Abstract
The objective of this paper is to offer a theoretical explanation of the development process of social recognition in a diverse sample of children. In this paper, the "process of social recognition" implies the process of thinking for decision making in the society. The participants were observed during a typical social studies class that focused on decision making; a constructivist evaluation model was used to understand how it allows us to compare the process of learning adopted by children taking social studies classes. As a result, I observed that all of the children make decisions in the class, at the same time there are three types of social recognition: a) multiple perspectives, b) single perspective, and c) sympathetic perspective. The goal of the class was to "enable students to acquire the ability to make rational decisions based on multiple perspectives." Therefore, the children who demonstrated the use of multiple perspectives (referred to as "leaping") achieved the goal, and those who displayed perspectives b) or c) did not (referred to as "stumbling"). To explore the development of social recognition in this diverse sample of children, I extracted data of one child from each group, traced how these children developed social recognition based on their statements and descriptions by using the model that I have previously mentioned, and then performed a comparative examination to identify differences in each of the processes. The results revealed that the dividing line between leaping and stumbling was whether the children could pull away from sympathetic decision making through value conflicts associated with the analysis of social structures. Bearing in mind this finding, I provide the solution to improve teacher's instruction for the students who fall into type b) or c). Finally, I point out two particular aspects of the model's meaning: it allows us to compare the way of learning and it can be adapted to any social studies classes.
