Effects of education-oriented and maintenance-oriented preschools on the cognitive functioning of the child

Abstract

The present study investigated the hypotheses of differential effects of education oriented and maintenance-oriented preschools on the cognitive functioning of preschool children. Piaget's classification and seriation tasks were chosen as indicants of cognitive development. The general hypotheses was that children attending education-oriented preschools would develop more in cognitive functioning than those children attending maintenance-oriented preschools. Operationally it was hypothesized that children attending education-orientec preschool centers would perform in developmentally more advanced level in cognitive functioning measured by Piaget's task of classification behavior than children attending maintenance-oriented preschool centers. The second operational hypothesis was that children attending education-oriented preschool centers would perform in developmentally more advanced level in cognitive functioning measured by Piaget's task of seriation behavior than children attending maintenance-oriented preschool centers. There were 72 subjects who were between the ages of five years and six years six months. Half of the Subjects were from education-oriented preschool s and the other half were from maintenance-oriented preschool centers. The materials used to test the above hypotheses were taken from Piaget's original work. They consisted of different sizes and colars, of wooden geometric blocks, wooden sticks and paper dolls. The children were asked to perform tasks of classification and seriation in a separate room individually by the researcher. The performance of each child on each task was evaluated and assigned to one of the three developmental cognitive level of Piaget Stage one signifies least advanced stage three signifies the most advanced level of cognitive functioning. The data was further analyzed by the Mann-Whitney- U method. The results of the present study support the pedicted level of performance among the education-oriented preschool attenders on the classification tasks. Specifically it was observed that the educationoriented preschool attenders attained scores at a more advanced cognive level than the maintenance-oriented preschool attenders on the classification tasks. For the seriation tasks there was a difference in favour of the education-oriented preschool children but it was nmt profound. The present study strongly suggests the need for longitudinal research in this area.