psych exam 2

Piaget's Theory: the pre-operational stage

-2-7 -Representations, but not yet operations; young children are not capable of operations—mental representations of actions that obey logical rules. Rather, their thinking is rigid, limited to one aspect of a situation at a time, and strongly influenced by the way things appear at the moment

Decision making

-Additional evidence confirms that in decision-making context , adolescence are far more enticed than adults or by the possibility of immediate reward more willing to take risks and less likely to avoid potential losses

Changes in arousal

-Adolescents go to bed much later than they did as children. Yet they need almost as much sleep as they did in middle childhood which is about 9 hours -Sleep deprived adolescents display declines in executive function in both the cognitive and emotional self regulation. As a result, they are more likely to achieve less well in school; Suffer from anxiety, irritability, and depressed mood; And engaging high risk behaviors that result in motor vehicle collisions and arrests for delinquency -Later school start times ease but do not eliminate sleep loss

Interventions for learned-helpless children

-An intervention called Attribution retaining encourages learned helpless children to believe that they can overcome failure by exerting more effort and using more effective strategies. Children are given tasks difficult enough that they will experience some failure, followed by repeated feedback that helps them revise their attributions such as you can do it if you try harder. After they succeed, children are given process praise so that they attribute their success to both effort and effective strategies, not chance -Another approach is to encourage low effort students to focus on mastering a task for its own sake, not on grades, and on individual improvement, not on comparisons with classmates. Instruction in effective strategies and self regulation is also vital, to compensate for development loss in this area and to ensure that renewed effort pays off -Attribution retaining is best begun early, before children's views of themselves become hard to change

Piaget's formal operational stage

-Around age 11 young people enter into the formal operational stage, in which they develop the capacity for abstract, systematic, scientific thinking -They can operate on operations and they come up with new, more general logical rules through internal reflection

Intelligence

-Around age 6, IQ becomes more stable than it was in earlier ages, and it correlate's moderately with academic achievement, typically around .50 to .60. And children with higher IQs or more likely to attain higher levels of education and enter more prestigious occupations in adulthood -Virtually all intelligence tests provide an overall score, which represents general intelligence, or reasoning ability, along with an array of separate scores measuring specific mental abilities. But intelligence is a collection of many capabilities, not all of which are included on currently available tests -Alfred Binet's intelligence test evaluates general intelligence but it also assesses five intellectual factors: general knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual spatial processing, working memory, and basic information processing -Sternberg's triarchic theory of successful intelligence identifies 3 broad interacting intelligences: analytic intelligence, creative intelligence, practical intelligence. Intelligent behavior involves balancing all three intelligence to achieve success in life according to one's personal goals and the requirements of one's cultural community. Analytical intelligence consists of the information processing skills that underlie all intelligent acts: executive function, strategic thinking, knowledge acquisition, and cognitive self regulation. People who are creative think more skillfully than others when faced with novelty. Intelligence is a practical, goal oriented activity aimed at adapting to, shaping, or selecting environments -According to Sternberg, intelligence tests, devised to predict achievement school, do not capture the intellectual strength that many children acquire through informal learning experiences in their cultural communities

Self esteem: middle childhood

-As children enter school and receive much more feedback about how well they perform compared with their peers, self-esteem differentiates and also adjust to a more realistic level -To study school age children self-esteem, researchers asked them to indicate the extent to which statements such as I'm good at reading or I'm usually the one chosen for games are true of themselves. By age 6 to 7, children in diverse western cultures have formed at least 4 broad self evaluations: academic competence, social competence comma's physical athletic competence comma and physical appearance. Within these or more refined categories that become increasingly distinct with age -Although individual differences exist, during childhood and adolescence, perceived physical appearance correlates more strongly with overall self worth than does any other self esteem factor -Emphasis on appearance in the media, by parents and peers, and in society has major implications for young people's overall satisfaction with themselves -Self esteem generally remains high during elementary school but becomes more realistic and nuanced as children evaluate themselves in various areas -These changes occur as children receive more competence related feedback, as their performances are increasingly judged in relation to those of others, and as they become cognitively capable of social comparison -Academic self esteem predicts how important, useful, enjoyable children judge school subjects to become a willingness to try hard, achievement, and eventual career choice

Friendships

-As preschoolers interact, first friendships form that serve as important contacts for emotional and social development. Friendship does not yet have a long-term, enduring quality based on mutual trust therefore friendships are fluid-ish -In one study, nearly 1/3 mentioned the same best friends-- the child they like to play with the most-- a year later -Children with a mutual friendship or better adjusted and more socially competent. Children entering kindergarten who have friends in their class or who readily make new friends adjust to school more favorably. Perhaps the company of friends serves as a secure base from which to develop new relationships, enhancing children's feelings of comfort in the new classroom -Socially competent preschoolers are more motivated and persistent, exceeding their less socially skilled peers in an academic performance in kindergarten and the early school grades. Because social maturity in early childhood contributes to academic performance, readiness for kindergarten must be assessed in terms of not only academic skills but also social skills -Young children's positive peer interactions occur most often in unstructured situations such as free play, making it important for preschools and kindergartens to provide space, time, materials, an adult scaffolding to support child directed activities -In studies, teacher's sensitivity and emotional support were strong predictors of children's social competence, both during preschool an in a follow-up after kindergarten entry

