ABSTRACT
Within education there is increasing recognition that, in a changing world, children need to learn more than just a body of knowledge. They need to learn to be creative in their thinking and become expert problem solvers. This chapter reviews the evidence about the development of children’s thinking. It emerges that, contrary to the earlier views of such as Piaget, even very young children are able to reason to a high level in context. What needs to be recognised by educators, however, is that they learn by induction and by analogy, and that they learn to be flexible in their thinking through play. A problem-solving approach to learning which encourages children to be playful and creative, and to take risks, is, therefore, always going to be the most powerful. The final part of the chapter looks at approaches to teaching children to think, solve problems and develop their creativity which encourage the key developments of becoming more exhaustive in their information processing, more able to comprehend relations of successively higher orders, more flexible in their use of strategies and information and more sophisticated in their reflections upon and control of their own thinking.
