HDFS Cognitive development
Which type of child care setting results in higher test scores and why?
Child-care centers, because these centers include materials, conversations, and lessons related to emergent literacy and emergent mathematics
Who held that children's first attempt to speak are efforts to establish and maintain social contact?
Vygotsky
The basic rules concerning word order are
syntax
What reasons did Piaget give for the fact that children can't grasp the concept of conservation?
1. preoperational children are seduced by appearance 2. their thinking is one-dimensional (centration) 3. does not recognize that operations are reversible
On average, how many new words do children learn per day in early childhood?
10
How many states offer preK programs?
38
What is the Continuous Performance Task?
A classic measure of attention and impulsivity; children are instructed to push a button when a specific object appears on a computer screen
Who expanded Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and the idea of the ZPD to include guided participation, and what is guided participation?
Barbara Rogoff, guided participation is the varied ways children learn their society's values and practices through participation in family and community activities
How do individual differences in the CPT show that the child's environment and experience with parents are also important?
Children from stimulating homes with warm, responsive parents gain control of their attention earlier than children do from less supportive homes. One reason for this may be that frequent conversations with parents provide young children with guided opportunities to observe and practice concentration and self-regulation
The fact that children who are never exposed to any language do not develop language supports the ideas of
John Watson and B.F. Skinner
The fact that all people have the capacity to develop language, and that they do so in a predictable sequence, supports the ideas of
Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker
What was Piaget's view on parents/teachers influence on children becoming logical thinkers?
Parents and teachers should not "push" children into becoming logical thinkers - it is a natural outgrowth of everyday opportunities to observe and manipulate everyday objects and materials and children develop logical thinking through their own explorations and actions
Who believed that peers might promote cognitive development in ways that adults cannot?
Piaget
Who held that symbolic representation, seen in language and in play, is the most significant cognitive development during the preschool years?
Piaget
What was the difference between Piaget's idea of language and Vygotsky's ideas of language?
Piaget believed thought came before language, and Vygotsky believed that language and thought develop together
What is inner speech and how does it help children?
Self-directed talk that has become internalized; it facilitates problem solving, recollection, planning, and organizing
What are the three steps in memory processing?
Sensory memory, working memory, then long term memory
Who is Judy Deloache and what did she do?
She extended and expanded Piaget's early work related to symbols and their referents. She did the Big Terry and Little Terry experiment, proving that younger children do not have the representational insight that there is a relation between a symbol and a referent
Who is Judy Dunn and how is she important in the concept of theory of mind?
She studied disobedience and teasing of siblings - she proposed that interactions between siblings may be particularly fertile ground for the development of social understanding and the theory of mind
What did Deloache's observations suggest?
That children only gradually develop an understanding that entities can stand for something other than themselves, and they do not experience the discrete qualitative shift that Piaget proposed
Who believed that cognitive development was continuous, indistinct stages, and the result of collaboration in a particular sociocultural setting?
Vygostky
Who held that children learn their culture's "intellectual tools" - language, number systems, reading and writing, religion and science, as well as ways to remember and plan - through social interaction in the ZPD?
Vygotsky
what is theory of mind?
a child's ability to attribute mental states - beliefs, intents, desires, knowledge - to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions are different from one's own.
What is the digit span task?
a classic test of working memory - a research procedure in which people are asked to repeat in order a series of rapidly presented items
What is a concept, and how does it help a child?
a mental representation or category - a general notion that applies to many individual cases. it helps a child simplify, sort, and group the many things in the environment
What is generic memory?
a type of long term memory, begins at about age 2; a script or general outline of what happens when, based on experience. (i.e. what to do when going to school or the store). helps children to know what to expect and how to behave in common situations
What is episodic memory?
a type of long-term memory; recall of a particular incident at a specific time and place
when do children recognize that different people who see or hear the same thing may remember it differently?
about age 6
How did Vygotsky see the child?
as embedded in a social context and focused on what she/he could do with the assistance of adults or older, more skilled children
What is autobiographical memory?
begins at about age 4, a recall of individual episodes that are personally meaningful and may last for decades. become part of the child's developing self-concept or self-image
a theory of mind seems to develop from
both maturation and experience with other people
How is impulsivity measure in the CPT?
by how often the child incorrectly pushes the button when another object is on the screen
what is significant about the telegraphic speech stage?
children are not repeating or imitating phrases but are applying some of the basic rules of their particular language
Why did Piaget believe parents should not accelerate logical thinking?
he believed that efforts to teach logical operations to young children would result in empty verbalizations and rote memorization without true understanding. children might mimic what adults say without fundamentally understanding the task
What is the difference in language learning between high-income and low-income families?
high-income= better vocabulary = talk more to their children and often follow childrens interest rather than dictating the subject
When it comes to styles of parent-child conversations, what is the difference between and highly elaborative style and a repetitive style, and which is better?
highly elaborative style introduces new info, often in the form of a leading question while repetitive style tend to ask the same question over and over, tell the child what happened, or change the subject if the child doesn't respond and correct the child. Repetitive style does not engage the child and only asks for the parents memory of the event; elaborative is better because it elicits more detailed and better organized narratives at age three and better memories of events at ages five and 6.