Early childhood: The self (self-concept)

-As self-awareness strengthens, preschoolers focus more intently on qualities that make the self unique. They begin to develop a self-concept, the set of attributes, abilities, attitudes, and values that an individual believes defines who he or she is - Preschooler self-concepts consist largely of observable characteristics, such as their name, physical appearance, possessions, and everyday behaviors ("My name's Tommy. I am 4. I have red hair. I have a new lego set") -By age 3 1/2, children also describe themselves in terms of typical emotions and attitudes ("I don't like scary movies"; "I am happy when I play with my friends") suggesting a beginning understanding of their unique physiological characteristics. And by age 5, children's degree of agreement with such statements coincides with maternal reports of their personality traits, indicating that or preschoolers have a sense of their own timidity, agreeableness, and positive or negative effect -A warm, sensitive parent child relationship fosters a more positive, coherent early self-concept -By the end of the preschool years, children can set aside their current state of mind and take a future perspective

Self-conscious emotions

-As their self concepts developed, preschoolers become increasingly sensitive to praise and blame or the to the possibility of such feedback. They more often experienced self-conscious emotions-- feelings that involve injury to or enhancement of their sense of self -Because preschoolers are still developing standards of excellence and conduct, they depend on the messages of parents, teachers, and others who matter to them to know when to feel proud, ashamed, or guilty, after viewing adult expectations as obligatory rules -When parents repeatedly calling on the worth of the child in her performance ("That's a bad job! I thought you were a good girl"), children experience self conscious emotions intensely-- more shame after failure, more pride after success. In contrast, when parents focus on how to improve performance ("try doing it this way"), they induce moderate, more adaptive levels of shame and pride and greater persistence on difficult tasks -Guilt helps children resist harmful impulses, and it motivates a misbehaving child to repair the damage and behave more considerably. But overwhelming guilt is linked to depressive symptoms as early as 3

make-believe play is less self-centered

-At first, make-believe is directed toward the self—for example, Dwayne pretends to feed only himself. Soon, children direct pretend objects, as when a child feeds a doll -Early in age 3, they become detached participants, making a doll feed itself or pushing a button to launch a rocket

Autobiographical memory (everyday memories)

-Autobiographical memory is representations of personally meaningful, one-time events. As preschoolers cognitive in 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 -Adults use two styles to elicit children's auto biographical narratives. The first style is elaborative style, they followed the child's lead, asked varied questions, add information to the child statements, and volunteered their own recollections and evaluations of events, assisting the child in weaving together a story. The second type is repetitive style, they provide a little information and keep repeating the same questions. Elaborative style parents scaffold the autobiographical memories of their young children, who produce more organized and detailed personal stories when followed up later in childhood and adolescence

Concrete operational thought: classification

-Between ages 7 and 10, children pass Piaget's class inclusion problem. This indicates that they are more aware of classification hierarchies (can focus on relations between a general classification and more specific classifications at the same time) and can focus on relations between a general category into specific categories at same time on three relations at once -They are better able to inhibit their habitual strategy of perceptually comparing the two specific categories in favor of relating each specific category to its less obvious general category

Brain development

-Brain imaging research reveals continued pruning of unused synapses in the cerebral cortex, especially the prefrontal cortex. Growth in myelination of stimulated neural fibers accelerate, further strengthening connections among various brain regions -fMRI evidence reveals that adolescence recruit the prefrontal cortex's network of connections with other brain areas less effectively than adults do. Because the prefrontal cognitive control network still requires fine tuning, teenager's performance on task requiring inhibition, planning, and delay of gratification is not yet fully mature -Changes in the emotional/social network also increase adolescents sensitivity to social stimuli, making them highly reactive to peer influence and evaluation -Because the cognitive control network is not yet functioning optimally, most teenagers find it especially difficult to manage these powerful feelings and impulses. This imbalance contributes to teenagers unchecked drive for novel experiences, including drug taking come reckless driver income of unprotected sex, and delinquent activity

Piagetian classroom

-Children are encouraged to discover for themselves through spontaneous interaction with the environment -teachers provide a rich variety of activities designed to promote exploration, including art, puzzles, table games, dress up clothing, building blocks, books, measuring tools, natural science tasks, and musical instruments -Teachers introduced 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 interest or readiness -teachers must plan activities for individual children in small groups, not just for the whole class

Mastery oriented attributions vs learned helplessness

-Children who are high in academic self esteem and motivation make mastery oriented attributions-- occur crediting their success to ability-- a characteristic they can improve through trying hard and can count on when faced with new challenges. And they attribute failure to factors that can be changed or controlled, such as insufficient effort or a difficult task -In contrast, children who developed learned helplessness attribute their failures, not their successes, to ability. When they succeed, they conclude that external factors, such as luck, are responsible. Unlike their mastery oriented counterparts, they believe that abilities fixed and cannot be improved by trying hard -Children's attributions affect their goals. Mastery oriented children seek information on how best to increase their ability through effort. Hence, their performances improve overtime. In contrast, learned helpless children focus on obtaining positive and avoiding negative evaluations of their fragile sense of ability. Gradually, their ability ceases to predict how well they do. -In one study, the more 4th to 6th graders held self critical attributions, the lower they rated their competence, the less they knew about effective study strategies, the more they avoided challenge, and the poor their academic performance. Because learned helpless children fail to connect effort with success, they do not develop the metacognitive and self regulatory skills necessary for high achievement. Lack of effective learning strategies, reduced persistence, and a sense of loss of control sustained one another in a vicious cycle

