DEVELOPMENT OF THINKING SKILL IN CHILD

DEVELOPMENT OF THINKING SKILL IN CHILD

“THINK BETTER TO BE BETTER” Being educated is not enough to utilize human potential or to meet the needs of the world of work or to be a good citizen of a country. Children are to be equipped with a varied range of competencies to face an uncertain and unpredictable future. In this era people are exposed to diverse problems in diverse contexts at different times throughout their lives.

Nowadays job markets as well as societies are looking out for people who can comprehend, judge and participate in generating new knowledge and processes.

Developing countries are in need of citizens who can assimilate information from multiple sources, determining its truth and use it to make sound judgements.

Real challenge for the educators is to develop educational programmes that will enable all individuals to become effective thinkers as it is required by all.

WHAT ARE THINKING SKILLS?

Thinking skills are the mental processes that we apply when we seek to make sense of experience. It refers to the human capacity to think in conscious ways to achieve certain purposes.

Such processes include remembering, questioning, forming concepts, planning, reasoning, imagining, solving problems, making decisions and judgements, translating thoughts into words and so on.

A thinking skill is a practical ability to think in ways that are judged to be more or less effective or skilled. They are the habits of intelligent behaviour learned through practice, for example children can become better at giving reasons, or asking questions the more they practice doing so.

NEED AND IMPORTANCE FOR DEVELOPING THINKING SKILLS IN CHILD

Thinking skills will enable us to learn from our experience and to utilize our intellect. Improving the quality of thinking skill is directly linked to better learning and there by maximize the potential towards betterment of society.

“In our evolving world, the ability to think is fast becoming more desirable than any fixed set of skills or knowledge. We need problem solvers, decision makers and innovators. And to produce them we need new ways to teach and learn. We need to prepare our children for their future, not for our past.

As a person becomes more proficient, thinkers move from being merely recipients of information to become manipulators and judges of information and ultimately to discoverers and creators of information. Most of the growth in the human brain occurs in early childhood. By the age of 6, the brain in most children is approximately 90% of its adult’s size. This implies that interventions will be more effective in the early years, while the brain is still growing, than at a later stage.

Growing interest in ways of developing children’s thinking and learning skills is the result of finding about how the brain works and how people learn and that specific interventions can improve children’s thinking and intelligence. If thinking is how children make sense of learning then developing their thinking skills will help them get more out of learning and life.

A thinking skills approach suggests that learners must develop awareness of themselves as thinkers and learners, practice strategies for effective thinking and develop the habits of intelligent behaviour that are needed for life long learning