Chapter 9: Study Guide
emergent literacy
A young child's active effort to construct literacy knowledge through informal experiences.
Explain how cultural tools support planning skills.
Directions for playing games Patterns for construction Recipes for cooking Learn from activites like above, especially when they collaborate with more expert planners. When parents encourage planning in everyday activities, from loading the dishwasher to packing for a vacation, they help children plan more effectively.
True or False: Children in academic preschools demonstrate higher levels of achievement than those in child-centered preschools, including greater mastery of motor, academic, language, and social skills.
False Children in academic preschools demonstrate higher levels of achievement than those in child-centered preschools, including greater mastery of motor, academic, language, and social skills.
True or False: Recent research indicates that the creation of imaginary companions is a sign of maladjustment. Explain your answer.
False Children with an invisible playmate typically treat it with care and affection and say it offers caring, comfort, and good company, just as their real friendships do. Such children also display more complex and imaginative pretend play, are advanced in understanding others' viewpoints and emotions, and are more sociable with peers.
True or False: Piaget believed that language is the most important factor in cognitive development.
False Piaget's view of make-believe as mere practice of representational schemes is regarded as too limited. Play not only reflects but also contributes to children's cognitive and social skills
Strategy for enhancing preschoolers' make-believe play - Provide sufficient space and play materials.
Generous space and materials allow for many play options and reduce conflict.
Benefits of Montessori education
Outperformed on literacy and math skills Cognitive flexibility False-belief understanding Concern with fairness in solving conflicts with peers Cooperative play with agemates
1.5 to 2.5
The average 2- to 6-year-old watches TV programs and videos from ______ hours a day.
True or False: Basic arithmetic knowledge emerges in a universal sequence around the world.
True Basic arithmetic knowledge emerges in a universal sequence around the world.
True or False: By age 6 or 7, scores on early childhood intelligence tests are good predictors of later IQ and academic achievement.
True By age 6 or 7, scores on early childhood intelligence tests are good predictors of later IQ and academic achievement.
According to Siegler, what two criteria do children use to select problem-solving strategies?
Accuracy Speed
scaffolding
Adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child's current level of performance. When the child has little notion of how to proceed, the adult uses direct instruction, breaking the task into manageable units, suggesting strategies, and offering rationales for using them. As the child's competence increases, gradually and sensitively withdraw support, turning over responsibility to the child. Then children take the language of these dialogues, make it part of their private speech, and use this speech to organize their independent efforts.
An example of a situation in which a preschooler is likely to experience a breakdown of conversational skills.
When talking on the phone. Grandfather: "How old will you be?" John: "Dis many." [Holding up four fingers]Grandfather: "Huh?" John: "Dis many." [Again holding up four fingers]
mutual exclusivity bias
An assumption made by children in the early stages of vocabulary growth that words refer to entirely separate (nonoverlapping) categories.
Research suggests that the home environment (does / does not) play a major role in the generally poorer intellectual performance of low-SES children in comparison to their higher-SES peers.
does
When children understand basic arithmetic, they are able to _____________ or generate approximate answers.
estimation
Characteristics of high-quality child care
group size (number of children in a single space) caregiver-child ratio caregivers' educational preparation caregivers' personal commitment to learning about and caring for children.
The number of young children enrolled in preschool or child care has steadily (decreased / increased) over the past several decades, reaching nearly 60 percent in the United States.
increased
At all ages between 1 and 5 years, the majority of children's questions are (information-seeking / non-information seeking).
information-seeking
Why do minorities and children from low-SES homes sometimes do poorly on intelligence tests?
Bombarded with questions by an unfamiliar adult, they sometimes react with anxiety. May not define the testing situation in achievement terms. Instead, they may look for attention and approval from the adult and may settle for lower performance than their abilities allow.
Piaget described preschoolers in terms of what they (can / cannot) understand. Operations or mental actions that obey logical rules.
Cannot
Circumstances children use private speech
Children use more of it when tasks are appropriately challenging—neither too easy nor too hard but within their zone of proximal development, or range of mastery.
Strategy for enhancing preschoolers' make-believe play - Offer a variety of both realistic materials and materials without clear functions.
Children use realistic materials, such as trucks, dolls, tea sets, dress-up clothes, and toy scenes (house, farm, garage, airport) to act out everyday roles in their culture. Materials without clear functions (such as blocks, cardboard cylinders, paper bags, and sand) inspire fantastic role play, such as "pirate" and "creature from outer space."
Factors responsible for gains in sustained attention during early childhood.
Children's ability to inhibit impulses. Keep their mind on a competing goal.
Perspective in the debate over how children acquire grammar - product of general cognitive development
Children's tendency to search the environment for consistencies and patterns of all sorts. Rely on semantics, or word meanings, to figure out grammatical rules—an approach called semantic bootstrapping. Then they merge these categories with observations of how words are used in sentences.