Influences on achievement attributions

-Children with a learned helplessness style often have parents who believe that their child is not very capable and must work harder than others to succeed. When the child fails, the parent might say "you can't do that, can you it's OK if you quit" -Similarly, students with unsupportive teachers often regard their performance as externally controlled, withdraw from learning activities, decline an achievement, and come to doubt their ability -Despite their higher achievement, girls more often than boys attribute their performance to lack of ability. When girls do not do well, they tend to receive messages from teachers and parents that their ability is at fault, in negative stereotypes undermined their interest and effort

Knowledge and memory

-During middle childhood, children's general knowledge base, or semantic memory, grows larger and becomes organized into increasingly elaborate, hierarchical structured networks -To investigate this idea, researchers classified 4th graders as either experts or novices in knowledge of soccer and then gave both groups lists of soccer and non soccer items to learn. Experts remembered far more items on the soccer list than novices. And during recall the experts listing of items was better organized, as indicated by clustering of items into categories -Children who are expert in an area are usually highly motivated. As a result, they not only acquire knowledge more quickly but also actively used what they know to add more. In contrast, academically unsuccessful children fail to ask how previously stored information can clarify new material create this, in turn, interferes with the development of a broad knowledge base

Theory of mind (middle childhhod)

-During middle childhood, children's theory of mind ("metacognition"), or set of ideas about mental activities, becomes more elaborate and refined -Children's improved ability to reflect on their own mental life is another reason that they're thinking advances. Older children regard the mind as an active, constructive agent that selects and transforms information. They have a much better understanding of cognitive processes in the impact of psychological factors in performance -This grasp of inference enables knowledge of false belief to expand. In several studies, researchers told children complex stories involving 1 characters belief about a second characters believe. Then the children answered questions about what the first character thought the second character would do. By age 6 to 7, children were aware that people form beliefs about other people's beliefs and that these second order beliefs can be wrong (false beliefs) -Appreciation of second order false belief enables children to pinpoint the reasons that another person arrived at a certain belief -Recursive thought is to reason simultaneously about what two or more people are thinking

Self-concept: middle childhood

-During the school years, children find their self concept, organizing their observations of behaviors and internal states into general dispositions -They start to incorporate positive and negative traits. Older school age children are far less likely than younger children to describe themselves in extreme, all or nothing ways -These evaluative self descriptions result from school age children's frequent social comparisons which are judgments of their appearance, abilities, and behavior in relation to those of others -Sociologist George Herbert Mead proposed that a well organized psychological self emerges when children adopt A view of the self that resembles others attitudes toward the child. Mead's ideas indicate that perspective taking skills in particular, an improved ability to infer what other people are thinking and to distinguish those viewpoints from one zone are crucial for developing a self concept based on personality traits -Children also look to more people beyond the family for information about themselves as they enter a wider range of settings and school and community. And self descriptions now frequently include references to social groups. As children move into adolescence, although parents and other adults remain influential, self concept is increasingly vested in feedback from close friends

mindfulness training

-Executive function can also be enhanced indirectly, by increasing children's participation in activities --such as exercise-- known to promote it. Another indirect method attracting growing interest is mindfulness training, which-- similar to meditation-- in yoga based experiences for adults-- encourages children to focus attention on their current thoughts, feelings, and sensations, without judging them -Mindfulness training leads to gains and executive function, school grades, pro social behavior, and positive peer relations in school age children -The sustained attention and reflection that mindfulness requires seems to help children avoid snap judgments, distracting thoughts and emotions, and impulsive behavior

Understanding emotions

-Gains in representation, language, in self concept support emotional development in early childhood -preschoolers gain in emotional understanding, becoming better able to talk about feelings into respond appropriately to others emotional signals -By age 4 to 5, children correctly judge the causes of many basic emotions. Preschoolers explanations tend to emphasize external factors over internal factors, a balance that changes with age. Preschoolers are good at inferring how others were feeling based on their behavior -Preschoolers have an impressive ability to interpret, predict, and change others feelings -Preschoolers have difficulty interpreting situations that offer conflicting cues about how a person is feeling (happy child with broken bike— 4 to 5 "hes happy because he likes to ride his bike"). Older children more often reconciled the two cues ("he's happy because his dad will fix his bike"). This capacity requires improved executive function-- retaining in working memory 2 conflicting sources of information while drawing on one's knowledge base and integrate them -The more parents label and explain emotions and expressed warmth when conversing with preschoolers, the more "emotion words" children use and the better developed their emotional understanding is -In one study, mothers who explained emotions and negotiated and compromise during conflicts with their 2 1/2 year old had children who, at 3, were advanced in emotional understanding and used similar strategies to resolve disagreements -As early as 3 to 5 years of age talking about emotions is related to friendly, considerate behavior, constructive responses to disputes with age mates, and perspective-taking ability. And as children learn about emotion from interacting with adults, they engage in more emotion talk with age mates and siblings

