Childhood Development PDF

Chapter 9: Cognitive Development in Early Childhood October 21, 2024 Piaget’s Preoperational Stage Section 9.1 The Preoperational Stage & Language Swift advances in mental representation Language is our most flexible form of mental representation Words allow us to combine present moment...

Chapter 9: Cognitive Development in Early Childhood October 21, 2024 Piaget’s Preoperational Stage Section 9.1 The Preoperational Stage & Language Swift advances in mental representation Language is our most flexible form of mental representation Words allow us to combine present moment experiences with the past and future Piaget underestimated the power language in early childhood Make Believe Play Make-believe play Through pretending, young children practice and strengthen new representational schemes Development of make-believe ○ Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it ○ Play becomes less self-centered ○ More complex combinations of schemas Sociodramatic play: Make-believe with others ○ Starts end of the second year ○ Increases rapidly in complexity in early childhood Benefits of Make Believe Play Reflects children’s abilities but also contributes to children’s cognitive and social skills Make believe play predicts a wide variety of cognitive capacities Most research is centered in sociodramatic play Make believe play is hard to study! Critics point to the fact that studies are largely correlational Encouraging Make Believe Play Ways of enhancing make-believe play in early childhood: Provide sufficient space and play materials Encourage children’s play without controlling it Offer a variety of realistic materials as well as materials without clear functions Ensure that children have many rich, real-world experiences to inspire positive fantasy play Help children solve social conflicts constructively Symbol Real-World Relations Experiences with diverse symbols strengthen preschoolers’ understanding that one object can stand for another Dual representation: viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its own right and a symbol Limitations of Preoperational Thought Egocentrism: failure to distinguish others’ symbolic viewpoints from one’s own Piaget demonstrated egocentrism using his three-mountains problem Animistic thinking: assigning human-like capacities to non-human objects Magical beliefs: thinking that magic accounts for events they otherwise can’t explain Piaget believed preschoolers’ egocentric bias prevents them from accommodating, or reflecting on and revising their faulty reasoning Conservation: the idea that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes Specific concepts of conservation: ○ Centration: focusing on one aspect of a situation while neglecting other important features ○ Irreversibility: an inability to mentally go through a series of steps in a problem and then reverse direction, returning to the starting point Centration and irreversibility are seen in preoperational children’s lack of hierarchical classification Hierarchical classification: ○ Organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences ○ Demonstrated in Piaget’s class inclusion problem Follow-Up Research on Preoperational Thought Egocentric Thinking ○ On simplified tasks with familiar objects, 3-year-olds show clear awareness of others’ vantage points ○ Perspective taking develops gradually throughout childhood and adolescence Animistic and Magical Thinking: ○ By age 2 ½, children give psychological explanations for people and other animals, but rarely for objects, and seldom attribute biological properties to objects ○ Preschoolers’ notions of magic are flexible and appropriate ○ Magical beliefs decline with age Logical thought: ○ On simplified, relevant tasks, preschoolers display logical thinking  ○ Young children also engage in impressive reasoning by analogy about physical changes Categorization: ○ Preschoolers flexibility organize knowledge into categories using both nonobvious and perceptual information ○ By age 3, they easily move between basic-level categories and general categories, and they break down general categories into subcategories Piaget’s Theory: Children’s Gestures Facilitate Cognitive Change Children who produce speech- gesture mismatches appear to be in cognitive transition Gesturing can facilitate children’s reasoning: ○ Brings together two forms of representation, one in action and the other in speech ○ Establishes sensorimotor representations in the cerebral cortex that learners reactivate in subsequent encounters ○ Adults who gesture while teaching encourage children to gesture, which enhances learning Evaluation of the Preoperational Stage Piaget was partly wrong and partly right about young children’s cognitive capacities ○ Cognitive development may be more gradual Three educational principles derived from Piaget continue to influence teachers and classrooms: ○ Discovery learning: involves opportunities for spontaneous interaction with the environment ○ Sensitivity to children’s readiness to learn builds on children’s current thinking, challenging their incorrect ways of viewing the world ○ Acceptance of individual differences means planning for activities for individual children and small groups Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory Section 9.2 Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory In Vygotsky’s view, child and social environment collaborate to mold cognition in culturally adaptive ways Vygotsky’s viewed private speech as the foundation for all higher cognitive processes Relationship of private speech to task difficulty among 5 and 6 year olds Children engage in private speech for self guidance when tasks are in their zone of proximal development Social Origins of Early Childhood Cognition Children’s learning takes place within the zone of proximal development To promote cognitive development, social interaction must