Abstract
PURPOSE; It is said that crippled children had so many other attended handicaps in addition to physical ones that they were inferior to normal children in their background experiences. Therefore, two following studies were aimed.(1) to study in what kind of things and phenomena crippled children were inferior to normal children in their background experiences for the learning of social subjects. (2) to study experimentally whether or not the quantity of experiences and the brain damage have an effect on the conceptual thinking. METHOD; (1) The experimental method of the first aim: forty items were selected from the standard textbook of social subjects from 1st to 3rd graders. They should be; 1) relatively important in the study of social subjects. 2) general materials. 3) able to be easily visualised so that they can be photographed for slide films. 4) carefully taken from the following each leld; politics, daily life, traffic, correspondences, commerce, industry, agriculture and forestry, fisheries, history, geography. While these slides were exposed one by one the screen to children, the quantity of experiences and the knowledge of pictures were reseirched. Subjects were pupiles of 1st grade in six primary special schools for crippled children and in one normal school in Tokyo and Kanagawa. They were divided into three groups; normal group , celebral palsygroup and polio group. As each group were consisted of ten boys and ten girls, the total number of the pupils examined was sixty. Subjects were mached three following conditions; 1) sex, 2) CA, 3) MA. 27 The experimental method of the second aim: "Picture-Object Test" was used as the experimental method of the conceptual thinking. Namely, ten pictures for each object (swimming, fishing, fire station, temple, post-office.) were exposed to subjects. After that, subjects were required to connect related pictures with each object. Their pictures consisted of the essential and the unessential. The number of subjects was also sixty. RESULT; (1) Crippled children were inferior to normal children in outdoor experiences (for example, fishing, picnic, police box, festival dancing.). (2) The normal girls were superior to the normal boys in indoor experiences. But, such a difference was not found between boys and girls in crippled children. (3) The more experiences normal and polio children without brain damage have, the more conceptual thinking they intend to do. Cerebral palsy children with brain damage can not do the conceptual thinking well, even if they come to have more experien ces. We have found that brain damage has bad or undesirable effect on the conceptual thinking. Therefore, though celebral palsy children have as many experiences as normal and polio children, they cannot catch the essential concept for the objects of swimming, fire station, post office, and they select less essential pictures for such objects.
