Operating with the relations of opposites by 5-8 years old children: a longitudinal study.

Conclusion

1. The conducted experimental study showed that the senior preschool age is sensitive for dialectical thinking development. In the first year of elementary school, the children who took part in our longitudinal study were more successful in coping with tasks to overcome contradictions and understand developmental processes than in preschool age. Moreover, in children of elementary-school age, there was a decrease in the use of the dialectical mental action of transformation when performing creative drawing tasks.

These results partially confirm the assumption that elementary-school age children would show a decrease in the successful dialectical problems solving with an increase in the successful formal logical operations performance. Probably, this change is connected with the leading activity change from the playing one to the educational one. In this case, the possibility of a child’s action in an imaginary situation is reduced, while this imaginary situation made it possible to remove the contradiction between the desired and possible.

2. With age children are able to cope more successfully with the solution of formal logical problems aimed at coordination of two conditions.

3. The correlation analysis results show that at the age of 5 and 7 years old, the successful overcoming of contradictions by children is positively associated with the multiplicative spatial relations understanding: when the movements of two differently directed objects create a single image. It confirms the assumption that the multiplicative spatial relations understanding is associated with the dialectical mediation development.

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