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Anna Toom, Touro University, United StatesAbstract
For over half a century, psychology was a science confined to a narrow circle of specialists. Today, it is an elective subject in most American educational institutions and one of the required core disciplines in many pedagogical programs. However, as experience shows, this humanitarian science is not among the easiest to comprehend. From this perspective, improving the methodology for assessing the assimilation of psychological knowledge appears to be a relevant and promising research task. Sixty graduate students participated in our study. We examined their understanding of key phenomena in child development, such as J. Piaget’s concept of object permanence, L. Vygotsky’s cognitive-emotional-volitional triad, and A. Bandura’s theory of learning through observation and imitation. The stimulus material was A.P. Chekhov’s short story Grisha, whose main character, a boy aged 2 years and 8 months, demonstrates all of the above qualities. The students were tasked with determining whether the story’s protagonist had fully developed these traits. According to the results, the participants were relatively successful in identifying text fragments that illustrated the psychological phenomena under study. However, many of them encountered significant difficulties when interpreting the content of these fragments. It was found that the primary reason for these challenges was a lack of skills in systematic and organized analytical activity. These findings suggest directions for improving the methodology of teaching psychology to non-specialists. Teaching complex psychological concepts to students while simultaneously training them in analytical thinking skills appears to be the most productive approach.
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Conference: ECE2025Stream: Assessment Theories & Methodologies
This paper is part of the ECE2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Toom A. (2025) Assessing Students’ Mastery of the Key Phenomena of Child Development ISSN: 2188-1162 The European Conference on Education 2025: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 157-170) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2025.14
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2025.14
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