Research Paper on Philosophy in Primary Schools: Enhancing Critical Thinking and Learning

Introduction

There are many reasons why people read, and one of them is reading for thinking. Incorporating philosophical discussions in primary schools can add a lot of value to developing critical thinking skills reasoning skills in children. The use of philosophy for children enriches thinking and learning. Research indicates that cognitive abilities can be improved through the use of a philosophical approach by developing skills that enable high-level attainment in the curriculum. It also promotes understanding levels, children's ownership of learning, and confidence, which enhances student motivation. One advantage of children's philosophy is that it develops learning to learn skills by use of questions, thinking out loud approach and emphasize on reflection. Philosophy is defined as the activities undertaken by an individual when they want to understand truths about the world, themselves, and how people relate to the world and others (Sare et al., 2016). it engages people to question and answer and argue for their answers. Similarly, philosophy for children aims to provide thinking and reasoning skills to children. This paper seeks to investigate some of the thinking skills fostered by children's philosophy and how it can lead to educationally significant results.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Literature Review

Philosophy is not consensual and is regarded to be an ancient activity. People are confronted with a different school of thoughts emphasizing universality and rationality, depending on times and culture. There are various definitions of philosophy, for example, philosophy of education, moral philosophy, epistemology, and political philosophy. Generally, philosophy is described as a discipline that studies concepts, and how the theories relate to each other, to better understand the world and nature of humans (Gorard et al., 2017). Children's philosophy emphasizes more on the ability to think critically. The broad purpose of this paper is to help children realize their intellectual capabilities. It is, however, necessary to ensure that the research does not create an arbitrary variable when selecting and isolating the tests on children (Siddiqui et al., 2019). It is essential to determine whether the social impulse in children results in improved cognitive performance and how the cognitive performance of the children can be measured using various tasks (Gorard et al., 2017). There is a gap in whether commonality has a positive effect on the cognitive proficiency of children. The study will require a shared experience and a collective commitment to an inquiry method. Analytical procedures are needed to enable individuals to identify the areas that they may have gone wrong in their thinking. It would be unacceptable to convert a classroom to a community of inquiry because it would on each person's experience to ensure meaningful results are available to everyone (Gorard et al., 2017).

It would be futile to expound the community of inquiry objective to children as even though they could understand the outline, they would not comprehend its importance to themselves. They would require to be encouraged to hope that the idea they had glimpsed was viable to others who were young like them and inexperienced (Topping et al., 2019). It hence calls for their imaginative power and recourse to their fiction. Children's philosophy aims to develop critical thinking in children using philosophical dialogue evolves in a perspective of cooperation to enrich the view of the group versus competitive argumentation in which victory at all cost is the objective. Instead of exhausting the children in a classroom, explaining to them the merits of inquiry, they can be shown in a fictional way the classroom community of inquiry. It should consist of ordinary children thinking about things of great importance to children. Matters of importance children include things such as personal identity and fairness, truth and friendship, goodness, and freedom. The children will also be required to spend time thinking about thinking, and the criteria to differentiate sound from unsound reasoning.

The community inquiry acts as the guiding tool for children's philosophy. Allowing children to participate in a community of inquiry enables them to develop essential cognitive abilities such as clarifying their terms, offering examples and counterexamples, creating a hypothesis, questioning other people's assumptions, following where the inquiry leads to, drawing inferences and giving and asking for sound reasoning. Community of inquiry also acts as a social enterprise by allowing children to express their own opinions and views, build as well as challenge other people's ideas, listen to others, reconstruct their ideas, and look for fallacious reasoning.

Education is one of the primary needs of human beings as it enables them to be closer to the modern world. Society therefore needs smart, creative, and innovative people to correspond to the life happenings. Most of the schools focus on science and technology-based on cognitive approaches to transfer the knowledge to children ignoring the training of thoughtful and creative students. However, in the last decade, psychologists and scientists have come together and suggested that it is necessary to train children on thinking skills rather than transferring knowledge and science (Abadi & Akbari, 2017). The approach will enable children to think through their natural intelligence abilities. Every person can imagine, making it necessary to put this potential into actual use. One of the primary dimensions of thoughts is critical thinking. There is a difference between critical thinking and ordinary thinking. Critical thinking is of exact proportions and is more complicated compared to ordinary thinking that is simple and has no criterion. Critical thinking enables an individual to analyze information and come to a conclusion as it is a dynamic process. Studies have shown that children can function intellectually when in cooperative or collaborative situations compared to those working individually. The essential philosophy of thinking dates back to philosophy after john Dewey who published it (Topping et al., 2019). Critical thinking is considered a branch of logic referred to as practical logic. This type of logic removes uncertainty, utilizes mental discipline, transparency, criticism, and logic reasoning. The primary purpose of critical thinking is to comprehend problems, evaluate their point of view, and provide solutions.

