Aged Between Six and Eleven Years

Children's thinking has been described by Piaget and others in general terms, which suggest that there are major developmental changes that affect children's thinking at various stages of their development. Some criticisms of Piaget's theory have related to his approach to describing children's thinking as a context free phenomenon. In relation to this point, arguments have been put forward for the need to investigate the development of children's thinking, within particular content areas, and the investigations reported in this thesis have con-centrated on the development of religious thinking of children aged from ~6 to 11 years. A reV1ew of preVlOUS investigations into this area of children's thought development reveals major shortcomings, both in the experimental approaches used and in the theories that have been constructed. In particular it is argued that there has been a tendency for investi