A STUDY ON THE CHILDRENS' ABILITIES OF CLASSIFICATION (PART 1) -CENTERED UPON THE LIVING THINGS-

Abstract

J. Piaget, who was a developmental psychologist, had created many genius tasks to pose clinically upon the children subjects during the inquiry into the developmental process of the children's intelligence. Among these tasks, there is one task called class-inclusion task, which means that the extention of a class concept includes all the subordinate concepts. The authors thought that this task could be applicable to other fields of class relations of objects. They applied the task to the living things and intended to investigate the children's abilities of classification. They made some problems similar to the task in a questionnaire form available in the classroom and asked the children to answer in the elementary and lower secondary schools. The data thus obtained were analyzed and interpreted. The main results of this study are as follows: (1) Almost all the elementary school children, from the 4th to the 6th grades, were lacking the basic abilities of the classification of the animals required by the problems. (2) Although they had learned the contents of the biological classification already in the science classroom, at most only 40% of the lower secondary students were able to answer the class-inclusion problems of living things completely. Moreover the percentage of the correct answers of the 8th graders was one half or one-third lower compared with that of the 7th graders. (3) The class-inclusion problems of living things made by the authors proved to be useful for the assessment of the classification abilities of the children from those facts mentioned. (4) These results and the children's responses to the questionnaire seem to suggest much information about the teaching programs and methods in the biology education.