Emotional Development

-Higher pubertal hormone levels are linked to greater moodiness, but only modestly so -Adolescents reported less favorable moods than school age children in adults. But negative moods were linked to a greater number of negative life events, such as difficulties with parents, disciplinary actions at school, in breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Negative events increased steadily from childhood to adolescence, and teenagers also reacted to them with greater emotion than children -High points of adolescent's day were time spent with peers and in self chosen leisure activities. Low points tended to occur in adults structured settings class, job, and religious services -Going out with friends in romantic partners increases so dramatically during adolescence that it becomes a cultural script for what is supposed to happen

Hypothetico-deductive reasoning

-Hypothetico-deductive reasoning: when faced with a problem, they start with a hypothesis, or prediction about variables that might affect an outcome, from which they deduce logical, testable inferences. Then they systematically isolate and combine variables to see which of these inferences are confirmed in the real world -Notice how this form of problem solving begins with possibility and proceeds to reality. In contrast, concrete operational children start with reality with the most obvious predictions about a situation -Adolescence performance on Piaget's famous pendulum problem illustrates this approach. Suppose we present several school age children and adolescents with strings of different lengths, objects of different weights to attach to the strings, and a bar from which to hang the strings. Then we ask each of them to figure out what influences the speed with which a pendulum swings through its arc. Formal operational adolescences hypothesize that 4 variables might be influential: the length of the string, the weight of the object hung on it, how high the object is raised before it is released, and how forcefully the object is pushed. By varying one factor at a time while holding the other three constant, they test each variable separately and, if necessary, also in combination. Eventually they discover that only one string length makes a difference

Education of U.S. children

-In International Studies of reading, mathematics, and science achievement, young people in China, Korea, in Japan are consistently top performers. Among Western nations, Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland are also in the top tier. But US students typically perform at or below the international averages -According to international comparisons, instruction in the United States is less challenging, more focused on absorbing facts, and less focused on high level reasoning and critical thinking than in other countries -A growing number of experts believe that US educational policies directed by getting students to meet targeted goals on achievement tests by holding schools and teachers accountable for students performance have contributed to these trends -Furthermore, countries with large socioeconomic inequality's such as the US rank lower and achievement, in part because low SES children tend to live in less favorable family and neighborhood contexts

preschool, kindergarten, and childcare

-In child centered programs, teachers provide activities from which children select, and much learning takes place through play. In contrast, academic programs, teachers structure children's learning, teaching letters, numbers, shapes, colors, and other academic skills through formal lessons, often using repetition and drill -Despite evidence that formal academic training undermines young children's motivation in emotional well-being, early childhood teachers have felt increased pressure to take this approach. Preschoolers and kindergartners who spend much time in large group, teacher-directed academic instruction and completing worksheets-- as opposed to being actively engaged in learning centers by warm, responsive teachers-- display more stress behaviors, have less confidence in their abilities, prefer less challenging tasks, and are less advanced in motor, academic, language, and social skills at the end of the school year

Memory for everyday experiences

-In remembering everyday experiences (episodic memory; memories/stories), you recall information in context-- linked to a particular time, place, or person -In remembering lists, you recall isolated pieces of information removed from the context in which it was first learned that has become part of your general knowledge base. Researchers called this type of memory semantic memory (facts, numbers) -Like adults, preschoolers remember familiar, repeated events in terms of scripts, general descriptions of what occurs in when it occurs in a particular situation. Young children's scripts began as a structure of main acts. With age, scripts become more elaborate -Scripts help children organize and interpret routine experiences. Once formed, scripts can be used to predict what will happen in the future. Children rely on scripts in make believe play and win listening to and telling stories. Scripts also support children's earliest efforts at planning by helping them represent sequences of actions that lead to desired goals (scripts can also overpower real memory which could create false memories)

Explaining individual and group differences in IQ

-In trying to explain differences, researchers have compared the IQ scores of ethnic an SES groups. American black children in adolescence score, on average, 10 to 12 IQ points below American white children. The gap between middle and low SES children which is about 9 points accounts for some of the ethnic differences in IQ, but not all -Many researchers have claimed that heredity is largely responsible for individual, ethnic, and SES variations in intelligence. The most powerful evidence on the heritability of IQ involves twin comparisons. The IQ scores of identical Twins or more similar than those of fraternal Twins. On the basis of this and other kinship evidence, researchers estimate that about half the differences in IQ among and can be traced to their genetic makeup -However that heritabilities risk overestimating genetic influences and underestimating environmental influences -Although these measures offer convincing evidence that genes contribute to IQ, disagreement persists over how large a role heredity plays. Heritability estimates do not reveal the complex processes through which genes and experiences influence intelligence as children develop

Information processing

-Information processing focuses on cognitive operations and mental strategies that children use to transform stimuli flowing into their mental systems -consists of executive function, theory of mind, and memory

Emotional self-regulation

-Language, along with preschooler's growing understanding of the causes and consequences of emotion, contributes to gains in emotional self regulation (ability to regulate negative emotions). By age 3 to 4, children verbalize a variety of strategies for alleviating negative emotion that they tailored to specific situations -As children use strategies, emotional outbursts decline -Gains an executive function-- in particular, inhibition, flexible shifting of attention, in manipulating information in working memory-- contribute greatly to managing emotion in early childhood. 3 year olds who can distract themselves when upset and focus on how to handle their feelings tend to become cooperative school age children with few problem behaviors -By watching parents manage emotion, children learn strategies for regulating their own. Parents who are in tune with their own emotional experiences tend to be supportive with their preschoolers, offering suggestions and explanations of emotion regulation strategies that strengthened children's capacity to handle stress. In contrast, when parents rarely expressed positive emotion, dismissed children's feelings as unimportant, and failed to control their own anger, children's emotion management and physiological adjustments suffer -Adult-child conversations that prepare children for difficult experiences by discussing what to expect and ways to handle anxiety also foster emotional self regulation

