sensations.

1). Images are more fragmentary than sensations. They are continuous with the total mass of experience, but in an image, the background is lost.An image is more detached.

2). Secondly, there is a difference in intensity. The image called up of a fine picture or music does not possess the vividness or liveliness that characterizes the actual sensation. Perceptions are aggressive, they “strike the mind” (Hume). The image of a loud sound or bright light is never as disturbing as the original sensation is.

3). Another difference between a percept and an image is that of distinctness.

One of the main differences between children and adults is the amount of using and making concrete and verbal imagery. Children use more of concrete imagery and less of verbal imagery: adults

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use more of verbal and less of concrete imagery. Children tend to think in terms of objects and concrete situations, whereas adults are more inclined to use words. Besides, children get most of their knowledge through sensations and their thinking is made up of pictures of objects. Adults get most of their knowledge through books and language and they substitute language symbols for things.

Verbal imagery has a distinct advantage over concrete imagery. A word gets associated with a large number of objects, has a richer and wider meaning, can suggest more than a concrete imagery of an object. It is only through verbal images that abstract thinking is possible and any speed in thinking can be acquired. Thus, verbal imagery is more useful and economical.

Teachers, often realizing the value and the use of verbal imagery, make haste to replace the object-image of learners by the word-image. They roughly believe that effective thinking is not possible without verbal imagery. But words without activity and experience are barren and should be taught and handled in close connection with actual experience. We have already stressed the need and value of activity in education but we should guard against the all too enthusiastic insistence on teaching through activity alone and without words.

Children are often unable to distinguish between memories and imaginations, their hold on reality is weak, and they do not only wishfully build stories but also believe them to be true. This accounts for excessive credulity among children.

Sometimes it is possible for them to distinguish between memory imagesandtheimagesofimagination.Vividnessinimaginaryisanindividual trait and belongs to children as well as to adults, and because adults have clearer and more definite percepts, their images should be more vivid than those of children.

On the other hand, because children are interested in concrete things and their images are not mixed with associations and meanings, their imaginary may be more vivid than that of adults. A very vivid type of image is called eidetic and is rich and accurate in detail.

Lastly, fantasy plays an important role in children’s imagination. Make-believe play helps them build a fantastic world in which wishes

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revel and everything is readily supplied for asking. Such a fantasy is not altogether absent among adults but in them it represents an abnormal phase of mental life. With adults, it is pathological, with children it is natural.

Forms of Imagination

Imaginative activity is distinguished into several forms and knowledge of them will help the teacher in developing and training imagination among children. Usually imagination is classified into re­ productive and productive. Imagination depends on perception and experience. When the product of imagination differs from the previous experience, it is rather a mere repetition or a copy of it; it is called the product of reproductive imagination, as when we recall details of events of the last year. But when the past only provides the raw material for building a new structure, when images of the experience are woven into a new texture, we speak of productive imagination. Stories,novels,scientifictheories,poemsareexamplesofproductive ima­ gination.

Productive imagination is receptive and creative. The imaginative activity of the class is guided by the teacher and each individual pupil is interpreting the clues to build a whole picture. This is called receptive imagination. On the other hand, when the author weaves a story or the pupils are called to describe an imaginary journey by plane or what they would do if they were kings, imaginative activity is essentially creative.

Besides, creative imagination can serve an end or a goal when we make a program or a general draw of a plan of some new strategy; or it can be indulged in for a pleasure of it.

Summary

1. Popular psychology believes that a thought is some inner mental process in which mental contents follow one another and which can be studied independently of the needs, motives and desires of the individual. This view shall have to be amended. To understand such a complex process as thinking, it is necessary to study the processes

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through which concepts are formed, judgements are arrived at and reasoning is carried out.

Concepts are formed with a purpose, an end in view. Concepts may be of objects, relations or qualities. With the help of concepts, learners are able to concentrate attention on general ideas.

Judgemententerseveryaspectofourmentallife.Mostoftenteachers pass on ready-made judgements to their learners and thus, unconsciously breed, among them, a habit of dependence on the judgements of others. Cultivating the right standards of judgement and healthy habits of acting according to their own judgement has a great value. It makes learners efficient, self-confident, self-reliant and intellectually independent.

4.Reasoning is the mental activity used in an argument, demonstration or proof. Reasoning is a process or a adjustment to a new situation and at the some higher level aims at the solution of a problem. Reasoning leads to cultural progress and is a source of individual efficiency and well being.

5.Imaginationisatotallydifferenttypeofcognitiveactivitywhere the individual catches some images in his mind being sketched by experience and knowledge. It has been found that the children imagine more actually than the adults do.

Study questions and tasks

1.What is thinking?

2.What are the kinds of thinking? State conditions for effective thinking.

3.Discuss the different functions of effective thinking.

4.What is the nature of reasoning?

5.Differentiate between inductive and deductive reasoning.

6.What do we mean by imagination? State their types.

7.How can the process of imagination be helped for leading a secured life?

8.How can education ensure effective thinking, good reasoning and versatile imagination?

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Chapter 5

Intelligence

The Concept of Intelligence

Intelligence is a highly controversial term in psychology, although it is found to be used quite frequently. The term “intelligence” comes from a Latin word coined by Cicero to translate a Greek word used by Aristotle to cover all cognitiveprocesses. It is assumed that this capacity of cognition is inherent in both human beings and animals.

The Definition of Intelligence

A consultation of various standard dictionaries reveals the meaning of intelligence as the “capacity to acquire and apply knowledge”. While defining intelligence, each definition emphasizes particular abilities and skills, which are thought to be important, and most of these say something about the ability to reason.

Intelligent Behavior

Every teacher is conscious of individual differences in intelligence among his pupils. Some of them can be bright, others dull. Some can easily adapt themselves to new situations, while others have trouble; some are quick, others slow; some learn with little effort, others with much painstaking application. Some solve problems directly and quickly, others fumble over them for a long time. The teacher understands that these are differences of intelligence and though he teaches them alike, all pupils do not derive the same benefit from his teaching.

There are three phases of intelligent behavior:

•the ability to take and maintain a definite direction;

•the ability to make adjustments for the attainment of a goal;

•the power of self-criticism.

Louis Terman says, “An individual is intelligent in proportion, as he is able to carry an abstract thinking”. William Stern thought of

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