An Investigation Of 4-7 Year-Old Children's Understanding Of Age

Piaget's research has been dominant in the field of children's cognitive development. He believed that development was a process of qualitative change and there were universal stages in turn in children's cognitive development. He also thinked cognitive development was domain-universal. Recently, a growing number of researchers believed that cognitive development was domain-specific. Especially, the rise of pre-school children "naive theory" studies challenged Piaget's theory of cognitive development in the recent. The existence of naive psychology and naive physics had been recognized generally, but whether children had the naive theory of biology was still controversial. The research of children's naive theory of biology included children's cognition of age, growth, aging, disease, reproduction and others. Inheritance is one of the important characteristics of living from non-living.Children's cognition of inheritance was paid much attention by psychologists and they carried out a lot of research. But researchers disputed about whether children had naive theory of inheritance, when children was access to cognition of inheritance and whether they understood biological phenomena was based on biological knowledge. In the previous studies, on the one hand a single kind of living(animals or humans) had been chosen, on the other hand researchers hadn't carried out a comprehensive study of inheritance(more studies about similarity of genetic characteristics, less studies about variation of genetic characteristics and cognition of property of genetic characteristics).The research selected human and animal as a cognitive materials to explore children's cognition of the similarity, variation and property of genetic characteristics and the impact of acquired related knowledge. The method of interview questions was used to explore the cognitive development of children in inheritance systematically. Total study is divided into four parts. They were study about children's knowledge about born, study about children's cognition of similarity of genetic characteristics, study about children's cognition of variation of genetic characteristics and study about children's cognition of stability of genetic characteristics. Based on comprehensive analusis of these study, the paper got the following conclusions:1.4-7 year-old children's level of knowledge about born was effected by age and 7-year-old children basically mastered the knowledge in this field.2.7-year-old children could make the right judgments about similarity of genetic characteristics and make a reasonable consistent causal explanation. They reached a naive understanding in similarity of genetic characteristics preliminarily.3. 7-year-old children could not make the right judgments about variation of genetic characteristics and could not make a reasonable consistent causal explanation. They didn't reach a naive understanding in variation of genetic characteristics preliminarily.4. 7-year-old children could make the right judgments about stability of genetic characteristics and could make a reasonable consistent causal explanation. They reached a naive understanding in stability of genetic characteristics preliminarily.5. Children's level of cognitive development was not consistent in the three aspect of genetic characteristics. Especially, the level of variation of genetic characteristics was lower.6. 4-7 years old children's understanding of inheritanc was effected by age, also by level of knowledge in specfic field.In conclusion, the study investigated children's cognitive development in inheritanc from similarity of genetic characteristics, variation of genetic characteristics and stability of genetic characteristics and impact of age, level of knowledge and kinds of living to children's cognitive development .The study provided theoretical and empirical support for theory of domain-spefic in children's cognitive development and pre-school children's naive theory of biology.