have two vital features: ○ Intersubjectivity: two participants who begin a task with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding ○ Scaffolding: adjusting the support offered during a teaching lesson to fit the child’s current level of performance Research Support for Vygotsky’s Theory Effective scaffolding leads to higher executive function and overall intellectual performance Cultural differences in skills to scaffold for optimal development Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory Vygotskian classrooms promote assisted discovery: ○ Teachers guide children’s learning with Explanations Demonstrations Verbal prompts Children with varying abilities engage in peer collaboration, working together in groups Challenges to Vygotsky’s ideas: ○ Verbal dialogues are not the only means through which children learn ○ Vygotsky says little about how basic motor, perception, attention, memory, and problem-solving skills contribute to socially transmitted cognition Evaluation of Vygotsky’s Theory Underscores the role of social experience in cognitive development Helps us understand cultural variation in cognitive skills Ideas have not gone unchallenged ○ Some cultures place less emphasis on language in schooling Limited attention to basic cognitive process Information Processing Theory Section 9.3 Information Processing: Executive Function Executive function components are closely interrelated and contribute to academic and social skills ○ Preschoolers gain steadily in ability to inhibit impulses ○ Flexible shifting of attention improves during the preschool years into middle childhood  ○ Gains in working memory permit preschoolers to generate more complex play and problem-solving goals ○ Marked gains occur in planning: thinking out a sequence of acts ahead of time Gains between ages 3 and 7 in performance on tasks requiring children to inhibit an impulse and focus on a competing goal ○ Children earlier in childhood tend to struggle a lot with, but tend to do better at ages 6-7 Miniature zoo used to assess children’s planning Information Processing: Memory Memory changes in preschoolers become explicit Recognition: ability to tell whether a stimulus is the same as or similar to one they have seen before Recall: generating a mental image of an absent stimulus Recognition memory is nearly perfected by age 4 or 5 Young children’s recall is much poorer than their recognition ○ Gains in recall are associated with language development ○ Recall poor due to a lack of memory strategies: deliberate mental activities that improve our chances of remembering Types of memory strategies: ○ Rehearsal ○ Organization Episodic memory: memory for everyday experiences, recalled in context- linked to time, place, or person Semantic memory: information removed from the context in which it was first learned that has become part of your general knowledge base Routine events are remembered in terms of scripts: ○ Become more elaborate and spontaneous with age ○ Help children interpret and predict everyday experiences and assist in recall, make-believe play, and planning Adults use two styles to elicit children’s autobiographical memory: ○ Repetitive style: repeating the same questions to evoke the telling of a memory ○ Elaborative style: scaffolding the autobiographical memories of their young children Differences in autobiographical memory ○ Gender Girls produce more organized and detailed personal narratives than boys Women report more vivid memories and earlier age of first memory ○ Culture  Western children talk more about their own thoughts and emotions than East Asian children East Asian children tend to highlight the roles of others in the recall of autobiographical memories Information Processing: Problem Solving According to overlapping-waves theory, when given challenging problems, children ○ Try out various struggles ○ Observe which work best, which work less well, and which are ineffective ○ Gradually select strategies on the basis of accuracy and speed ○ Overlapping-waves pattern of strategy use in problem solving- Children are going to try many strategies and find the most effective one Information Processing: The Young Child’s Theory of Mind Children construct a theory of mind as they reflect on their own thought Metacognition- thinking about thought: ○ Age 1: view people as intentional beings who can share and influence one another’s mental states ○ Age 2: display clearer grasp of others’ emotions and desires; first verbs include mental-state verbs “I think”, “I want” ○ Age 3: realize that thinking is internal but focus only on behavior consistent with desires ○ Age 4: realize that both beliefs and desires determine behavior; become aware of false beliefs The age at which theory of mind is seen on verbal false-beliefs task is the same across various cultures and SES ○ Strengthens at 3 ½ years ○ More consistently accurate from 4-6 years Theory of mind might be expressed earlier on tasks that do not include verbal skills ○ Violation-of-expectation paradigms Factors contributing to preschoolers’ theory of mind ○ Language and verbal reasoning ○ Executive function ○ Make-believe play ○ Social interaction Biology and Environment- Autism and Theory of Mind Autism spectrum disorder associated with impairment in theory of mind Two hypotheses: ○ Children with autism are impaired in executive function  ○ Children with autism display a unique style of information processing, preferring to process the parts of stimuli over patterns and coherent wholes Information Processing: Early Literacy Emergent literacy: children’s active efforts to construct literacy knowledge through informal experiences Phonological awareness: the ability to reflect on and manipulate the sound structures of spoken language ○ Rhyming ○ Sensitivity to incorrect pronunciation ○ Identifying syllables in a word Experiences that contribute to better emergent literacy and