Mixed-age Education Process Investigated

Nowadays, people recognized the positive influences that mixed-age education brang to children social development, more and more kindergartens began the mixed-age educational practice. Looking forward to the former researches, I found that the biggest problem of mixed-age educational practice was the exploration and construction of mixed-age curriculum resources. But this part of mixed-age education researches were very few.However, the construction of mixed-age curriculum resources were not built one day, it would take one research group several years to accomplish. And it was not available for me, one person with few time and few resources. So I decided to investigate the mixed-age educational process through observing the mixed-age educational scene and I tried to know the characters of mixed-age educational practice and the problems that teachers met.Considering that, researcher studied A mixed-age class selected from one kindergarten by objective sampling methods. I investigated the educational process by means of observing and interviewing in order to present a real mixed-age educational process, find the problem that teachers met and analysis the reasons.Researcher found that there were some characters in the educational process of A mixed-age class as follow:the physical environment influenced by different ages; activities were organized by mixed-age group mostly and sometimes by same ages; children were grouped in different ways; same age interaction exist in the educational process as same as the mixed-age interaction; the whole class activity organization required pertinence and by level.Teachers in A mixed-age class tried the practice very hard because of lack of references. Although they were doing 10 years, there were many problems in the process. And the most puzzled one was the mixed-age whole class direction activities; another one was the assessment of children.The direct reason was that different development level of children made the whole class activities not meet children's needs; and there were two indirect reasons:one was the lack of excellence teachers; the other one was that parents still had some wrong perception of mixed-age education.And then researcher discussed three questions, one was about the teachers puzzled thing; the rest two were about two inappropriate teacher behaviors and it must arouse educators attention.The last part was about researcher's gain and thought. This research process was not smooth but valuable.After this research, I got close to the mixed-education.