IQ test underestimate children's abilities

-Many experts acknowledge that IQ scores can underestimate the intelligence of children from ethnic minority groups -Dynamic assessment, an innovation consistent with Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, the adult introduces purposeful teaching into the testing situation to find out what the child can attain with social support -Research shows that children's receptivity to teaching and capacity to transfer what they have learned to novel problems contribute substantially to gains in test performance. In one study, first graders diverse in SES an ethnicity participated in dynamic assessment in which they were asked to solve a series of unfamiliar math questions that increased in difficulty. When a child could not solve an equation, an adult provided increasingly explicit teaching until the child either succeeded or still had trouble, in which case the session ended. Dynamic assessment seemed to evoke skills and understandings that children readily applied to a very different in demanding type of math

IQ findings

-Many researchers argue that IQ scores are affected by specific information acquired as part of majority culture upbringing. Knowledge affects ability to reason affectively. In one study, researchers assess black-and-white Community School students familiarity with vocabulary taken from items on an intelligence test. When verbal comprehension, similarities, and analogies items depended on words that the white students knew better, the whites scored higher than the Blacks. When the same types of items involved words that the two groups knew equally well, the two groups did not differ -Prior knowledge, not reasoning ability, fully explained ethnic differences in performance -Among children, adolescent, and adults alike, playing video games that require fast responding in mental rotation of visual images increases success on spatial test items. Low income minority children may lack the opportunities to use games in objects that promote certain intellectual skills -Children who have been in school longer score higher in verbal intelligence-- a difference that increases as the children advance further into school. Taken together, these findings indicate that children's exposure to knowledge and ways of thinking valued in the classroom has a sizable impact on their intelligence test performance -Stereotype threat is the fear of being judged on the basis of a negative stereotype and can trigger anxiety that interferes with performance. Mounting evidence confirms that stereotype threat undermines test taking in children and adults. For example, researchers gave African-American, Hispanic American, in European American 6 to 10 year olds verbal tasks. Some children were told that the tasks were "not a test". Others were told that they were "a test of how good children are at school problems" a statement designed to induce stereotype threat and that ethnic minority children. Among children who were aware of ethnic stereotypes, African Americans and Hispanic performed far worse in the test condition then in the not a test condition

Memory strategies

-Memory strategies are deliberate mental activities we use to store and retain information. As attention improves so do memory strategies -Rehearsal is repeating the information to yourself (type of memory strategy) -Another common strategy is organization-- grouping related items together, an approach that greatly improves recall -By the end of middle childhood, children start to use elaboration--creating relationship, or shared meaning, between two or more pieces of information that do not belong to the same category -Because organization and elaboration combine items into meaningful chunks, they permit children to hold on to much more information and, as a result, further expand working memory. In addition, when children link a new item to information they already know, they can retrieve it easily by thinking of other items associated with it

Types of play (peer sociability)

-Mildred Parten concluded that social development proceeds in a three step sequence. It begins with non-social activity unoccupied, onlooker behavior and solitary play. Then it shifts to parallel play, in which a child plays near other children with similar materials but does not try to influence their behavior. At the highest level are 2 forms of true social interaction. In associative play, children engage in separate activities but exchange toys and comment on one another's behavior. Finally, in cooperative play, a more advanced type of interaction, children Orient toward a common goal, such as acting out a make-believe theme -Longitudinal evidence indicates all types coexist in early childhood. When researchers observed free play periods in preschools, they found that girls participated more in sociodramatic play, whereas boys participated in more friendly, vigorous interactions called rough and tumble play

Limitations of concrete operational thought

-One important limitation is children think in an organized, logical fashion only when dealing with concrete information they can perceive directly. Their mental operations work poorly with abstract ideas once that or not apparent in the real world -That logical thought is at first tied to immediate situations helps account for a special feature of concrete operational reasoning: children master concrete operational test step by step -This continuum of acquisition( or gradual mastery) of logical concepts is another indication of the limitations of concrete operational thinking because Piaget said that our children acquire the same skills at the same time in stages rather than different children can acquire these skills at different times -In village societies, conservation is often delayed. Among the Hausa of Nigeria, who live in small agricultural settlements and rarely send their children to school, even basic conservation tasks are not understood until age 11 or later. This suggests that participating in relevant everyday activities helps children master conservation in other Piagetian problems. When children of the same age are tested, those who have been in school longer do better on transitive interference problems

Consequences of adolescent cognitive changes

-Piaget believed that a new form of egocentrism arises, in which adolescents again have difficulty distinguishing their own and others perspectives. Piaget's followers suggest that two distorted images of the relation between self and other appear. -The first is called the imaginary audience, adolescents believe that they are the focus of everyone else's attention and concern. As a result, they become extremely self conscious. The imaginary audience helps explain why adolescents spend long hours inspecting every detail of their appearance and why they are so sensitive to public criticism. A critical remark from a parent or teacher can be mortifying -A second cognitive distortion is the personal fable. Certain that others are observing and thinking about them, teenagers develop an inflated opinion of their own importance-- a feeling that they are special and unique. Many adolescents view themselves as reaching great Heights of omnipotence and also sinking to unusual depths of despair experiences that others cannot possibly understand -Although imaginary audience and personal fable ideation is common in adolescence, these distorted visions of the self do not result from egocentrism, as Piaget suggested. Rather, they are partly an outgrowth of advances in perspective taking, which caused young teenagers to be more concerned with what others think