Limitations in preschooler's ability to plan.
Compare detailed pictures, preschoolers fail to search thoroughly. Tasks with several steps, they often fail to decide what to do first and what to do next in an orderly fashion. Difficulty postponing action in favor of mapping out a sequence of moves and evaluating the consequences of each. Procedures that require inhibition and increased working-memory capacity in addition to planning skill.
fast mapping
Connect new words with their underlying concepts after only a brief encounter, a process. Even toddlers comprehend new labels remarkably quickly, but they need more repetitions of the word's use across several situations than preschoolers, who process speech-based information faster and are better able to categorize and recall it. During the preschool years, children become increasingly adept at __________ two or more new words encountered in the same situation.
How does a child's questioning behavior change with age?
Content of children's questions is related to their cognitive development. At a time when vocabulary is advancing rapidly, about 60 percent of 1½- to 2-year-olds' questions ask for names of objects. With age, preschoolers increasingly ask about function ("What's it do?"), activity ("What's he doing?"), state ("Is she hungry?"), and theory of mind ("How does the pilot know where to fly?"). Context also makes a difference. Compared with everyday situations, a visit to a zoo elicits many more questions about biological information from 2- to 4-year-olds: "
Challenges
Current research (challenges / supports) Piaget's view of preschoolers as cognitively deficient.
hierarchical classification
p. 322) The organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences.
Factors that support preschoolers' impressive skill at categorizing.
rapidly expanding vocabularies general knowledge
Benefits of watching educational programs like Sesame Street.
stress basic literacy number concepts teach: - general knowledge - emotional and social understanding - social skills
Tools of the Mind
A preschool curriculum inspired by Vygotsky's theory. Scaffolding of attention skills is woven into virtually all classroom activities.
preschool
A program with planned educational experiences aimed at enhancing the development of 2- to 5-year-olds.
child care
A variety of arrangements for supervising children of employed parents.
Explain why Vygotsky saw make-believe play as the ideal social context for fostering cognitive development in early childhood.?
As children create imaginary situations, they learn to follow internal ideas and social rules rather than their immediate impulses. For example, a child pretending to go to sleep follows the rules of bedtime behavior. A child imagining himself as a father and a doll as a child conforms to the rules of parental behavior. According to Vygotsky, _________ is a unique, broadly influential zone of proximal development in which children try out a wide variety of challenging activities and acquire many new competencies. Enhances a diverse array of cognitive and social skills. Pretending is also rich in private speech. Better at taking personal responsibility for following classroom rules. Better at regulating emotion. Plays a role in children's increasing self-control.
Perspective in the debate over how children acquire grammar - Chomsky's language acquisition device (LAD)
Assumes that children have innate knowledge of grammatical rules.
200
At age 2, the average child has a spoken vocabulary of ____ words.
Give an example of the following important changes in make-believe play during early childhood - Play becomes less self-centered.
At first, make-believe is directed toward the self. For example, Dwayne pretends to feed only himself. Soon, children begin to direct pretend actions toward objects, as when a child feeds a doll. Early in the third year, they become detached participants, making a doll feed itself or pushing a button to launch a rocket. Make-believe becomes less self-centered as children realize that agents and recipients of pretend actions can be independent of themselves.
10,000
By age 6, vocabulary grows to around ________ words.
Milestone of mathematical reasoning - 4 to 5 years
Children can use counting to solve simple arithmetic problems.
Milestone of mathematical reasoning - 3½ to 4 years
Children display a beginning grasp of cardinality.
Explain how adults can use expansions to promote preschoolers' language development.
Elaborating on children's speech, increasing its complexity.
Explain how parent involvement in early intervention contributes to improved school adjustment in children.
Gains in academic achievement were still evident in junior high school. When children enter good-quality schools, IQ gains endure into adulthood.
Features of social interaction that facilitate cognitive development
Intersubjectivity Scaffolding
Factors that contribute to preschoolers' theory of mind
Language Cognitive abilities Make-believe play Social interaction
Summarize contributions of make-believe play to children's cognitive development.
Make-believe strengthens a wide variety of mental abilities, including sustained attention, memory, logical reasoning, language and literacy.
Features of Montessori education
Multiage classrooms Teaching materials specially designed to promote exploration and discovery Long time periods for individual and small-group learning in child-chosen activities Equal emphasis on academic and social development
Long-term benefits of preschool intervention
Poverty-stricken children who attended programs scored higher in IQ and achievement than controls during the first two to three years of elementary school. After that, differences declined. But on real-life measures of school adjustment, children and adolescents remained ahead. Less likely to be placed in special education. Nor retained in grade. Greater number graduated from high school. Benefits lasting well into adulthood. - increased employment - reduced pregnancy - lower delinquency rates in adolescence.
