An investigation into some aspects of the development of religious thinking in children aged between six and eleven years
Abstract
Children's thinking has been described by Piaget and others in general
terms, which suggest that there are major developmental changes that
affect children's thinking at various stages of their development.
Some criticisms of Piaget's theory have related to his approach to
describing children's thinking as a context free phenomenon. In
relation to this point, arguments have been put forward for the need
to investigate the development of children's thinking, within particular
content areas, and the investigations reported in this thesis have concentrated on the development of religious thinking of children aged from
~6 to 11 years.
A review of previous investigations into this area of children's
thought development reveals major shortcomings, both in the experimental
approaches used and in the theories that have been constructed. In
particular it is argued that there has been a tendency for investigators to propose stage development theories on the basis of inadequate
results. It is argued that there is a need for investigations which
approach this problem from new directions. As a first step, a series
of investigations, which employ a variety of approaches and which
investigate various cognitive and semantic factors that may influence
the development of religious thinking in children, are presented.
The investigations that are reported involved individual interviews
with 440 children, in the age range from 6 to 11 years. A variety
of experimental techniques were employed, including those investigating the children's understanding of various biblical parables,
their understanding of the meaning of words used in religious discourse,
their conception of historical time and ability to sequentially order
events in time, and the way that these factors affected their understanding of religious ideas.
The results of the investigations are discussed in terms of the variety
of aspects, which they reveal, relating to the development of religious
thinking in children. It is argued that this evidence does not support
the idea of the development of religious thinking being a unidimensional
stage related process; however, the evidence collected from these
studies is insufficient to form the basis of an alternative model. It
is argued that future studies that follow this approach will be necessary
if a satisfactory theory is to be constructed.
The educational implications of these findings are discussed and it is
argued that certain curriculum changes in the area of religious
education may have been made on the basis of insufficient evidence and
inadequate theories.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
Rights
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Collections
Except where otherwise noted within the work, this item's licence for re-use is described as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.