اللَّعب البنائي والذَكاء التّكنولوجي في رياض الأطفال

Abstract

In this paper, we sought to examine constructive play and its components in the context of two different approaches. Constructive play is one of the forms of play most favored by children. Its short and long-term contributions are apparent in various areas of development. Nonetheless, a little has been done in the field of empirical studies about this form of play.

In conceptualizing the output of the children’s construction, the research relied upon the fields of problem-solving and technological thinking. In characterizing the construction output, previous studies in this field relied primarily on mathematical aspects and disregarded technological aspects due to the types of construction units used. The relations between these units were mathematical, such as part-whole relations. Therefore, in the current study, the construction materials used, particularly in the Waldorf kindergartens, were diverse and less mathematical. Accordingly, the research designed a new assessment scale suitable for coding diverse constructions.

The research participants included 90 children ranging in age from 4-6 enrolled in four preschools in a city in northern Israel. Two of the participating preschools had a traditional approach to education and two were Waldorf schools that adopted the anthroposophical approach to educations.

The data analysis included preliminary analyses to examine means and standard deviations, analyses of the relationships between categorical variables (Chisquare) and inter-rater reliability tests during the stage of editing the new coding scale for assessing construction sophistication. In addition, a two-step cluster analysis was conducted to reveal homogeneous groups of dimensions that were most able to predict the sophistication of the constructions among the 200 documented examples.

The study’s main finding with respect to the construction output points to a relation between educational approach and level of construction sophistication. Higher levels of sophistication were found at the Waldorf preschools than at the mainstream preschools. The explanation for this finding is related to the differences in the educational environments and the amount of time devoted to this type of play in each environment. In the Waldorf preschools, more time was devoted to this play and the physical play space was much larger than in the normal preschools. Moreover, the Waldorf preschools offered a wide variety of construction materials that the children could combine into one result, while the traditional preschools used closed construction kits that could not be combined.

This study exposed the unique play environment in Waldorf preschools, which differs from the play environment in normative preschools. The ability to observe construction play in these kindergartens and to compare this to equivalent play in normative preschools provided an opportunity to enrich this research field and the existing knowledge about this type of play. To the best of our knowledge, no other studies have compared these two approaches with respect to construction play in early childhood. The results of the comparison have the potential to enrich the knowledge of those working in the field of children’s play.