Explanations for vocabulary development during early childhood
Sensitive to perceptual features (such as object shape and physical action). Increasingly attend to social cues—the speaker's direction of gaze, gestures, expressions of intention and desire, and soon the speaker's knowledge.. Llinguistic cues—sentence structure and intonation (stress, pitch, and loudness)—play larger roles.
Explain how adults can use recasts to promote preschoolers' language development.
Restructuring inaccurate speech into correct form.
Characteristics of homes that foster young children's intellectual growth.
Rich in educational toys and books. Parents are warm and affectionate, stimulate language and academic knowledge, and arrange interesting outings. Reasonable demands for socially mature behavior—for example, that the child perform simple chores and behave courteously toward others. Parents resolve conflicts with reason instead of physical force and punishment.
Ways adults support children's vocabulary growth during early childhood.
Take advantage of the rich social information that adults frequently provide when they introduce new word First designate the whole object ("The bird has something ...") and then point to a part of it ("in its beak"). The child sees the that beak is a certain part, not the whole bird. Inform children directly about word meanings. Highlight the meaning of adjectives by using the new label with several object. Helps children infer that the word refers to an object property. Explain which of two or more words to use, by saying, for example, "You can call it a sea creature, but it's better to say dolphin". Express certainty about a word's meaning. Child more likely to accept her referent than when she expresses uncertainty. Fill in for words they have not yet learned. Metaphors permit young children to communicate in amazingly vivid and memorable ways.
Features of child-centered preschools
Teachers allow children to select activities. Learning takes place through play.
Features of academic preschools
Teachers structure children's learning. Literacy and mathematical skills are taught using drill and repetition.
egocentrism
The inability to distinguish the symbolic viewpoints of others from one's own. Piaget believed that this is is the most serious deficiency of preoperational thought.
What does research reveal about the effects of heavy TV viewing on children's cognitive development?
The more time spent on this activity means the less time they spend reading and interacting with others and the poorer their academic skills. Educational programs are beneficial. Entertainment TV—especially heavy viewing—detracts from children's school success and social experiences.
Types of tasks are commonly included on early childhood intelligence tests.
Verbal - "Tell me what this is" Nonverbal Copied designs with special blocks, figured out the pattern in a series of shapes, and indicated what a piece of paper folded and cut would look like when unfolded
phonological awareness
Ability to reflect on and manipulate the sound structure of spoken language.
Provide evidence to support Piaget overestimated preschoolers' animistic beliefs. your answer.
Even infants have begun to distinguish animate from inanimate, as indicated by their remarkable categorical distinctions among living and nonliving things
Factors that facilitate children's movement from less to more efficient problem-solving strategies.
Practice Reasoning Tasks with new challenges Adult assistance
Worse
Preschoolers' recall memory is much (better / worse) than their recognition memory
sociodramatic play
The make-believe with others that is under way by the end of the second year and that increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood.
animistic thinking
The preoperational belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, such as thoughts, wishes, and intentions.
overlapping-waves theory
when given challenging problems, children try out various strategies and observe which work best, which work less well, and which are ineffective. Gradually, they select strategies on the basis of two criteria: accuracy and speed. For basic addition, the min strategy. As children hone in on effective strategies for solving the problems at hand, correct solutions become more strongly associated with problems, and children display the most efficient strategy—automatic retrieval of the answer.
Vygotsky believed that children's learning takes place within a zone of proximal development. Explain what this means.
A range of tasks too difficult for the child to do alone but possible with the help of others.
metacognition
A theory of mind, also called __________. A coherent set of ideas about mental activities.
How can adults strengthen children's categorical learning?
Adult-child conversations Picture-book reading is an especially rich context for understanding categories
Factors that contribute to children's understanding of dual representation.
Adults pointing out similiarities of models to real world examples. exposing young children to diverse symbols—picture books, photographs, drawings, make-believe, and maps—helps them appreciate that one object can stand for another
Order in which categorization develops in most children.
Basic-level categories—ones at an intermediate level of generality, such as "chairs," "tables," and "beds." By the third year, children easily move back and forth between basic-level categories and general categories, such as "furniture." And they break down the basic-level categories into subcategories, such as "rocking chairs" and "desk chairs.
Features of effective adult scaffolding that foster children's cognitive development.
Captures the form of teaching interaction that occurs as children work on school or school-like tasks. puzzles model building picture matching academic assignments. It may not apply to other contexts that are equally vital for cognitive development—for example, play or everyday activities, during which adults usually support children's efforts without deliberately teaching. To encompass children's diverse opportunities to learn through involvement with others,
Educational principle derived from Piaget's theory - Discovery learning.
