Nursery World - Learning and Development: Prediction

The concept and practice of predicting teaches children about cause and effect. Early years consultant David Quinn looks at the science. Photographs at Oakey Dokeys pre-school, Essex, by Teri Pengilley.

Predicting is an essential thought process, an intellectual tool, that we need to make sense of the world around us. As young children develop, they gradually become less rooted in the here and now and start to grasp daily routines, so enabling them to predict that lunch is often followed by a trip to the park. As this ability to predict develops, it not only guides us through our daily life but promotes higher-level thinking and allows us to engage intellectually with the world.

Piaget and Vygotsky both developed a constructivist view of learning, whereby young children make meaning through experience, assimilating knowledge and making accommodations to their view of the world as their experience clashes with their already formed ideas.

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