Make-believe play

-Piaget believed that through pretending, young children practice and strengthen newly acquired representational schemes -play becomes detached from reality -play becomes less self-centered -sociodramatic play

children talking to themselves

-Piaget explained this through egocentric speech. Their talk, he said, is often "talk for self" in which they expressed thoughts in whatever form they happen to occur, regardless of whether a listener can understand -Vygotsky calls it private speech. He believed that children speak to themselves for self-guidance. With age, as Vygotsky predicted, private speech goes underground, changing into whispers and silent lip movements (children use it more when something is difficult or confusing) (children who use it show better task performance)

hierarchical classification (limitation of pre-operational thought)

-Pre-operational children have difficulty with hierarchical classification-- the organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences -Piaget demonstrates this with the class inclusion problem in which he asked children are there more red Flowers or Flowers the children respond with red Flowers because there are a bigger number of red Flowers than blue flowers

Propositional thought

-Propositional thought is adolescents ability to evaluate the logic of propositions (verbal statements) without referring to real world circumstances -In a study of propositional reasoning, researchers show children and adolescence a pile of poker chips and asked whether statements about the chips were true, false, or uncertain. In one condition, the researcher hid a chip in her hand and presented the following propositions either "the chip in my hand is green or it is not green" or "the chip in my hand is green and is not green". In another condition, the experimenter made the same statements while holding either a red or a green chip in full view. School age children focused on the concrete properties of the poker chips. When the chip was hidden, they replied that they were uncertain about both statements. When it was visible, they judged both statements to be true if the chip was green and false if it was red. In contrast, most adolescents analyzed the logic of the statements. They understood that the either-or statement is always true and the and statement is always false regardless of the chips color

language development: vocabulary

-Research shows that children can connect new words with their underlying concepts after only a brief encounter, a process called fast mapping -Preschoolers figure out the meanings of new words by contrasting them with words they already know -According to one proposal, preschoolers discover many word meanings by observing how words are used in the structure of sentences ("this is a citron one" talking about a yellow car. kids can piece together that citron means yellow). As kids hear the word in various sentence structure, they refine its meaning and generalize it to other categories -Adults also informed children directly about 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" -To fill in for words they have not yet learned, children as young as 3 coin new words using ones they already know, for example plant-man for a gardener -Some theorists believe that vocabulary is innately biased to induce word meanings using certain principles, such as mutual exclusivity. But critics point out that a small set of built in, fixed principles cannot account for a varied, flexible manner in which children master vocabulary. In many word learning strategies cannot be innate because children acquiring different languages use different approaches to master the same meanings -According to one account, children draw on a coalition of cues-- perceptual, social, in linguistic-- which shift in importance with age -as language develops further, linguistic cues-- sentence structure and intonation-- play larger roles -Preschoolers are most successful at figuring out new word meanings when several kinds of information are available

Early childhood: The self (self-esteem)

-Self-esteem is the judgments we make about our own worth and the feelings associated with those judgments -These self-esteem judgments are very important because they affect our emotional experiences, future behavior, and long-term physiological adjustment -They lack the cognitive maturity to combine these evaluations into a global sense of self-esteem. Also, because preschoolers have difficulty distinguishing between their desire and their actual competence, they usually rate their ability as extremely high and underestimate task difficulty -High self esteem contributes greatly to preschoolers initiative during a period in which they must master many new skills. By age 3 children whose parents patiently encourage while offering information about how to succeed are enthusiastic and highly motivated. In contrast, children whose parents criticized their worth and performance give up easily when faced with challenges and expressed shame and despondency after failing

concrete operational thought: seriation

-The ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight, is called seriation -To test for it, Piaget asked children to arrange sticks of different links from shortest to longest period older preschoolers can put the sticks in a row, but they do so haphazardly, making many mistakes. In contrast, 6 to 7 year olds create the series efficiently, moving in an order sequence from the small stick, to the next largest, and so on. -This is called a transitive inference task. When piaget showed the children three sticks and observed that stick A is longer than be in stick B and stick B is longer than stick C, children must infer that A is longer than C. Which requires children to integrate three relations at once. As long as they have help remembering the premises, 7 to 8 year olds can grasp transitive inference

Concrete operational thought: conservation

-The ability to pass conservation tasks provides clear evidence of operations-- mental actions that obey logical rules -Decentration is focusing on several aspects of a problem and relating them, rather than centering on just one -the ability to pass a conservation task demonstrates reverse ability, which is the capacity to think through a series of steps and then mentally reserve direction, returning to the starting point

Information processing perspective (executive function, inhibition, flexible shifting, and working memory)

