The behavior of the child soon after birth cannot be defined as mental. Gradually the mental abilities and capacities of the child are developed and he picks up various sensations such as new relations, recognizing details and differences, followed by the development of abilities to attend, memorize, imagine and to reason.
Mental development widens the horizon from sensations which impinge upon the nervous system through such functional abilities as perception, attention, memory, understanding, intelligence, language ability, and imagination to thinking and reasoning on complex issues, conceptual ability, problem solving ability, and decision making ability. Although all these mental processes appear to be a unitary process, it is not so. These abilities are inter related to each other and interact with one another. For instance, imagination is not a unitary process; on the other hand, it is an integrated mental process implying perception, retention and imagination. Since they are interdependent on one another, it is not easy to estimate the growth in one ability at any stage of mental development.
Mental development is a product of maturity and learning. It begins with the reception of stimuli from the environment; and it progresses from sensation to complicated mental process of imagining, thinking and so on. Several studies have also revealed that mental development starts with sensation.
Mental development follows the principle of differentiation and integration. A child first recognizes all categories of people say family members, the servants, doctor and so on, as men. Gradually, he distinguishes these people by a process of differentiation.
The progress from sensation to thinking is a continuous process. One cannot demarcate the stages through which the child passes from one stage to another say, from sensation to perception and so on. In fact, mental development is a complex process. It is a complex process involving simultaneous development of a number of abilities as stated above.
Mental development is more rapid in early years of life. It is found that the child’s mental development correspond to its spoken vocabulary. As in the case of aspect of mental development, child’s ability to use language is not rapid in early years. Smith studied the size of vocabulary for children from eight months to six years. The following table gives the results by years. The original study gives them by half years.
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Age 8 months 1 yr 2 yrs 3 yrs 4 yrs 5 yrs 6yrs
No.of words 0 3 272 896 1540 2072 2562
Thus, it is seen that at the age of two, the child’s spoken vocabulary is 272 and it increases to 2562 at the age of six.
Mental development progresses with age, and also declines in age. It is a common knowledge that the ability to observe and remember at the age of say 7 years is not the same as that at the age of 17 or 70 years. So also the ability for problem solving at the age of 8 years is by far less than the same at 18. It is found that certain abilities decline with age, but experience and learning leave behind their contribution in the form of wisdom and deep understanding.
Rate of mental development vary with individual. It is found that the rate of mental development is uniform in an individual. Each individual develops in his own unique manner, so much so that one maintains the status quo regarding the progress of mental development.
Sensation – Sensation is considered as an important aspect of one’s mental development. Sensations are the basic information gathered by sense organs. The child is endowed with mainly five sense organs. These sense organs contain end nerves (afferent nerves). When a sense organ comes into contact with an object, the later stimulates end nerves, and produces a nerve energy which passes through a nerves system to the cortex region of the brain. This produces a mental image of the object and this mental image is called sensation.
Characteristics of sensation – Sensation have mainly four characteristics, which have great educational implications, and they are:
Intensity – Sensation that possess a certain amount of intensity is effective. For instance, a very faint light or an inaudible sound do not make an impression on us. Similarly, if sensation is over-intensive, like a very bright light, a shrill voice, it becomes painful instead of stimulating us. Thus, stimulus should fall within the upper and lower limits known as thresholds.
Extensity – Many sensations possess extensity, in space or in time, or in both. In case of touch and sight, the sensation occupies a certain amount of time; and of sound, sensation extends over a certain length of time. For instance, the extensity of sensation resulting from a hot bath is greater than that resulting from a pinprick.
Latency period – Generally a stimulus is followed by a response and we think that they are spontaneous. On the contrary, the nerves and tissues take some time (roughly about .005 sec to .1sec) to respond. This is called the latency period of sensations.
Educational Implications of Sensation
Sensations form the first stage of mental development; and in fact it forms the basis for all mental processes such as memory, imagining and thinking. It implies that mental development can be accelerated through the efficient training of the senses. Therefore, sense training should be given in accordance with the characteristics of sensation. A few suggestions are given below:
1. The child should be exposed to rich and varied environment.
2. athletic, and different hobbies like excursion, radio listening, gardening and horticulture
3. The teacher should give opportunities for observation, experimentation and intuition.
Perception – Both sensation and perception are the important aspects of one’s mental development. Sensations are elementary impression gathered by sense organs. When these impressions are interpreted and some definite meanings are attached to them, they take the form of perception. Thus, perception is a combination of sensation and meaning. In other words, perception is sensation reinforced with meaning. Sensation refers to the object, perception refers to the sensation. Sensation tells us about the qualities of the object, and perception about the object itself.
Characteristics of Perception
Perception in the child has certain characteristics qualities. The percept of an object is formed through the meaning that is attached to sensation; and the richer the sensation, fuller the meaning.
Percepts formed with the ‘apperceptive mass’ or the ‘mind set’ of the child. Obviously, the child’s mind set is inadequate, and sometimes it may be defective. All these indicate the need for supplementing the apperception mass of the child for effective learning.
The child requires extensive stimulation to form a percept. For instance it is found that, unless every word to every sentence is distinctively spoken and clearly explained the child fails to form the correct percepts and thus to understand the language.