Children are encouraged to discover for themselves through spontaneous interaction with the environment. Instead of presenting ready-made knowledge verbally, teachers provide a rich variety of activities designed to promote exploration and discovery, including art, puzzles, table games, dress-up clothing, building blocks, books, measuring tools, musical instruments.
Milestone of mathematical reasoning - 2 to 3 years
Children can count rows of about 5 objects.
Milestone of mathematical reasoning - 14 to 16 months
Children display a beginning grasp of ordinality.
Give an example of the following important changes in make-believe play during early childhood - Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it.
Children younger than age 2, for example, will pretend to drink from a cup but refuse to pretend a cup is a hat. They have trouble using an object (cup) that already has an obvious use as a symbol of another object (hat). After age 2, children pretend with less realistic toys—for example, a block for a telephone receiver. Gradually, they can flexibly imagine objects and events without support from the real world, as Sammy's imaginary control tower illustrates.
How do cultural values influence children's narratives about past events?
Collectivist cultural values lead many Asian parents to discourage children from talking about themselves. Chinese parents, for example, engage in less detailed and evaluative past-event dialogues with their preschoolers. Women report an earlier age of first memory and more vivid early memories than men. Western adults' autobiographical memories include earlier, more detailed events that focus more on their own roles. Asians tend to highlight the roles of others.
Vygotsky's view of private speech
Disagreed strongly with Piaget's conclusions. Because language helps children think about their mental activities and behavior and select courses of action, Foundation for all higher cognitive processes, including controlled attention, deliberate memorization and recall, categorization, planning, problem-solving, and self-reflection. Children speak to themselves for self-guidance. As they get older and find tasks easier, their self-directed speech is internalized as silent, inner speech—the internal verbal dialogues we carry on while thinking and acting in everyday situations. Most research findings have supported his view of children's _________.
Educational principles derived from Piaget's theory.
Discovery learning. Sensitivity to children's readiness to learn. Acceptance of individual differences.
Give an example of the following important changes in make-believe play during early childhood - Play includes more complex combinations of schemes.
Dwayne can pretend to drink from a cup, but he does not yet combine drinking with pouring. Later, children combine schemes with those of peers in sociodramatic play, the make-believe with others that is under way by the end of the second year and that increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood. Already, Sammy and his classmates can create and coordinate several roles in an elaborate plot. B y the end of the preschool years, children have a sophisticated understanding of role relationships and story lines.
True or False: Preschoolers cannot understand written language until they learn to read and write.
False: Preschoolers cannot understand written language until they learn to read and write.
Why do preschoolers from low-SES families have fewer opportunities for literacy learning than their more affluent counterparts?
Fewer home and preschool language and literacy learning opportunities. A major reason that they are behind in emergent literacy skills and in reading achievement throughout the school years. Age-appropriate books, for example, are scarce in their environments.
The inability to conserve highlights three aspects of preoperational children's thinking. List and describe them.
First, their understanding is centered, or characterized by centration. They focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting other important features. In conservation of liquid, the child centers on the height of the water, failing to realize that changes in width compensate for the changes in height. Second, children are easily distracted by the perceptual appearance of objects. Third, children treat the initial and final states of the water as unrelated events, ignoring the dynamic transformation( pouring of water) between them.
elaborative style
Follow the child's lead. Ask varied questions Add information to the child's statements Volunteer their own recollections and evaluations of events. "What was the first thing we did? Why weren't the parrots in their cages? I thought the roaring lion was scary. What did you think?" I Helps the children reestablish and reorganize their memory of the field trip.
Summarize contributions of make-believe play to children's social development.
Imagination, creativity, and the ability to reflect on one's own thinking, regulate one's own emotions and behavior, and take another's perspective
Ways adults can help promote emergent literacy in early childhood.
Informal literacy experiences. Pointing out letter-sound correspondences and playing language-sound games enhance children's awareness of the sound structure of language and how it is represented in print. Interactive reading, in which adults discuss storybook content with preschoolers. And adult-supported writing activities that focus on narrative, such as preparing a letter or a story.
Greatest challenge to educational applications of Piaget's theory.
Insistence that young children learn primarily through acting on the environment. Children also use language-based routes to knowledge—a point emphasized by Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, to which we now turn.
How might impairments in executive processing affect the thinking and behavior of children with autism?
Leaves them deficient in skills involved in: Flexible, goal-oriented thinking. Shifting attention to address relevant aspects of a situation, Inhibiting irrelevant responses. Applying strategies to hold information in working memory, and generating plans.
scripts
Like adults, preschoolers remember familiar experiences in these terms. General descriptions of what occurs and when it occurs in a particular situation.
Growing evidence reveals that children with autism have a deficient theory of mind. Cite several consequences of this deficit.