When it comes to emergent literacy, what can a typical three yo do?
hold a book and turn pages, listens when read to, understands the pictures in books, can name characters and features, and perhaps recognize a few letters
what is the head start program?
it is a comprehensive preschool program for economically disadvantaged children, launched in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. provides education, medical and dental care, nutritious meals, and coping. serves more than 900,000 children nationwide
What is deferred imitation and what did Jean Piaget believe about it?
it is reproducing a series of actions seen at an earlier time, and he believed it's a sign that a child is moving from actions to symbols
What are some examples of guided participation?
listening to adults talk, listening to family stories or their culture's mythology, playing traditional games, when adults praise, shame, or laugh about a child's behavior, "known-answer questions (i.e. where is your bellybutton?)
what are some mathematical concepts children learn before first grade?
magnitude ("a lot," "more"), numbers, counting, addition and subtraction
when do research findings suggest that children begin developing a theory of mind?
on the border between infancy and early childhood
How many children five years of age or younger attend child-care centers?
one third
According to the Study of Early Child Care, what percentage of child care in the US is excellent?
only 10 percent
what can adults do to promote literacy?
provide more words of affirmation in conversation and regularly read to and read with young children
what is scaffolding?
providing learning opportunities, materials, hints, and clues when a child has difficulty with a task (i.e. training wheels on a bike)
when it comes to emergent literacy, what can a typical 4 yo do?
recite the alphabet and recognize some letters, relate stories to real life, enjoy rhymes and word play, and pretend-write in play
What are three examples of how the child cannot think logically yet?
reversibility - understanding that an item that has been changed can be returned to its original state by reversing the process classification - the ability to divide or sort objects into different sets and subsets, and to consider their inter-relationships (i.e. poodle is a mammal AND a dog) conservation - the understanding that characteristics of objects such as mass and volume do not change despite changes in appearance or form when nothing is added or taken away
what is egocentrism?
self-centeredness, the child's inability to see other peoples viewpoints (three mountain task)
What is working memory?
sensory memory info is transferred to here. sometimes referred to as short-term memory - conscious, short-term representations of what a person is actively thinking about at a given time. lasts at most a few minutes and either fades or turns into long term memory
What is telegraphic speech and when does it occur?
simple, meaningful, two-word utterances spoken by young children; between about 18 and 36 months
In what two ways is the quality of child-care settings measured?
structural quality - group size, child-adult ratios, caregiver education and training and process quality - an assessment of childrens interactions and experiences in child care settings
What do language and pretend play demonstrate for the preoperational child?
that they are a symbolic thinker
what is animism?
the belief that inanimate objects are alive and have thoughts, feelings, and motives like humans
What is sensory memory?
the entryway to memory - it is a subconscious process of picking up sensory information - sights, sounds, smells, touch, from the environment
What is the zone of proximal development?
the gap between what a child can do alone and what a child can do with assistance. it is made up of skills, ideas, and understandings that are just beyond the child's reach but can do with support or assistance from others
What is semantics?
the meaning of words and sentences, or the content of speech, in addition to learning how their culture uses concepts to organize their perceptions of the world.
What did Jean Piaget recognize as the second stage of cognitive development?
the preoperational period, from age 2-7, in which children acquire a mental storehouse of images and symbols, especially spoken and written words
What is pragmatics?
the social uses and conventions of language
when it comes to emergent literacy, what can a typical 5 yo do?
track the print when being read a simple, familiar book, spontaneously talks about the content of a story and info book, can identify all and write most letters, recognizes and can spell some simple words but mostly uses invented spellings when writing
What is long term memory?
transferred from working memory. the collection of info that is mentally encoded and stored; it is believed to have potentially unlimited capacity and no time limits. access to long term memory may take the form of recall or recognition
Why do some early memories last while others fade?
uniqueness of the event, personal participation, talking to a parent or another adult about an event
In learning language, what does a child's native language affect?
what sounds they can hear and produce, what underlying rules or grammar they use to put words together, and the social rules they apply in communicating
What is fast-mapping?
when a child picks up a word they have only heard a few times
What is overregulation, and why is it significant?
when children mistakenly apply regular grammatical rules to irregular cases (i.e. goed, taked). it is a sign that children are learning the underlying structure of their language and not just mimicking what they hear
What was the fault in Piaget's understanding of logical thinking in children?
young children understand more than Piaget credited them for and preschoolers aren't as consistently deceived by appearance as Piaget suggested