Extending Primary Children's Thinking

Extending Primary Children’s Thinking through the Use of Artefacts Yosanne Vella, Faculty of Education, University of Malta. Abstract This article reports part of the findings of a research project involving Maltese school children working with historical sources. In the actual research project there were various sessions each time involving different types of historical sources: artefactual, pictorial and written evidence. However this paper focuses on the findings involving children’s thinking with the artefacts only and is based on the Vygotskyian assertion that instruction can go ahead of maturational development. This research sees an “interventionist’ role on the part of the teacher as crucial in the intellectual development of pupils and tries to show how correct is the assumption that teaching methods can stimulate the pupil along the road of intellectual development. The article strongly suggests that in a social learning context conventional views of differences in pupil performance linked to IQ are mistaken. Keywords: Primary, Maltese, Children’s thinking, Extending thinking, History teaching, History learning, Historical sources, Artefacts. Introduction This project, which was carried out with Maltese primary school children at San Andrea Infant and Middle private school, used a combination of research methods of data collection and analysis. Qualitative methods were mainly used by the author while working with pupils to establish their ideas. The research had three main aims; first to establish (through the pre-intervention part) what specific ideas children have about an historical object and then to see whether it was possible to encourage children to look differently at sources (the intervention part) and finally to note any change in their response to the original object (the post-intervention part). The responses of the same children were analysed to see whether the acti