Long after they reach the intellectual level of an average 4-year-old, they have great difficulty with false belief. Most find it hard to attribute mental states to themselves or others. They rarely use mental-state words such as believe, think, know, feel, and pretend. As early as the second year, they show emotional and social deficits believed to contribute to an understanding of mental life. Less often establish eye contact and joint attention. Have difficulty distinguishing facial expressions Seldom engage in social referencing or imitate an adult's novel behaviors. Relatively insensitive to eye gaze as a cue to what a speaker is talking about, they often assume that another person's language refers to what they themselves are looking at.
Strategy for enhancing preschoolers' make-believe play - Encourage children's play without controlling it.
Model, guide, and build on young preschoolers' play themes. Provide open-ended suggestions (for example, "Would the animals like a train ride?"), and talk with the child about the thoughts, motivations, and emotions of play characters. These forms of adult support lead to more elaborate pretending. Refrain from directing the child's play; excessive adult control destroys the creativity and pleasure of make-believe.
Factor that contribute to preschoolers' theory of mind - Social interaction
Mothers of securely attached babies were more likely to comment appropriately on their infants' mental states. These mothers continued to describe their children, when they reached preschool age, in terms of mental characteristics: "She's got a mind of her own!" Maternal "mind-mindedness" was positively associated with later performance on false-belief and other theory-of-mind tasks. Secure attachment is related to more elaborative parent-child narratives, which often include discussions of mental states—conversations that expose preschoolers to concepts and language that help them think about their own and others' mental lives . Preschoolers with siblings who are children (but not infants)—especially older siblings or two or more siblings—tend to be more aware of false belief because they experience more family talk about others' perspectives Preschool friends who often engage in mental-state talk are ahead in false-belief understanding. Interacting with more mature members of society contributes, too.
Explain why preschoolers are ineffective at using memory strategies.
Not skilled at using _________, deliberate mental activities that improve our chances of remembering. For example, to retain information, you may rehearse, repeating the items over and over, or organize, intentionally grouping items that are alike so that you can easily retrieve them by thinking of their similar characteristics.
Strategy for enhancing preschoolers' make-believe play - Ensure that children have many rich, real-world experiences to inspire positive fantasy play.
Opportunities to participate in real-world activities with adults and to observe adult roles in the community provide children with rich social knowledge to integrate into make-believe. Restricting television viewing, especially programs with violent content, limits the degree to which violent themes and aggressive behavior become part of children's play.
What Piagetian task demonstrates limitation of hierarchical classification?
Piaget's famous class inclusion problem demonstrates this. Preoperational children center on the overriding feature, red. They do not think reversibly, moving from the whole class (flowers) to the parts (red and blue) and back again.
Important changes in make-believe play during early childhood.
Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it. Play becomes less self-centered. Play includes more complex combinations of schemes.
intersubjectivity
Pprocess by which two participants who begin a task with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding. Creates a common ground for communication, as each partner adjusts to the other's perspective. Adults try to promote it when they translate their own insights in ways that are within the child's grasp. As the child stretches to understand the adult, she is drawn into a more mature approach to the situation.
Piaget's view of children's egocentric speech.
Reflecting his belief that young children have difficulty taking the perspectives of others. Their talk, he said, is often "talk for self" in which they express thoughts in whatever form they happen to occur, regardless of whether a listener can understand. Believed that cognitive development and certain social experiences eventually bring an end to egocentric speech. Specifically, through disagreements with peers, children see that others hold viewpoints different from their own. As a result, __________ declines in favor of social speech, in which children adapt what they say to their listeners.
Explain how autobiographical memory changes in early childhood.
Representations of personally meaningful, one-time events. As 3- to 6-year-olds' cognitive and conversational skills improve. Their descriptions of special events become better organized in time, more detailed. Enriched with a personal perspective, and related to the larger context of their lives A young preschooler simply reports, "I went camping." Older preschoolers include specifics: where and when the event happened and who was present. And with age, preschoolers increasingly include subjective information—why, for example, an event was exciting, funny, sad, or made them feel proud or embarrassed ("I loved sleeping all night in the tent!")—that explains the event's personal significance.
Benefits of using this strategy to aid memory and recall
Scripts help children organize, interpret, and predict everyday experiences. Once formed, they can be used to predict what will happen on similar occasions in the future. Children rely on scripts to assist recall when listening to and telling stories. They also act out scripts in make-believe play as they pretend to put the baby to bed, go on a trip, or play school. And scripts support children's earliest efforts at planning by helping them represent sequences of actions that lead to desired goals.
Educational principle derived from Piaget's theory - Sensitivity to children's readiness to learn.
Teachers introduce activities that build on children's current thinking, challenging their incorrect ways of viewing the world. But they do not try to speed up development by imposing new skills before children indicate they are interested and ready
Describe preschoolers' ability to plan.