-The school years are a time of continued development of the prefrontal cortex, which increases its connections with more distant parts of the brain. Myelination of neural fibers for rises steadily, especially in the prefrontal cortex and in the corpus callosum, which connects the two cerebral hemispheres. As Inter connectivity between the frontal cortex and other brain areas strengthens, the prefrontal cortex becomes more effective/ "executive", overseeing the integrated functioning of neural networks -Heritability evidence suggests considerable genetic contribution to executive function. And molecular genetic analyses are identifying specific genes related to severally deficient executive function components, such as inhibition inflexible thinking, which contribute to learning and behavior disorders, including ADHD. Heredity combines with environmental context to influence executive function -During middle childhood, children become better at deliberately attending to relevant aspects of a task in inhibiting irrelevant responses -Researchers studied this by introducing irrelevant stimuli to a task and see how well children attend to its central elements. Performance improves sharply between ages 6 and 10, with gains continuing throughout adolescence -older children are also better at flexibly shifting their attention in response to task requirements. When given rule used tasks that require frequent switching of the rules used to sort picture cards containing conflict cues, school children gain steadily with age in the complexity of rules they can keep in mind an in speed and accuracy with which they shift between rules -selectivity and flexibility of attention become better controlled and more efficient over middle childhood -Time needed to process information on a wide variety of cognitive tasks declines rapidly between ages 6 and 12 in diverse cultures, likely due to myelination and enhanced connectivity among regions of the cerebral cortex. A faster thinker can hold on to and operate on more information at once.

Theory of mind (early childhood)

-Theory of mind is a coherent set of ideas about mental activities. This is also called metacognition or "thinking about thought" -2 year olds have a clear grasp of other's emotions and desires and how they differ to theirs. 3 year olds realize that thinking happens in the head -But 2 to 3-year old verbal responses indicate that they assume people always behave in ways consistent with their desires. Not until age 4 do most realize that less obvious, more interpretive mental states, such as beliefs, also affect behavior. Dramatic evidence for this advance comes from games that test whether preschoolers realize that false beliefs-- ones that do not represent reality accurately-- can guide people's actions. -Not until age 4 do children understand explicit false beliefs -Many studies indicate that language ability strongly predicts preschooler's false belief understanding. Children who spontaneously use, or who are trained to use, mental state words in conversations are especially likely to pass false belief tasks. -Several aspects of preschooler's executive function-- inhibition, flexible shifting of attention, and planning-- predict mastery of false belief because they enhance children's ability to reflect on experiences in mental states -Core knowledge theorists believe that to profit from the social experience just described, children must be biologically prepared to develop a theory of mind

Vygotsky classroom

-Vygotsky classroom goes beyond independent discovery to promote assisted discovery. Teachers guide children's learning tailoring their interventions to each child's zone of proximal development. Assisted discovery is aided by peer collaboration, as children of varying abilities working groups, teaching and helping one another

Teacher's impact on students

-Well behaved, high achieving students typically get more encouragement and praise, whereas unruly students have more conflicts with teachers and receive more criticism from them -Warm, low conflict teacher student relationships have an especially strong impact on the academic self esteem, achievement, in social behavior of low SES minorities students and other students at risk for learning difficulties. But overall, higher SES students who tend to be higher achieving and to have fewer learning and behavior problems have more sensitive and supportive relationships with teachers -Once teachers attitudes toward students are established, they can become more extreme than is warranted by students behavior -Educational self fulfilling prophecies: children may adopt teachers positive or negative views and start to live up to them -This effect is especially strong when teachers emphasize competition and publicly compared children, regularly favoring the best students -Teacher expectations have a greater impact on low achieving than high achieving students. When a teacher is critical, high achievers can fall back on their history of success. Low achieving students sensitivity to self fulfilling prophecies can be beneficial when teachers believe in them -In one study, African-American in Hispanic elementary school students taught by high bias teachers showed substantially low end of year achievement than their counterparts taught by low bias teachers

person praise vs process praise

-When a child succeeds, adults can offer person praise, which emphasizes the child's traits "you are so smart", or process praise, which emphasizes behavior an effort "you figured it out" -Children especially those with low self esteem feel more shame following failure if they previously received person praise, less shame if they previously received process praise or no praise at all -Consistent with a learned helpless orientation, person praise teaches children that abilities are fixed, which leads them to question their competence and retreat from challenges. In contrast, process praise consistent with a mastery orientation implies that competence develops through effort

language development: grammar

-as children listen for familiar verbs in adults' speech, they expand their own utterances containing those verbs, relying on adult speech as their model -To test preschooler's ability to generate novel sentences that conform to basic English grammar, researchers had them use a new verb in the subject-verb-object form after hearing it in a different construction ("Ernie is getting gorped by the dog"). But not until age 3 1/2 to 4 could the majority of children applied the fundamental subject-verb-object structure broadly, to newly acquired verbs ("the dog is gorping Ernie") -When preschoolers acquire these markers, they sometimes over-extend the rules to words that are exceptions a type of error called overregularization ("my toy car breaked" or "we each got 2 foots") (foot & foots, eat & eated, run & runned) -Some experts believe that grammar is a product of general cognitive development-- children's tendency to search the environment for consistency's and patterns of all sorts. Information processing theorists believe that children notice which words appear in the same positions in senses and are combined in the same way with other words. Other theorist, while also focusing on how children process language, agree with the essence of Chomsky's theory that the grammatical categories into which children group word meanings are innate, present at the outset. Critics, however, point out that toddlers two-word utterances do not reflect a flexible grasp of grammar and that preschoolers make many errors in their gradual mastery of grammar -Besides acquiring vocabulary in grammar, children must learn to engage in effective and appropriate communication. This practical, social side of language is called pragmatics -Preschoolers conversations appear less mature in highly demanding situations in which they cannot see their listeners reactions or rely on typical conversational aids, such as gestures or objects to talk about. When asked in a Phone conversation what he received for his birthday, one 3 year old held up a new toy and said "this" -In addition, sensitive, caring adults use specific techniques that promote early language skills. Criticism discourages children from freely using language in ways that lead to new skills -Instead, adults generally provide indirect feedback about grammar by using 2 strategies, often in combination: recast-- restructuring inaccurate speech to correct form, and expansions-- elaborating on children's speech, increasing its complexity ("I gotted new red shoes" response "yes, you got a new pair of red shoes") -evidence shows 2- to 4-year olds often shifted to correct forms

