Chapter 9: Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Limitations of the young child's theory of mind

-3 and 4 year olds are unaware that people continue to think while they wait, look at pictures, listen to stories, or read books, that is, when there are no obvious cues that they are thinking -Children younger than 6 pay little attention to the process of thinking. -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.

Semantic Bootstrapping

-A view that young children rely on semantics, or word meanings to figure out grammatical rules -For example, children might begin by grouping together words with "agent qualities" (things that cause actions) as subjects, and words with "action qualities" as verbs.

Vygotsky: Scaffolding

-Adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child's current level of performance

Example of a False-Belief Task

-An adult shows a child the contents of a Band-Aid box and of an unmarked box. Th Band-Aids are in the unmarked contained -The adult introduces the child to a hand puppet named Pam and asks the child to predict where Pam would look for the Band-Aids and to explain Pam's behavior. The task reveals whether children understand that without having seen that the Band-Aids are in the unmarked container, Pam will hold a false belief. -False Beliefs: ones that do not represent reality accurately

Guided Participation

-Barbara Rogoff -Refers to endeavors between more expert and less expert participants, without specifying the precise features of communication -Broader than scaffolding

Project Head Start

-Began in 1965 -A typical Head Start center provides children with a year or two of preschool, along with nutritional and health services. -Parent involvement is central to the Head Start philosophy -Parents serve on policy councils, contribute to program planning, work directly with children in classrooms, attend special programs on parenting and child development, and receive services directed at their own emotional, social, and vocational needs.

Vygotsky and Early Childhood Education

-Both Piagetian and Vygotskian classrooms emphasize active participation and acceptance of individual differences -Vygotsky promotes "assisted discover" where teachers guide children's learning with explanations, demonstrations and verbal prompts. -Assisted discovery is aided by "peer collaboration" as children with varying abilities work in groups, teaching and helping one another -Vygotsky also supported make believe play

Piaget: Follow-Up Research on Preoperational Thought: Categorization

-By the beginning of early childhood, children's categories include objects that go together because of their common function, behavior, or natural kind (animate versus inanimate, challenging Piaget's assumption that preschoolers' thinking is wholly governed by perceptional appearances -Although preschooler's category systems are less complex than those of older children and adults, they already have the capacity to classify hierarchically and on the basis of non-obvious properties.

Shortcomings of Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory

-Challenging Vygotsky, in some cultures, verbal dialogues are not the only- or even the most important- means through which children learn -Vygotsky was also criticized for saying little about how basic motor, perception, attention, memory, and problem-solving skills contribute to socially transmitted higher cognitive processes -Piaget paid far more attention than Vygotsky to the development of basic cognitive processes.

Child-centered programs vs. academic programs

-Child-centered programs: teachers provide activities from which children select, and much learning takes place through play -Academic programs: teachers structure children's learning, teaching letters, numbers, colors, shapes, and other academic skills through formal lessons, often using repetition and drill -Teachers often feel more pressured to utilize academic programs however these children usually display more stress behaviors, have less confidence in their abilities, prefer less challenging tasks, and are less advances in motor, academic, language, and social skills at the end of the school year

When do children display awareness that make-believe is a representational activity?

-Children as young as age 2 display awareness that make-believe is a representational activity -They distinguish make-believe from real experience and grasp that pretending is a deliberate effort to act out imaginary ideas

Vocabulary Development

-Children draw on a "coalition of cues"- perceptual, social, and linguistic- which shift in importance with age -Infants reply solely on perceptual features -Toddlers and young preschoolers, while still sensitive to perceptual features (such as object shape and physical action), increasingly attend to social cues- the speakers direction of gaze, gestures, expressions of intention and desire, and soon speaker's knowledge -As language develops further, linguistic cues, sentence structure and intonation play larger roles

Types of Words in Early Childhood

-Children in many Western and Non Western language communities fast-map labels for objects especially rapidly because these refer to concepts that are easy to perceive -Soon children add verbs (go, run, broke) which require understandings of relationships between objects and actions

Pragmatics

-Children must engage in effective and appropriate communication- by taking turns, staying on the same topic, stating their messages clearly, and conforming to cultural rules for social interaction -These abilities increase with age -Having older siblings promotes this

Emergent Literacy

-Children's active efforts to construct literacy knowledge through informal experiences -Observing and participating in activities involving storybooks, calendars, lists, and signs -Phonological Awareness: the ability to reflect on and manipulate the sound structures of spoken language, as indicated by sensitivity to changes in sounds within words, to rhyming, and to incorrect pronunciation- is a strong predictor of emergent literacy and later reading and spelling achievement -Interactive Reading: when adults discuss storybook content with preschoolers- promotes many aspects of language and literacy development -Kindergarteners who are behind in emergent literacy development tend to remain behind

Learning with Computers

-Computer literacy and math programs, including online storybooks, expand children's knowledge and encourage diverse language, literacy, arithmetic skills -As long as adults support children's efforts, these activities promote problem solving and metacognition (awareness of thought processes) because children must plan and reflect on their thinking to get their programs to work.