Thinking out a sequence of acts ahead of time and allocating attention accordingly to reach a goal. As long as tasks are familiar and not too complex, preschoolers can generate and follow it. For example, 4-year-olds can search for a lost object in a play area systematically if possible locations are few.
Contributions of Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development.
Verbal communication may not be the only means through which children's thinking develops—or even, in some cultures, the most important means. When Western parents scaffold their young children's mastery of challenging tasks, they assume much responsibility for children's motivation by frequently instructing and conversing with the child. Their communication resembles the teaching that takes place in school, where their children will spend years preparing for adult life. But in cultures that place less emphasis on schooling and literacy, parents often expect children to take greater responsibility for acquiring new skills through keen observation and participation in community activities. Contribute to socially transmitted higher cognitive processes.
Provide an example of how preschoolers are capable of logical thought when given tasks that are simplified and made relevant to their everyday lives.
When a conservation-of-number task is scaled down to include only three items instead of six or seven, 3-year-olds perform well. And when preschoolers are asked carefully worded questions about what happens to substances (such as sugar) after they are dissolved in water, they give accurate explanations. Most 3- to 5-year-olds know that the substance is conserved—that it continues to exist, can be tasted, and makes the liquid heavier, even though it is invisible in the water.
Factor largely accounts for young children's difficulty on appearance-reality problems
Younger children's poor performance, however, is not due to a general difficulty in distinguishing appearance from reality, as Piaget suggested. Rather, they have trouble with the language of these tasks. When permitted to solve appearance-reality problems nonverbally, by selecting from an array of objects the one that "really" has a particular identity, most 3-year-olds perform well
As children move from the sensorimotor to the preoperational stage, the most obvious change is an extraordinary increase in__________________________.
representational, or symbolic, activity.
episodic memory
your memory for everyday experiences Remember not just the animals they saw but the contexts in which they saw them. The capacity to bind together stimuli when encoding and retrieving them supports the development of an increasingly rich event memory during early childhood.
Goal and program components of Project Head Start
Began in 1965. A typical center provides children with a year or two of preschool. Nutritional and health services. Parent involvement is central to their philosophy.
Describe middle-SES parents' interactions with children.
Children are largely excluded from participating in adult work, which generally takes place outside the home. The role of equipping children with the skills they need to become competent workers is assigned to school. preparing children to succeed in school through child-focused activities—especially adult-child conversations and play that enhance language, literacy, and other school-related knowledge. Little access to adult. Spent much time conversing and playing with adults.
Describe parents' interactions in village and tribal cultures.
Children receive little or no schooling. Spend their days in contact with or participating in adult work. Sart to assume mature responsibilities in early childhood. Parents have little need to rely on conversation and play to teach children.
Why do the benefits derived from Head Start typically disappear when children begin school?
Children typically enter inferior public schools in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, which undermine the benefits.
Ways in which preschoolers' awareness of inner cognitive activities is incomplete.
3-and 4-year-olds are unaware that people continue to think while they wait, look at pictures, listen to stories, or read books. When there are no obvious cues that they are thinking. Do not realize that when two people view the same object. Their trains of thought will differ because of variations in their knowledge and other characteristics. Children younger than age 5 pay little attention to the process of thinking. When asked about subtle distinctions between mental states, such as know and forget, they express confusion. And they often say they have always known information they just learned. They believe that all events must be directly observed to be known. They do not understand that mental inferences can be a source of knowledge.
2 examples of nonegocentric responses in preschoolers' everyday interactions.
4-year-olds show clear awareness of others' vantage points. Even 2-year-olds realize that what they see sometimes differs from what another person sees. When asked to help an adult look for a lost object, 24-month-olds—but not 18-month-olds—handed her a toy resting behind a bucket that was within their line of sight but not the adult's. Appear in young children's conversations. For example, preschoolers adapt their speech to fit the needs of their listeners. Four-year-olds use shorter, simpler expressions when talking to 2-year-olds than to agemates or adults. And in describing objects, children do not use such words as "big" and "little" in a rigid, egocentric fashion. Instead, they adjust their descriptions to allow for context. By age 3, children judge a 2-inch shoe as small when seen by itself (because it is much smaller than most shoes) but as big for a tiny 5-inch-tall doll
Jumpstart
A few supplementary program have responded to this shortage by delivering extra educational enrichment to children in Head Start and other preschool classrooms serving low-income children. Two or three times a week, members (college students and older adults) go to an early childhood center, where they read to and converse with 1 to 3 designated 3-to 5-year-olds. Engage in additional individualized learning activities. Play collaborative games in small groups.
Educational principle derived from Piaget's theory - Acceptance of individual differences
All children go through the same sequence of development, but at different rates. Therefore, teachers must plan activities for individual children and small groups, not just for the whole class. In addition, teachers evaluate each child's educational progress in relation to the child's previous development, rather than on the basis of normative standards, or average performance of same-age peers.
