Is your child a flexible thinker? Are you, in your classroom, promoting flexible thinking?

With acknowledgements to Amanda Morin and the ‘Understood’ team.

Key points:

Children with weak flexible thinking skills have trouble knowing when not to use typical grammar and pronunciation rules.
They may have difficulty understanding abstract concepts in maths and reading
There are tools and strategies that can help your child or learner in the classroom think less rigidly.

Flexible thinking is something we use every day. For instance, when a plan goes wrong, you need to be able to think of an alternative. For instance, if your usual route to work is blocked, you’ll visualise an alternative to get to your office. We need to be able to quickly switch gears and find new solutions to problems.

Many children with learning and thinking differences struggle with flexible thinking, which plays an important role in how they learn and adapt to new information. Here are six ways kids use this skill for learning.

Flexible thinking and real-life learning

The term ‘cognitive flexibility’ includes flexible thinking and set changing. Flexible thinking is when children are able to think about something in a new way. Set changing is when they can let go of ‘old ways’ of doing and adopt new ways. For instance, when learning to lie shoelaces, children start out with the ‘bunny ears’ method of making each lace into a loop. Then they often progress to the ‘squirrel in the tree’ method of making one loop and wrapping the other lace around it. Flexible thinking enables children to consider the new squirrel approach. Set shifting helps them ‘unlearn’ the bunny ears way in order to use the new method.

Kids who are rigid in their thinking have difficulty moving beyond the more basic ways of doing things. When kids have weak flexible thinking skills, taking on new tasks and responsibilities as they get older may be tough.

Flexible thinking and reading

Children use flexible thinking both for learning to read and for reading to learn. At first, flexible thinking enables them to understand how the same letter combination can make different sounds. (For example, the combination of ‘ough’ in words like enough and dough.) It also helps understanding of how words can be used in more than one way (We slip on the banana peel and also sign the permission slip.)

When children begin learning from books, they need flexible thinking to understand what information is important and what details are used merely to add to a description. It also helps them understand the perspectives of different characters.

Flexible thinking and language learning

Flexible thinking allows children to understand idioms (‘keep your ear to the ground’) and puns (‘the joke about the duck quacked me up’).

It helps them to learn the rules of language, for example, knowing that the way to put most words into the past tense involves adding ‘-ed’ to the root word. It also helps them come to terms with the exceptions to the rules so that it makes sense that the past tense of ‘go’ is ‘went.’ When learning a second language, it helps to understand that the same letters have different sounds.

Flexible thinking and writing

Writing is complicated for children. When they struggle with flexible thinking, their writing may not have enough supporting details, or have lots of language errors. They may find it easier to learn by listening to how people speak the language rather than trying to learn the rules from a textbook.

Flexible thinking and maths

Flexible thinking is a key skill in maths. It is used to find ways to solve word problems and to understand that, for example, a phrase like ‘how many in all’ means that addition needs to be used. It helps them realise that there’s more than one way to solve a maths problem and also how a new type of problem can be solved using a formula they already know.

Flexible thinking and studying

Doing homework and studying for a test needs flexible thinking too. Knowing how to switch between different subjects during homework time becomes increasingly important as children grow older and have more work to juggle. Answering maths problems need different strategies than a writing assignment. Flexible thinking allows youngsters to change their thinking to handle both.

Studying requires this skill too. They need to work out to what kind of information they need to pay the most attention. Which facts need to be memorised and which need to be understood in order to cope with a multiple-choice format.

The good news is that there are ways to help. Teachers can use strategies in the classroom to teach in ways that make more sense to a child. Parents can play games at home to build children’s flexible thinking skills.

Visit the Understood website to find suggestions of ways that you can help. They are a valuable source of information relating to children’s learning problems and can be recommended.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.