Designing a Scale to Assess Dialectical Thinking: Link to ECERS-R Items

Dialectical thinking is gaining wide circulation as part of personal and social preschool child development in modern society, which makes all the more urgent the task of designing a tool to evaluate the extent to which the educational environment in a pre-school establishment supports the development of dialectical thinking in preschoolers. To implement this task, the researchers analyzed the ECERS-R as a means for assessing the quality of preschool education and concluded that this tool fails to focus on rating the environment in terms of the development of dialectical thinking. N.Ye. Veraksa and E.V. Sviridova designed a tool for assessing how well the educational environment supports dialectical thinking in preschoolers (the scale of dialectical thinking support (DTS scale). The research into the use of the DTS scale was conducted in 18 preparatory groups of three educational complexes in Moscow in February–April 2019. The comparison of the results on the DTS scale and those on the ECERS-R scale made it possible to conclude that the ECERS-R scale does not differentiate between the stimulation of dialectical thinking and formally logical thinking in preschool age children. The use of the newly designed tool was justified statistically. It is noted that the teacher activity in line with the ECERS-R scale scores of “Stimulating Communication with Children”, “Books and Illustrations”, “Using Speech to Develop Cognitive Skills” may be associated with decreased levels of support for children’s dialectical thinking in preschool educational institutions. In addition, a positive relationship was found to exist between the ECERS-R score of “Care-Giver and Children Interaction” and DTS scale. The results obtained make it possible to hypothesize that there are interrelations between the development of dialectic thinking in children, on the one hand, and voluntariness and the emotional sphere, on the other.