Learning Principles in EVS Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The key calls the question an analytical question.

'Why do we feel comfortable in woollens during winter' asks the child to give a reason and connect cause and effect (wool traps air, air conducts heat poorly, body heat is kept in). Questions that ask for reasons or relationships, rather than for a name or a fact, are treated as analytical.

It is not a factual question, which asks for a single recalled fact (for example, 'Which animal gives wool ?'), and it is not hypothetical, which would begin with 'what if'. Option (1), convergent, is the one a reader might hesitate over, since the underlying explanation has one accepted line of reasoning. I could not find a source that classifies this exact question, so this explanation follows the key and the reasoning-based meaning of 'analytical'.

Answer: C

The key gives a divergent question.

A divergent question is open-ended: it has no single correct answer and invites children to imagine, think creatively and give many possible responses. 'What would have happened if all birds were killed at once?' asks children to think of food chains, pests, seed dispersal and much else, with no single expected answer.

A convergent question has one correct answer. The question is also hypothetical in form, but in the classification of questions by the thinking they demand, an open-ended imaginative question like this is divergent. It is not a philosophical question.

Answer: C

Statement I is true but Statement II is false.

The EVS curriculum, following NCF 2005, is built on a social constructivist view: children construct knowledge through activity and interaction with others and their environment.

Piaget's work, though based on in-depth study of children, represents cognitive (individual) constructivism, in which the child constructs knowledge largely through his or her own interaction with the physical world. Social constructivism is associated with Vygotsky, so Statement II is false.