Fast-mapping

-Connect new words with their underlying concepts after only a brief encounter -Does not imply that children immediately acquire adultlike word meaning

Piaget: Inability to Conserve

-Conservation: the idea that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes -Example: a child is shown two identical tall glasses of water and asked if they contain equal amounts. Once the child agrees, the water in one glass is poured into a short, wide container, changing its appearance but not its amount. Then the child is asked whether the amount of water is the same or has changed. Preoperational children think the quantity has changed.

Piaget: Symbol- Real-World Relations

-Dual Representation: viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its own right and a symbol -Appearance reality tasks: When asked whether a stone painted to look like an egg is really and truly an egg, children younger than age 6 responded "yes." But simplify these appearance-reality tasks by permitting children to solve them nonverbally, by selecting from an array of objects the one that "really" has a particular identity and most 3- year -olds perform well. They realize that an object can be one thing (a stone) while symbolizing another (an egg).

Basic-level categories, general categories, and subcategories in early childhood

-During the 2nd and 3rd years, children's categories differentiate -They form "basic level categories"- ones at an intermediate level of generality, such as chairs, ables, and beds. -By the 3rd year, children easily move back and forth between basic level categories and "general categories" such as furniture. -And they break down basic level categories into "subcategories" such as rocking chairs and desk chairs

Memory Strategies

-Even preschoolers with good language skills recall poorly because they are not skilled at using memory strategies -Memory Strategies: deliberate mental activities that improve our chances of remembering, like rehearsing (repeating over and over again) or organizing (grouping items that are alike so that you can easily retrieve them by thinking of their similar characteristics)

Grammar in Early Childhood

-First use of grammatical rules, is piecemeal- limited to just a few verbs -Once children form three-word sentences, they also make small additions and changes in words that enable speakers to express meanings flexibly and efficiently. For example, they add -ing for ongoing actions (playing), -s for plural (cats), use prepositions (in and out), and form various tenses of the verb to be (is, are, were, has been, will) -Once children acquire these markers, they sometimes overextend the rules to words that are exceptions, a type of error called "over-regularization", for example "we each got two foots", and "my toy care breaked"

Piaget: Egocentric Thinking

-For Piaget, the most fundamental deficiency of preoperational thinking is egocentrism -Egocentrism: failure to distinguish the symbolic viewpoints of others from one's own -He believed that when children first mentally represent the world, they tend to focus on their own viewpoint and assume that others perceive, think, and feel the same way they do -Three-Mountains Problem: Each mountain is distinguished by its color and by its summit. One has a red cross, another a small house, and the third a snow-capped peak. Children at the preoperational stage respond egocentrically. They cannot select a picture that shows the mountains from the doll's perspective. Instead, they simply choose the photo that reflects their own vantage point

Scripts

-General descriptions of what occurs and when it occurs in a particular situation -Scripts help children organize, interpret, and predict everyday experiences -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. -Scripts support children's earliest efforts at planning by helping them represent sequences of actions that lead to desired goals.

Recall

-Generating a mental image of an absent stimulus. -Children's recall is much poorer than their recognition -Example: how a young child a set of 10 pictures or toys. Then mix them up with some unfamiliar items, and ask the child to point to the ones in the original set. Now keep the items out of view and ask the child to name the ones she saw. -At age 4 they can recall only about 3 or 4 items

Strengthening Project Head Start

-Head Start REDI -Enriched curriculum designed for integration into existing Head Start classrooms. -Before school begins, Head Start teachers take workshops in which they learn research- based strategies for enhancing language, literacy, and social skills. -Relative to typical Head Start classrooms, Head Start REDI yields higher year-end language, literacy, and social development scores. These advantages are still evident at the end of kindergarten, with stronger effects in elementary schools with many poorly achieving students

Why do Western children ask "why" questions more often than Non Western children?

