La tutela procesal efectiva

While the objectives of study were achieved and have led to the investigator‟s conclusion that the Bright Start Cognitive Curriculum has yielded gains in the cognitive functions of young children and led to greater academic achievement, there are some limitations to this study.

184 An unanticipated event occurred during the course of the research study for both the control and experimental groups, which is referred to as a history threat by Campbell and Stanley (1966). The pretests period was disrupted by an outbreak of Hand, Foot and Mouth disease in the childcare centres. To prevent the spread of the disease, some of the centres in my research study were closed for two weeks and the rest of the centres did not allow for any visitors during that period of time. Hence, this has disrupted the pretest schedule and in turn caused the delay in the implementation of the Bright Start programme and the integrated thematic curriculum. Another event was the graduation and year end concert, it has been a tradition for the graduating children (the children in this research study) to put up performances before they leave the preschool for their primary education. Due to this, some Bright Start lessons towards the end of the research study were disrupted or compressed to make time for concert practice sessions.

Due to time constraints, the research study was conducted over six months with the completion of four out of a total of seven units of Bright Start cognitive curriculum. It would have been better if the research time could have been extended to complete all the seven units. However this was not possible because the children in the research study were being oriented for their enrolment into primary school by the end of 2008.

From the investigator‟s interviews with the teachers, the children were not yet accustomed to provide justification for their answers and one reason for this could be that some children from non-English speaking homes had difficulties expressing themselves clearly and fluently in English. The Bright Start cognitive curriculum was delivered in the official language of instruction, English. Initially getting children to provide justification for their answers were difficult; in fact, about 40 percent of the children in the experimental group came from non-English speaking background and they did not use English regularly at homes. Hence, they experienced some difficulties in expressing themselves fluently in English language during the Bright Start lessons. The study has highlighted that language as a

185 „psychological tool‟3

as Vygotsky pointed out, is crucial for children to participate and engage in more complex cognitive operations (Berk and Winsler,1995; Yang, 2000). In the Bright Start cognitive programme, when children are equipped with language as a psychological tool, they can benefit from the predominantly discussion type of learning that tap on their mental processes and sometimes higher order higher mental processes.

However in a multilingual society such as Singapore, it would be beneficial for young children to be exposed to mediation in their mother tongue too. The home has an important contribution to make to children‟s learning and development (Klein, 2003). In the future implementation of the Bright Start cognitive curriculum, consideration should be given to the training of primary caregivers at home. The Bright Start has a parent‟s manual as it sees the home as a context for transcendence of cognitive functions. When children are regularly exposed to context of discussion, they would develop more responsiveness and reciprocity towards mediation. Through discussions at home as well as in the preschool centres, children get to transcend the cognitive functions to new situations and diverse (Haywood, 1988).

Future studies may need to consider children from bilingual or multi-lingual backgrounds whose mother tongue differ from the language that they are to be mediated in and how this may affect their understanding and learning of Bright Start cognitive curriculum.

Another limitation of the research study is the choice of outcome measures. They measured predominantly the cognitive domain. For future studies, a broader range of outcome measures of other domains such as self-regulation, social-emotional

3

“Psychological tools are those symbolic artifacts-signs, symbols, texts, formulae, graphic-symbolic devices-that help individuals master their own “natural” psychological functions fo perception, memory, attention and so on. Psychological tools serve as a bridge between individual acts of cognition and the symbolic sociocultural prerequisites of these acts.” ( Kozulin, 1998, p. 1)

186 domains would be important to examine as effects of the Bright Start Cognitive Curriculum.

From the investigator‟s knowledge, the Bright Start Cognitive Curriculum is the only comprehensive cognitive programme for young children with lesson plans that have been clearly and systematically designed. With the well prepared curriculum, it is easy for teachers who are trained in mediated learning experience teaching approach to implement the curriculum efficiently. On the other hand, it is this value offered by the Bright Start Cognitive Curriculum that has caused the investigator to overlook or limit the potential value that other programmes can offer. Future studies, may consider comparing the Bright Start Cognitive Curriculum with other cognitive programmes for young children to examine the effects more clearly and hence limit some of the potential biases that arise.

The research methodology could have included several focus group interviews with the experimental teachers to gather information about their feelings and perspectives about implementing the Bright Start Cognitive Curriculum using the mediated learning experience teaching approach. Such interviews may have enabled the investigator to gain a more in-depth understanding of the quantitative data, like analyzing the data for patterns and themes.

The small sample of 80 children and 5 teachers from five different centres significantly limits the generalisation of this study and a wider sample may confirm the findings or indeed identify some other issues needing further investigation. The small sample size as evident in this study cannot be generalised to wider population but it does yield a rich source of data and this has occurred in this study.