As you will discover below, Donaldson’s theories about children’s cognitive development form part of the theoretical position known as constructivism.

Brief history/biography

1926                 Born in Scotland

1947                 Graduated from the University of Edinburgh (French & German)

1953 – 6            MEd and PhD in Psychology and how children think

1957                 Spent a term at Piaget’s Institute in Geneva

1958                 Lecturer in the Psychology department of University of Edinburgh

1960s               Visited America to work with Jerome Bruner and his team (see later unit)

1963                 Published A Study of Children’s Thinking

1978                 Published Children’s Minds

1980                 Professor in the Psychology department of University of Edinburgh

1992                 Published Human Minds

2020                 Died in Edinburgh

Donaldson’s work and theories

The time that Donaldson spent with Piaget in Geneva seems to be pivotal in clarifying her psychological theories. The dominant theory in the 1950s was behaviourism (see earlier unit) which Donaldson did not embrace but, neither did she entirely embrace Piaget’s approach or theories.

The basis of Donaldson’s early work is that children understand and make sense of themselves and others by making sense of the situation. If this is familiar, or becomes familiar, children are able to apply reason to the situation as they understand the context and the significance of it. If they are faced with an unfamiliar situation, outside their understanding and experience, their thinking becomes disjointed and illogical. Donaldson used the terms ‘embodied’ and ‘disembodied’ thinking to describe how children succeed or fail to understand tasks, depending on whether or not their contexts were familiar or not.

As you will imagine, Donaldson’s work was particularly applicable to Early Years (EY) practitioners, but her theories are equally valid for all learners.

She admired Piaget’s scientific approaches and she and her team emulated his research method, but their focus was on the way in which children’s language and thought development was affected significantly by their interactions in infancy and early years.  Her research stated that young children’s thinking is usually guided to a specific and usually egocentric task. It is also dependent on their understanding of the purpose of the task. The implications of this for EY teachers and parents is that if the child is asked to do an abstract, decontextualised task, they may struggle to carry this out effectively.

To prove her thoughts about this, she took Piaget’s 3 mountain test which as you have already seen was used by him to demonstrate that children struggle to see things from vantage points other than their own (egocentricity). Donaldson argued that a reason for the children’s failure to complete the task was because they were given a task that made no contextual sense, nor had a human reason as a purpose.  With a colleague, Martin Hughes, she constructed a stage set with four rooms divided by intersecting walls. The children were told that a naughty boy was hiding from a policeman who wanted to catch him. The children were asked to place the boy in places where the policeman cannot see the boy. Because there was a contextual reason for the test, they found that more children could approach this task in a non-egocentric approach than in Piaget’s original experiment. This result substantiated Donaldson’s concept that the fundamental ability and need for humans to understand and identify with the thoughts and feelings of others is certainly clear in early childhood. She explored the idea in ‘Children’s Minds’, indeed, that this is present from birth.

However, Donaldson also pointed out the inherent dangers of encouraging children to identify with what others around are expecting, one of which is that children can be aware of failure – both of action and of meeting the expectation – something that can lead to mental health problems and self-awareness issues.

Like Piaget, she wrote about the stages in child development

2 – 3 months     Point mode in which thinking is egocentric and immediate

8 – 9 months     Line mode in which children show that they can remember and act on previous    experiences

3 – 4 years         Construct mode in which the child’s thinking takes in the wider world:

Intellectual construct sums and patterns

Value-sensing construct personal responses to stimuli such as must

Transcendent mode in which the child can think beyond the restraints of experience, time and space.

Intellectual transcendent mode: faith, abstract thought

The significance of her ideas to pedagogy is a clear encouragement for teachers to get to know their students from a very early age and to teach in a way that highlights what they can do, rather than emphasising what they cannot achieve. She advocated de-centred teaching which clearly places a task within the reality of the child’s experiences and her theories about how emotion and intellect are inextricably bound in intellectual development.

If Donaldson was a tutor

Like all of the practitioners who you have read about, Donaldson highlighted in her theories the importance of educators knowing the individual child. She would elicit what each student can do well and see how this can be applied to other areas. She would also need to be clear about what challenges the child faces in learning and be mindful not to go too far beyond what the student can do.

Donaldson would present tasks that have a clear context, as she argued that even young children learn quicker if they understand the reason for the information or the task, or if they are given a real-life example. So, if she was tutoring about water displacement theories in science, she would ask the child to explain what would happen if Daddy filled the bath too full and then helped the child to climb in.

Donaldson would also apply ‘decentred teaching’ in which she would attempt to see things from the child’s point of view. This then can provide the best way of explaining a task or learning element.

As tutors (and parents), we can all be guilty of making assumptions. I remember being very grumpy with my son when he missed the bus to meet some friends, meaning that I had to drive him. On questioning him irritatedly, I suddenly realised that I had assumed that he could read and understand a bus timetable. He was an academic student, a prolific reader and doing well at school. I had assumed that the skill of deciphering something as basic as a timetable would somehow have been one that he had assimilated from somewhere. I was wrong!

Criticisms

Criticisms of Donaldson’s theories come from the reliance on the child being able to articulate responses based on their experience, this also requires their language catabolites to be equivalent to their experiences.  Their experience may not be such that there is enough scope to be able to decentralise. Nor may their cognitive understanding of the situation be of a sufficient level to be able to learn from the approach.

The use of questions to elucidate meaning and encourage understanding is proven, but there is some thought that a young child asks questions of an adult, a more knowledgeable being, and expects answers, not a question in return.  If a child asks a question, they will have already processed the situation in which some information is missing. They are looking to the adult, in a dialogical process which is embedded pretty much from the first communication, to provide answers. The failure to provide the answer or the missing information does break what could be seen as a dialogic convention.

Most tutors would place a huge significance in getting to know their individual students and being able to contextualise learning for all of them, but the principle is easier in a one-to-one setting and may become diluted in small group tuition.

Key terms

Point Mode: The idea that thinking is about the present experience – here and now

Line Mode: The idea that thinking is a process which links past events to specific events in the present

Construct Mode (intellectual): The idea that thinking moves from the specific to a world mode in which we think about the general significance of things in life, referring to maths or science.

Construct Mode (value sensing): The idea that thinking moves from the specific to a wider world mode in which we think about the general significance of things in life, referring to the ability to appreciate music or art.

Transcendent Mode (intellectual): The idea that thinking moves from the construct mode to concepts which are not bound by time or space, for example logic.

Transcendent Mode (value sensing): The idea that thinking moves from the construct mode to concepts which are not bound by time or space, for example faith, philosophy, morality.