Research Method

The research includes selecting programs that are not exhausting to the children in the thinking skills that the children's philosophy program aims at polishing. A representative list will be developed, and for each ability, an exercise or example will be cited for the use of the knowledge. Models will be obtained from stories or novels identified by the researcher and introduced to the children to assist in improving their practical thinking skills. Exercises will be obtained from the instructional manuals that come with the novels. The chosen examples are not models but will be taken from everyday life experiences. The children are hence to find more instances where they can apply these skills, creating more practice opportunities. The program is not exempted from the various arbitrariness that accompanies lists of cognitive abilities in any educational program. The menu consists of 30 skills that are closely related, while others are not listed because they represent higher-order combinations or because they are borderline cases (Topping et al., 2019). For example, in reading, some of the written material may be complex for the children who require the children to use most of their necessary skills, especially the inferential ones. However, by ensuring that only the inferential abilities are used, the children can obtain meaning, although the more dynamic processes of thinking would not be realized. The students are required to use all their skills to gain sense, ask questions, and consider alternatives on what is being said. Reading, writing, and mathematics are deemed to be essential skills that would be useful in determining what it means to be educated. Although the skills are labeled as fundamental, it does not imply that they cannot be analyzed into scores of elementary thinking skills (Siddiqui et al., 2019). By teaching students to coordinate the primary abilities, it will be possible to improve their performance.

The philosophy for children's research will be done in a primary school whereby the teachers will be equipped with reasoning, thinking, and questioning skills. The children will be trained in analytical and reasoning skills. There will be the transfer of reasoning skills to mathematics, English, and science. The pupils participating in the study will be from primary three and primary four, and the survey will take approximately one year and will be guided by the same teachers. The teachers will receive lessons on thinking skills through the use of workshops conducted by the study team. A 10-week online course will also be available for the teachers to ensure they are well equipped to guide the students (Abadi & Akbari, 2017). Two other classes will then be selected to act as control classes. During the research period, the research team will have regular meetings with the teachers to ensure the project is successful.

The philosophy for children lessons will get conducted in four groups as the size of the classes was large. Ground rules of participation will be provided to the children before each lesson, and they include no wrong or right answer, share ideas, one voice, each response should be justified with a good reason, and students should build on others' opinions. The lessons will begin with the teachers reading a story followed by the students raising questions (Haynes, 2018). Discussions will also revolve around pictures and objects besides books. Books from different cultures and with shorter stories were selected.

To observe formative evaluation, the study team used videotapes to identify the transformation or monitor the changes in teachers' and pupils' behaviors. Cognitive coaching was done with the teachers after each teaching lesson to correct improper management of questions from the pupils and to reinforce good practice. Questionnaires on the perception of the students on the philosophy for children will be provided at the end of the school year. It will assist in monitoring the effectiveness of children's philosophy on thinking skills and their achievements in mathematics, English, and science (Murris, 2016). Researchers will also obtain students' results in the three subjects, which will then be analyzed. Parents of the students will also be questioned on the nature and frequency of their interactions with the children.

To assess the reasoning skills of the students, the new jersey test of reasoning skills (NJTR) will be used. The test has 50 multi choice items that assess contradictions, deductive inferences, and transitivity (Murris, 2016). It will be provided at the beginning of the research and the end. General reasoning skills will be assessed using the group test, which is a standardized test. The test consists of two parallel tests with three components, which are numeral, verbal, and perceptual (Murris, 2016). Forty multiple-choice items are found in each element. To assess the metacognitive skills developed by the children, a set of 12 metacognitive tasks in social studies, mathematics, and science will be designed (Murris, 2016). It will be useful in assessing the transfer effects on the achievements of the students in curricular subjects. The students will also be required to answer four dilemma questions during the project to evaluate their reasoning skills.

Findings...