make-believe becomes detached from reality

-children 2 and younger only use realistic objects because their pretending is not flexible -after 2, children pretend with less realistic toys -by age 3, they flexibly understand that an object (a yellow stick) may take on one fictional identity (a toothbrush) in one fictional game and another fictional identity ( a carrot) in a different pretend game

Inability to conserve (limitation of pre-operational thought)

-different conservation tasks such as number (spacing out one row looks like more), mass (2 equal clay balls and one is rolled out; preschooler thinks rolled out has more clay), and liquid (same amount of water into 2 of same glass, one glass is dumped into taller glass, preschooler thinks taller glass has more water) -their understanding is centered on one aspect of a situation. children are easily distracted by perceptual appearance of objects. They ignore dynamic transformation (pouring of water) -preschoolers lack reversibility (irreversibility-- inability to mentally go through a series of steps in a problem and then reverse direction, returning to the starting point)

Executive function

-focusing our mind to move information through it -With age, preschoolers gain steadily in ability to inhibit impulses and keep their mind on a competing goal (this is inhibition). An example of an inhibition task is when a word of a color is not that color (The word blue appears green). 3 to 4 year olds make many errors with this but 6 to 7 year olds find such tasks easy. Another example of an inhibition task is Simon says. This requires kids to pay attention to direction, and distinguish what you are and are not supposed to do -Flexible shifting improves greatly during the preschool years, with gains continuing in middle childhood. Note that inhibition contributes to preschoolers flexible shifting. To switch rules, children must inhibit attending to the previously relevant dimension while focusing on the dimension they had just ignored. Studied by asking kids to switch ways of sorting cards (or switching driving rules)

make-believe in sociodramatic play

-make believe play with others -In sociodramatic play, children display awareness that make-believe is a representational activity—an understanding that strengthens over early childhood -children think about their own and others' fanciful representations—evidence that they have begun to reason about people's mental activities -Preschoolers who spend more time engaged in socio dramatic play are better at inhibiting impulses, regulating emotion, and taking personal responsibility for following classroom rules

Vygotsky beliefs about make-believe

-make-believe play is the ideal context for cognitive development because it creates the zone of proximal development-- a range of tasks too difficult for the child to do alone but possible with the help of others -Vygotsky believed that children's learning takes place within the zone of proximal development -As children create imaginary situations, they learn to follow internal ideas and social rules rather than impulses

Egocentrism (limitations of pre-operational thought)

-preschoolers are ego-centric-- failure to distinguish others symbolic viewpoints from one's own -Piaget believed that when children 1st mentally represent the world they tend to focus on their own viewpoint and simply assume that others perceive, think, and feel the same way they do -Piaget demonstrated this by using the three-mountains problem (preschoolers are shown 3 mountains, preschoolers cannot predict what another's perspective. They simply think the person sees the same thing they do) -egocentrism as responsible for preoperational children's animistic thinking-- the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities such as thoughts wishes feelings and intentions (preschoolers think the bear is sad)

Memory recognition vs recall

-showing kids a set of 10 cards then mixing them up in the deck, and ask kids to pick out original 10. You will find that preschoolers recognition memory--- ability to tell whether a stimulus is the same as or similar to one they have seen before-- is remarkably good. In fact, 4 and 5-year old performed nearly perfectly -now put cards away, and ask kids to tell you which ones were the original 10. This more demanding task requires recall-- generating a mental image of an absent stimulus. Young children's recall is much poorer than their recognition. At age 2, they can recall no more than one or 2 items in at age 4 they only can remember about 3 or 4 -Improvement in recall in early childhood is strongly associated with language development, which greatly enhances the long-lasting representations of past experiences -Preschoolers have not yet skilled memory strategies-- deliberate mental activities that improve our chances of remembering (rehearse or organize) -Young children rarely use memory strategies because strategies tax their limited working memories, and preschoolers have difficulty holding onto pieces of information in applying a strategy at the same time

Piaget's concrete operational stage

-the concrete operational stage, which extends from about 7 to 11 years. Compared with early childhood, thought is more logical, flexible, and organized

Dual representation

-viewing symbolic object as both an object in its own right and a symbol (2-and-a-half-year-old struggles with this but not 3-year-old) -Not until age 3 can children use a model as a guide (snoopy experiment)

chapter 8

Emotional and social development in early childhood

Chapter 10

Emotional and social development in middle childhood

Chapter 11

physical and cognitive development in adolescence

Chapter 7

physical and cognitive development in early childhood

chapter 9

physical and cognitive development in middle childhood