A Study of the Impact of Questions Containing Unconventional Words and Arrangements on Developing Children's Philosophical Mind

A thinking and philosophical mind enjoys three basic features: comprehensiveness, reflectiveness, and flexibility. One of the essential responsibilities of teachers is to help with the development of a philosophical mind. This is realized in the light of “philosophical inquiry”, and the main role in this process of inquiry is played by “questions”. Generating appropriate questions is the first step in philosophical thinking. By appropriate questions, the writers mean those which require children to perform some mental activities in order to induce and discover the relationships among different things. Such questions should be posed by using some homogeneous words which appear semantically unrelated; however, discovering the hidden relationships among them would be quite attractive to children. In this research, the experimental group was exposed to such questions over a learner-centered treatment period (similar to P4C), and their performance was compared with that of a control group. The findings demonstrated that posing such questions was effective in the development of a philosophical mind. This research was conducted following the field and library methods. A questionnaire and a series of interviews with the participants were used to collect the required data for the study, and the non-parametric Kolgomorov-Smirnov test was used to compare the experimental and control groups.