Order of each milestone in children's theory of mind in the order that it is typically achieved.
A. Able to view people as intentional beings who can share and influence one another's mental states. B. Realize that other people differ from each other and from themselves C. Understand that thinking takes place inside their heads. D.Realize that both beliefs and desires determine behavior; understand concept of false beliefs.
How do parents adjust the complexity of their answers to fit their children's maturity?
An earlier study also revealed that parents adjust the complexity of their answers to fit their children's maturity. To a question like "Why does the light come on?" 3-year-olds typically get simpler, "prior cause" explanations ("I turned on the switch"). Slightly older children frequently get "mechanism" explanations ("The switch allows electricity to reach the light bulb").
irreversibility
An inability to mentally go through a series of steps in a problem and then reverse direction, returning to the starting point. This is the most important illogical feature of preoperational thought.
Strategy for enhancing preschoolers' make-believe play - Help children solve social conflicts constructively.
Cooperation is essential for sociodramatic play. Guide children toward positive relationships with agemates by helping them resolve disagreements constructively. For example, ask, "What could you do if you want a turn?" If the child cannot think of possibilities, suggest options, and assist the child in implementing them.
guided participation
Encompasses children's diverse opportunities to learn through involvement with others, Broader concept than scaffolding. Shared endeavors between more expert and less expert participants, without specifying the precise features of communication. Consequently, it allows for variations across situations and cultures.
Benefits associated with children's use of educational computer programs.
Expand children's general knowledge. Encourage diverse language and mergent literacy skills. Allowing child to interact directly with ________, children's sustained attention and interest increase . Produce more elaborate pictures and text, make fewer writing errors, and edit their work much as older children do. Effective in promoting math concepts and skills.
Preschoolers are skilled conversationalists. Provide an example to support this statement.
In face-to-face interaction, they take turns and respond appropriately to their partner's remarks. With age, the number of turns over which children can sustain interaction and their ability to maintain a topic over time increase, but even 2-year-olds converse effectively.
An example of how religion and culture contribute to how quickly children give up certain fantastic ideas.
Jewish children are more likely than their Christian agemates to express disbelief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Having heard at home that Santa is imaginary, they seem to generalize this attitude to other magical figures. And cultural myths about wishing—for example, the custom of making a wish before blowing out birthday candles—probably underlie the conviction of most 3- to 6-year-olds that by wishing, you can sometimes make your desires come true.
Core areas of functioning in which children with autism display deficits.
Limited ability to engage in nonverbal behaviors required for successful social interaction, such as eye gaze, facial expressions, gestures, imitation, and give-and-take. Language was delayed and stereotyped. Used words to echo what others said and to get things he wanted, not to exchange ideas. Engaged in much less make-believe play than other children.
Benefits children derive from gaining an understanding of false belief.
Mind-mindedness Early reading ability Verbal tasks strengthens
Factor that contribute to preschoolers' theory of mind - Make-believe play
Offers a rich context for thinking about the mind. As children act out roles, they often express the thoughts and emotions of the characters they portray and then reason about their implications. These experiences may increase children's awareness that belief influences behavior. who engage in extensive fantasy play or who have imaginary companions—and, thus, are deeply absorbed in creating make-believe characters—are advanced in understanding false belief and other aspects of the mind. The better 3- and 4-year-olds can reason about situations that contradict a real-world state of affairs, the more likely they are to pass false-belief tasks.
overregularization
Overextend grammatical rules to words that are exceptions. For example, saying "I runned fast" instead of "I ran fast"
repetitive style
Provide little information and keep repeating the same questions, regardless of the child's interest: Do you remember the zoo? What did we do at the zoo? Which animals did you see at the zoo?
Strategies for enhancing preschoolers' make-believe play.
Provide sufficient space and play materials. Encourage children's play without controlling it. Offer a variety of both realistic materials and materials without clear functions. Ensure that children have many rich, real-world experiences to inspire positive fantasy play. Help children solve social conflicts constructively.
Yucatec Mayan parents expect young children to be self-sufficient. Provide an example of this.
Rarely converse or play with preschoolers or scaffold their learning. Children imitate adult tasks, parents conclude that they are ready for more responsibility. Assign chores, selecting tasks the child can do with little help so that adult work is not disturbed. If a child cannot do a task, the adult takes over and the child observes, reengaging when able to contribute. Expected to be autonomous and helpful
Criticisms of Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development.
Saying little about how basic motor, perceptual, attention, memory, and problem-solving skills,
What steps can be taken to help improve minorities and children from low-SES homes performance?
Spend time playing before begin testing. Encourage child while the test was in progress.
How can a high-quality preschool curriculum assist in the development of sustained attention?
