Project Title: Development of Cognitive Functions in children through exploration and collaborative practices

Supervisor: Prof Ravi Poovaiah

In a situation like India, where mostly everyday teachers have to meet a class of 40-50 students in a one hour teaching lesson and pressure is always on completing the syllabus and preparing students for a variety of examinations, there is little room for learners to be independent and develop cognitive skills. It is essential that our education system appreciates and include practices to enhance and develop cognitive skills in children at the right development stage. Educational research reports that repeated and varied experience in joint activities provides the learner to internalize effects of working together and acquires useful cognitive strategies and new knowledge. The challenge is to understand how these cognitive systems (individual and the group) merge to produce a shared understanding. Hence, the goal of our research is to understand how one cognitive system is transformed by messages received from another using pre designed collaborative activities and learning aids.

Through our study and series of experiments we wish to investigate how cognitive functions are developed in children of the age seven to eleven years. Also, find out whether these functions are developed better in a group of learners as against solitary learning.

Through our experiment based study we wish to develop methods for designing collaborative aids with specific educational purposes in Indian classrooms with a focus on cognitive development in children where peers will become the socio-cognitive sources of individual development. The study aims at building collaborative practices in classrooms to facilitate the teachers and children to co-construct knowledge through participation, inquiry, cooperative problem-solving and joint discovery. Aspects of collaboration within and among group members will be observed through a scale designed to measure the roles played by the members, conflicts and their resolution, sharing of resources, communication, peer review among the students, realization of common goals and diffusion of learning

Publications:
- Poster presentation at agIdeas conference 2011, Australia: Effect of inputs on children in evolution of design ideas and design thinking

Paper presentations:
- Malhotra, A. (2011, August). Effect of inputs on children in evolution of design ideas and design thinking. In Design, Development and Research 2011. Page number 268-278

- Developing Young Thinkers: An exploratory experimental study aimed to investigate design thinking and performance in children. In ICoRD'13 4th International conference on
Research into Design, 2013 at IIT Madras
Author - Malhotra, A., Poovaiah R. (2013, January)

Contact details:
Industrial Design Centre,
IIT Bombay ,
Powai, Mumbai 400076

Telephone:
091-022-25767812

E-mail: malhotra.anisha[at]gmail.com