later reading and writing skills: ○ Pointing out letter- sound correspondences ○ Playing language- sound games ○ Interactive reading and adult-supported writing activities that focus on narrative Information Processing: Mathematical Development Toddlers display a beginning grasp of ordinality By age 3 ½ to 4, most children have mastered the numbers up to ten and grasp cardinality (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) = 6 Around age 4, children use counting to solve simple arithmetic problems An understanding of basic arithmetic makes estimation possible Adults can enhance mathematical development by providing occasions for: ○ Counting ○ Comparing quantities ○ Talking about numbers Settings Outside the Home Section 9.4 Settings Outside the Home: Preschool, Kindergarten, and Child Care Academic programs: ○ Formal lessons, repetitive drills ○ Early childhood teachers are pressured to take this approach Child-centered programs: ○ Children select teacher provided activities ○ Much learning takes place through play ○ Montessori education: a child-centered approach that places equal emphasis on academic and social development Teaching Through Guided Play Guided play integrates child autonomy and playful exploration with adult-guided instruction, or scaffolding: ○ Voluntary, engaging, and flexible features of play ○ Ensures that children focus on content relevant to learning goals Adults can implement guided play in two ways: ○ Providing materials that emphasize a learning goal ○ Observing child-controlled playful activities and making comments and suggestions Preschool Interventions Project Head Start typically provides a year or two of preschool along with nutritional and health services: ○ Currently serves nearly 1 million U.S. families ○ Parent involvement is central to its philosophy Head Start 3-year-olds exceeded controls in ○ Vocabulary ○ Emergent literacy ○ Math skills ○ Social skills Benefits dissolve quickly upon entering elementary school Benefits of preschool intervention for children in poverty: ○ Attain higher IQ and achievement scores in the first two or three years of school ○ Less likely to be placed in special education or retained in grade ○ Greater number graduate from high school High/ Scope Perry Preschool Project 2 years exposed to highly cognitively enriching preschool Benefits into adulthood (age 27) including: ○ Earned high school and college degrees ○ Higher incomes ○ Be married ○ Own their own home A follow-up at age 40 showed: ○ Higher income ○ Improved family life ○ Law abiding behavior Improving Head Start Head Start REDI-C integrates an enrichment curriculum into Head Start program 27% of Head Start teachers who not have a degree in early childhood education or related field Strategies for enhancing language, literacy and social skills REDI-P provides home visits before and after the transition to kindergarten REDI-C yields higher year end scores Child Care Settings Center based care is more strongly linked to cognitive gains Signs of developmentally appropriate early childhood programs: ○ Safe, clean, richly equipped physical setting ○ No more than 18-20 children with two teachers ○ Child-selected group and individual activities ○ Positive adult-child interactions ○ College- level teacher preparation ○ Parents encouraged to observe and participate ○ State licensing and voluntary accreditation Educational Screen Media Television remains the dominant form of media Time spent watching educational programs, such as Sesame Street, is associated with ○ Early literacy and math skills ○ Academic progress in elementary and high school Background TV Viewing ○ Impairs sustained attention to play activities ○ Reduces quantity and quality of parent- child interaction ○ Is associated with delayed motor, cognitive, and language development Majority of 2- to 6-year-olds use interactive digital media on mobile devices Most early childhood classrooms include learning centers equipped with tablets or computers Shared reading of a paper book, leads to higher-quality, parent-child conversation than sharing of an ebook Language Development Section 9.3 Language Development: Vocabulary Mutual exclusivity bias: the assumption that words refer to entirely separate categories Syntactic bootstrapping: discovering word meanings by observing how words are used in syntax  Word-learning strategies do not fully explain vocabulary development: ○ Development cannot be innate because children acquiring different languages use different approaches ○ Vocabulary growth is governed by the same cognitive strategies that children apply to nonlinguistic information ○ Children may draw on a coalition of cues— perceptual, social, and linguistic— that shift in importance with age Language Development: Grammar English speaking children begin using simple sentences between age 2-3 Efficient at adding “s” and “ing” Overregularization: overextension of grammatical rules to words that are exceptions ○ “We each got two foots” ○ “My toy car breaked” Semantic bootstrapping: grouping words by certain qualities and observing how they’re used Language Development: Conversation Pragmatics- the practical, social side of language: ○ Effective and appropriate communication ○ Involves taking turns, staying on topic, stating messages clearly, and conforming to cultural rules for social interaction ○ Preschoolers make considerable headway in mastering it By age 4, children adjust their speech to fit the age, gender and social status of listeners From ages 4 to 8, conversing over the phone improves greatly Language Development: Grammar Adults can provide feedback with two strategies: ○ Recasts: restoring inaccurate speech into correct form ○ Expansions: elaborating on children’s speech, increasing its complexity Role of adults: ○ Listening attentively ○ Elaborating on what children say ○ Modeling correct usage ○ Stimulating children to talk further