Teachers provide external aids to support ________. A child might hold a drawing of an ear as a reminder to listen and refrain from interrupting a classmate who is telling a story. Teachers also lead games requiring frequent inhibition and memory for instructions. And they encourage make-believe play, which helps children follow rules and use thought to guide behavior
Factor that contribute to preschoolers' theory of mind- Cognitive abilities
The ability to inhibit inappropriate responses, think flexibly, and plan fosters mastery of false belief. Gains in inhibition are strongly related to mastery of false belief. Because to do well on false-belief tasks, children must suppress an irrelevant response—the tendency to assume that others' knowledge and beliefs are the same as their own.
pragmatics
The practical, social side of language that is concerned with how to engage in effective and appropriate communication with others. Having an older sibling facilitates the acquisition of _________.
dual representation
The ability to view a symbolic object as both an object in its own right and a symbol. Difficulty with dual representation may contribute to 2-year-olds' scale errors—for example, attempts to put on dolls' clothes or sit in a doll-sized chair
conservation
The idea that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes. At snack time, Sammy and Priti had identical boxes of raisins, but when Priti spread her raisins out on the table, Sammy was convinced that she had more.
Factor that contribute to preschoolers' theory of mind - Language
The prefrontal cortex seems to play a crucial role. Reasoned about others' beliefs revealed that children who pass false-belief tasks (as opposed to those who fail) Left-prefrontal ERP pattern typically appears when adults reason verbally about mental concepts. Requires the ability to reflect on thoughts, which is greatly aided by ________. Predicts preschoolers' grasp of false belief. Children who spontaneously use, or who are trained to use, complex sentences with mental-state words are especially likely to pass false-belief tasks. The Quechua people of the Peruvian highlands refer to mental states such as "think" and "believe" indirectly, because their language lacks mental-state terms. Quechua children have difficulty with false-belief tasks for years after children in industrialized nations have mastered them. Chinese languages have verb markers that can label the word believe as decidedly false. When adults use those markers in false-belief tasks, Chinese preschoolers perform better.
Some neo-Piagetian theorists combine Piaget's stage concept with the information-processing emphasis on task-specific change. Briefly describe this viewpoint.
They believe that Piaget's strict stage definition must be transformed into a less tightly knit concept, one in which a related set of competencies develops over an extended period, depending on brain development and specific experiences. These investigators point to findings indicating that as long as the complexity of tasks and children's exposure to them are carefully controlled, children approach those tasks in similar, stage-consistent ways. For example, in drawing pictures, preschoolers depict objects separately, ignoring their spatial arrangement. In understanding stories, they grasp a single story line but have trouble with a main plot plus one or more subplots. This flexible stage notion recognizes the unique qualities of early childhood thinking. At the same time, it provides a better account of why, as Leslie put it, "Preschoolers' minds are such a blend of logic, fantasy, and faulty reasoning.
True or False: Preschoolers exposed to poor-quality child care score lower on measures of cognitive and social skills and display more behavior problems.
True Preschoolers exposed to poor-quality child care score lower on measures of cognitive and social skills and display more behavior problems.
True or False: Researchers agree that autism stems from abnormal brain functioning, usually due to genetic or prenatal environmental causes.
True Researchers agree that autism stems from abnormal brain functioning, usually due to genetic or prenatal environmental causes.
True or False: By the end of the preschool years, children use most of the grammatical constructions of their language competently, with the exception of passive expressions.
True By the end of the preschool years, children use most of the grammatical constructions of their language competently, with the exception of passive expressions.
True or False: English-speaking children show wide variability in the sequence in which they master grammatical markers.
True or False: All English-speaking children master these grammatical markers in a regular sequence, starting with those that involve the simplest meanings and structures (Brown, 1973; de Villiers & de Villiers, 1973). For example, children master the plural form -s before they learn tenses of the verb to be.
peer collaboration
Vygotskian classrooms emphasize this and assisted discovery, in which teachers guide children's learning. Children of varying abilities and skill levels work together.
syntactic bootstrapping
When children figure out the meaning of a word by observing how it is used in the structure of a sentence.
How does culture contribute to the fast mapping process?
Young children learning Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—languages in which nouns are often omitted from adults' sentences, while verbs are stressed—acquire verbs more readily than their English-speaking agemates. Besides increased exposure to verbs, Chinese-speaking children hear a greater variety of verbs denoting physical actions, which are easiest to master—for example, several verbs for carry, each referring to a different way of carrying, such as on one's back, in one's arms, or with one's hands.
Between 4 and 8 years of age, as familiarity with physical events and principles increases, children's magical beliefs (increase / decline)
decline
Styles adults use for promoting children's autobiographical narratives, and note which style leads to better memory of events over time.
elaborative style repetitive style