The Sunday News
Psychomotor Skills
PSYCHOMOTOR learning is the relationship between cognitive functions and physical movement. Psychomotor learning is demonstrated by physical skills such as movement, co-ordination, manipulation, dexterity, grace, strength, speed; actions which demonstrate the fine motor skills such as use of precision instruments or tools, or actions which evidence gross motor skills such as the use of the body in dance, musical or athletic performance.
Behavioural examples include driving a car, throwing a ball, and playing a musical instrument. In psychomotor learning research, attention is given to the learning of co-ordinated activity involving the arms, hands, fingers, and feet, while verbal processes are not emphasised.
A psychomotor skill is the ability to do something without engaging your brains, the actions we take without thinking simply because we are used to such action to the extent that it becomes part of life or the norm. Actions such as moving your arms and hands steady while holding your arm and hand in one position.
When learning psychomotor skills, individuals progress through the cognitive stage, the associative stage, and the autonomic stage. The cognitive stage is marked by awkward slow and choppy movements that the learner tries to control. The learner has to think about each movement before attempting it. In the associative stage, the learner spends less time thinking about every detail, however, the movements are still not a permanent part of the brain. In the autonomic stage, the learner can refine the skill through practice, but no longer needs to think about the movement.
Advantages in teaching Psychomotor Skills
Psychomotor skills have an important influence on concept learning. It is possible to analyse the task and make a description of a response pattern optimally suited to carrying out the activity in question.
Knowledge of skill learning could help them to help themselves if they have not already acquired the skills.
In children – Psychological development is the set of processes that allows infants to grow up after going through many steps and stages.
This is the whole psychic (psychomotor) of the individual and the body. Acquisition of motor skills (neuromuscular) and psychological (appearance by step demonstration of intellectual and emotional increasingly sophisticated). The child is anything other than adult reduced both in quantity and quality.
The development of the child during the first six years is significant in the brain (he grows as fast and more), psychomotor, personality (emotional, basic personality sets before two years).
The nervous system: At birth, the structures most developed in children are the midbrain and medulla oblongata. The two structures are important as they ensure the regulation of some basic functions (power, sleep, etc).
The cerebral cortex is the set of the gray matter with the convolution entailed the midbrain. Cala governs higher functions of the individual (perception, body movement, thought, language, memory).
Cortical development: At birth, everything is already created but the connections are not functional. Until the age of 2 ½ years, the synapses will be and multiply. They form the dendritic tree of the synapse, which results in an increase in brain size that triples from zero to two years. There is a rapid change in the first two years of life that will allow the emergence of adaptive functions like language.
The muscle and skeletal: There are changes of body structures in parallel which are slower. This spread between childhood and adolescence with the stiffening (hardening of the bones). Flexibility is synonymous with vulnerability in children. Muscles lengthen and thicken first for maintaining muscles (neck) and this autonomy (legs).
The motor development: Physical changes will be the basis for rapid development of the child’’s motor skills. Different skills are locomotor (walking, running, jumping), and postural manipulation (throwing, seize, grasp). At 6 months, the child walks with four legs and standing at 13 months. Specific development is influenced by environmental factors (diet and exercise).
The cognitive development
A child is a motor that is to say that if he had not the opportunity to play and manipulate, he could not understand the world, that’s why it’s called motor development. Zero to two years, he governs his movements according to what he hears, he responds to his feelings by his movements. For Piaget (1896-1980), it is the sensory motor period. The child at that time there is no link between the events even if they are repeated. When he does something that is not intentional or planned. But gradually, the baby comes to understand that things continue to exist even when he no longer sees them and starts to remember things, people, etc..
Child development from zero to two years
zero to one month exercise reflexes
one to four months primary circular reactions
four to eight months secondary circular reactions
eight to 12 months coordination of secondary schemata
12 to 18 months tertiary circular reactions
18 to 24 months symbolic
Compared to this time, the evolution of intelligence of the child seems to gradually rise the motor plan and sign plan to the mental representation of this behaviour is imitative.
Child from two to six years
Physical: Physical changes in the preschool is to say two to six years less dramatic and less numerous than the period of infancy. These are incremental changes. Gradual changes allow the child to progress in terms of motor development. The changes are less radical but they will allow the child skills that will increase his independence and his adaptation to the larger world around him. Motor skills will allow the child around five- six years of cycling, using scissors, visual and motor coordination.
Cognitive development: This is the preoperative period (Piaget), this is a period when the child begins to use symbols and representations and manipulate them mentally. The main features are the self, the child can not take into account the opinions of others. At this age, the child deals with things from their own point of view.
Conservation, some objects although they have undergone changes remain constant. For Piaget, within five years if the child has not mastered this conservation is that children are so absorbed by the appearance of change that focuses on the change and not on the mind unchanged and of the underlying object.
Classification, it is the attitude to the child to classify objects, group them by category and use of concrete and abstract properties to perform its clusters. Two to three years, the child of graphic collections. There is a group object is done, but no apparent link between these objects. Between four and five years, the child collections based on a characteristic. He begins to pull together and objects in a systematic and logical. The inclusion of class is a classification that the child still does not get to six years. This is the relationship between object classes such as, an object class is in a more general class.
Logic, the logic of the child is at that age transductive. The child matches some element in some fact, but the problem is that the link it establishes between the elements and facts is incorrect.
Piaget is an author of reference in his time. It divides by stage. In recent years, he is widely criticized because he believes he has underestimated the skills of children. Children are less egocentric than Piaget said, and they have sophisticated theories of mind from four-five years. Brownell has experience in 1990, he has children together (same age, disabled, older, etc.). To play. The child seems to understand that others may think differently from him since he plays and explains the rules to others.
child from six to 12 years
Physical: The most important motor skills are acquired at six-seven years, he is acquired in terms of their simplest form. Also the physical changes that occur between six and twelve years are mere refinements of these motor skills with increasing speed, improving coordination, competence in performing physical activity accurate. It was during this period that there are hormonal changes to eight years in girls and 10 years in boys.
Cognitive development: For Piaget, it is an important time and as significant as when the child begins to use symbols to two years. This is the concrete operational period. An operation is the set of abstract patterns and powerful as internal reversibility, subtraction, addition, multiplication, division, seriation. The main features are the conservation, to six years the child has acquired the conservation of liquid, substance, and the number. In seven- eight years is the conservation of weight. At 10-11 years the conservation of volume.
To achieve this level of understanding, the child uses several strategies that may be reversible, the addition or subtraction, compensation. – The classification to seven years the child understands the principle of class inclusion. – The logic is inductive. For Piaget, it seems that the child develops at this time an inductive logic. It is a form of reasoning which is to move from specific to general, experience to more general rules, etc. — Google