Child’s notion of space and time are neither clear nor accurate as that of adults. For instance, it wrongly thinks that, all heavenly bodies are equally away from the earth.
Educational Implications of Perception
The above characteristics of perception suggest certain classroom procedures as given below:
- The teacher should provide rich, varied, and invigorating experiences to pupils.
- The teacher should direct and require pupils to make observation of objects
and phenomena to enable them to get correct percepts.
- The teacher should give plenty of opportunities for pupils to observe phenomena, to
manipulate objects and experiments
Concept Formation or Conception
Concepts fall under certain broad categories, and the development of a few concepts are given below.
The concept of space relations – (Distance, depth, height, length etc.) . The child is quite vague and indefinite at the young age regarding the concept of space relations. To a pre-school child the train viewed from a distance may appear as a toy train, the child of six years places the cup very close to the edge of the table. At school the child acquire fairly a good amount of concepts of space, distance etc; the use of words by the child such as on, in, up, down at and above indicates the fact.
The concept of time – The child’s first idea of time is related to those of morning and evening in relation to his own needs like those of going to school, going for a walk etc. Experimental investigation show that at the age of five, the child distinguishes between past, present, and future. By the age of ten, the child acquires the concept of our system of time-measurement as well as that of time in the historic sense. By and large the concept of time improves with maturity and experience.
Mathematical concepts – Piaget found that the child acquires the concept of number before it counts and the concept of quantity before that of measurement.
Science concepts – By and large science concepts are related to cause and effect relations. The concept of causal relations appears only after the development of other concepts although there may be exception. It is found that as the child grows the number of problems for which he can find adequate answers also increases; and answers that are logical and scientifically plausible appear at all levels.
Social concepts – Social concepts such as tolerance, freedom, justice, equality and fraternity develop even with the child’s first relations with the family members; and the number of such concepts increases with maturity and the relationships that the child establishes with other social groups such as peer group and social community.
Moral concepts – The child starts learning moral concepts very early in life through natural consequences of his unmoral conduct and as the child grows in maturity, the moral concepts begin to develop and it happens in terms of the reasons that lie behind them.
Educational Implications of Conception – Concepts form the basis of learning, thinking and problem solving. Therefore, the teacher should provide opportunities, as early as possible, for the development of numerous concepts in the child. He should pay special care to develop correct concepts. The following are a few suggestions.
- Concept formation involves the process of comparison, discrimination, induction, deduction, synthesis etc; and hence the teacher should give adequate training in all these mental processes.
- Concept development progresses towards the levels of abstraction from concrete dimension. The teacher should follow the rule ‘from concrete to abstract’ in all his endeavors at developing concepts in children.
- Concepts do not develop with more words. Words are only symbols and hence become meaningful only in relation to experience. Therefore, the teacher should provide numerous experience of varied kinds; and hence, the importance of A.V.aids, nature ramples, excursion etc. in education.
Development of Memory
Memory is also an important aspect of mental development. Emotion is the affective aspect of conscious life. Almost everyone knows what emotion is, but no one can define it in words. C.W.Valentine defines emotion as “the feeling tone of certain states, though some emotions are undoubtedly closely linked with innate tendency to act”. However, emotional experiences have been analyzed and found to reveal that they involve three interrelated aspects and they are:
- Feeling: Feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness are the primary feelings; and all emotions originate from these two primary feelings.
- Visceral and skeletal changes such as increased heart- beat, increased circulation of blood, rapid pulse, high blood pressure, inhibited digestion, and the like.
- Impulses to action such as an urge to fight when angry, to flee when afraid and so on.
Thus, every emotional experience involves three aspects. The absence of any one aspect shows the absence of emotion.
Educational Implication of Emotional Development
Emotions are the prime movers of behavior. To a large extent, emotions are closely related to learning and adjustment. Therefore, a teacher has the responsibility for the emotional development as much as intellectual development of children. A few pertinent suggestions that can help a teacher to provide opportunities for children to become emotionally mature are given below:
- The teacher should provide security to the child. For instance, a word of encouragement for any better performance, proper organization of classroom activities, a sense of humor, and so on, go a long way in providing a sense of security. These will enable pupils to express emotions freely.
- The teacher should never repress emotions; on the other hand, he should provide opportunities for their expression along right lines.
- Pupils get emotional maturity by associating themselves with mature persons. Therefore, the teacher should display all the characteristics of emotional maturity.
- The teacher should direct, sublimate or control destructive emotions such as anger and jealousy.
Conclusion
Mental growth and development is a process responsible for the development of cognitive or mental abilities in an individual such as sensation, perception, concept formation, memory, reasoning, understanding, generalization, interpretation, language ability, problem solving ability, and decision making ability and so on. All these aspects of mental growth and development grow and mature with increase in age of the child due to maturation and learning. In fact, maturation helps in achieving physical growth and development, which in turn helps in one’s mental development. Learning in the form of experiences and education helps the mental development process to reach its optimum level.
The knowledge about the trend of mental growth and development and the resulting changes in the various types of mental abilities are useful for the teacher to plan and organize his teaching learning materials, and create an environment conducive for both teaching and learning in order to ensure the maximum growth and development of the mental abilities of his students for their own sake as well as for the welfare of the society.