| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 人類發展與家庭研究所 === 91 === An Abstract of
Young Children’s Comprehension of Related Theory of Mind Tasks and the
Intervention Effect of Story Reading with Extensive Activities
The purpose of this study was to explore preschoolers’ understanding of mind, especially focus on commonality and difference of development. Researcher also tries to make connection between teaching practice and children’s development. Subjects of the first part of this research was four to six years old and came from two kindergartens located in city and urban separately. Researcher describes and analyzes variables as family background, gender and language ability related to children’s responses to some standardized situation（including measures of false belief , intention and the appearance-reality distinction）. The second part of this research was to experimentally manipulate four- years old children’s exposure to story telling activities to determine whether training would have an impact on children’s performance on measures of measures of false belief, intention and the appearance-reality distinction.
The results shows that during the preschool years, striking changes take place in children’s performance on related theory-of-mind tasks. In contrast to their 4-year-old counterparts, 4-year-olds typically perform very poorly except in measure of appearance-reality distinction. The modal interpretation of these findings is that young preschoolers suffer from a conceptual deficit of one kind or another: They are said to lack a concept of belief, or a concept of mental representation. Since a powerful influence on children’s growing understanding of others’ minds is most likely culture, the results show that the performance of children from different background is significantly different.
In addition, the results show that young children’s comprehension in different kind of tasks is related. The performance of measures of false belief and knowledge —intention was highly related.
As to the second part of the research, the present data only minimally support the hypothesis. The mean scores of false belief and similar-behavioral intention measures did differ after intervention. It implies that intervention may enhance children’s awareness of protagonist’s operation of mind such as perception and belief. However, the improvement still limited. The results provide a basis for evaluating the limitation and the advantage of using multiple teaching materials and methods.
|
|---|