-In Non Western village cultures, young children engage in question asking just as often as their Western counterparts, but they rarely ask why questions. Preschoolers in village societies are included in nearly all aspects of family and community life reducing their need to ask adults to explain -Asking questions is a major means through which Western children strive to attain adult-like understandings

Mathematical Reasoning in Early Childhood

-Like literacy, mathematical reasoning builds on informal knowledge -Between 14 and 16 months, toddlers display a beginning grasp of "ordinality" -Ordinality: order relationships between quantities, for example, that 3 is more than 2 and 2 is more than 1 -In the 3rd year, children begin to count- most can count rows of about 5 objects, although they do not yet know what the words mean. -By age 3 1/2 to 4, most children have mastered the meaning of numbers up to ten, count correctly, and grasp the vital principle of "cardinality" -Cardinality: that the last number in a counting sequence indicates the quantity of items in the set (ex. a child counting four children at his snack table and then retrieving four milk cartons) -By age 4, children use containing to solve simple problems and realize that subtraction cancels out addition

Autism

-Limited ability to engage in nonverbal behaviors required for successful social interaction such as eye gaze, facial expressions, gestures, imitation, and give and take -Langue delayed and stereotyped. -Engage in much less make-believe play -Larger than average brains, with the greatest excess in the brain region volume occurring in the prefrontal cortex as a result of unsuccessful pruning -Deficient left hemispheric response to speech sounds -Great difficulty with false belief

Do low SES children usually receive high or low HOME scores?

-Low -HOME scores assess aspects of 3 to 6 year olds home lives that foster intellectual growth like having educational toys and books and parents who are warm and affectionate that stimulate language and academic knowledge

Piaget: Follow-Up Research on Preoperational Thought: Logical Thought

-Many studies show that when preschoolers are given tasks that are simplified and made relevant to their everyday lives, they do not display the illogical characteristics that Piaget saw in the preoperational stage -They can engage in impressive "reasoning by analogy" about physical changes. When presented with the picture-matching problem "play dough is to cut-up play dough as apple is to...? even 3 year olds choose to answer (a cut up apple) from a set of alternatives (a bitten apple, a cut-up loaf of bread) share physical features with the right choice. -Preschoolers seem to use illogical reasoning only when they must grapple with unfamiliar topics, too much information, or contradictory facts that they cannot reconcile

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, and equal emphasis on academic and social development.

Piaget: Follow-Up Research on Preoperational Thought: Egocentric, Animistic, and Magical Thinking

-Non-egocentric responses actually do occur when researchers simplify tasks with familiar objects, 3 year olds and even some 2 year olds show clear awareness of other's vantage points such as recognizing how something looks to another person who is looking at it differently. -Piaget also overestimated preschooler's animistic beliefs. Even infants have begun to distinguish animate from inanimate objects -Similarly, preschoolers think that magic accounts for events they otherwise cannot explain, but their notions of magic are flexible and appropriate -Between ages 4 and 8, as children gain familiarity with physical events and principles, their magical beliefs decline

Syntactic Bootstrapping

-Observing how words are used in syntax, or the structure of sentences -As children hear the word in various sentence structures, they use syntactic information to refine the word's meaning and generalize it to other categories -Example: A mother points to a yellow car and says "this is a citron one" and later at home she points to a lemon and says "this lemon is bright citron"

Piaget: Advances in Mental Representation

-Piaget acknowledged that language is our most flexible means of mental representation -But Piaget did NOT regard language as a primary ingredient in childhood cognitive change -Instead, he believed that sensorimotor activity leads to internal images of experience, which children then label with words.

Vygotsky: Private Speech

-Piaget called these utterances egocentric speech -Vygotsky disagreed strongly with Piaget's conclusions. -Vygotsky saw private speech as the foundation for all higher cognitive processes -In Vygotsky's view, children speak to themselves for self-guidance. -As they get older, their self-directed speech is internalized as silent, inner speech. -Research shows that children use private speech more when the task is appropriately challenging- neither too easy nor too hard but within their Zone of Proximal Development

Piaget: Limitations of Preoperational Thought

-Piaget described preschoolers in terms of what they CANNOT understand. -According to Piaget, 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 situation at a time, and strongly influenced by the way things appear at the moment

Piaget: Animistic Thinking

-Piaget regarded egocentrism as responsible for animistic thinking -Animistic Thinking: the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, such as thoughts, wishes, feelings, and intentions -Piaget argued that preschoolers' egocentric bias prevents them from accommodating, or reflecting on and revising their faulty reasoning in response to their physical and social worlds.

Piaget: Benefits of make-believe play

-Piaget's view of make-believe as mere practice of representational schemes is regarded as too limited -Make believe play strengthens a wide variety of cognitive capacities: -Sustained attention -Inhibiting impulses -Memory -Logical reasoning -Language and literacy -Imagination -Creativity -The ability to reflect on one's own behavior -The ability to take another's perspective -Between 25 and 45% of preschoolers and young school-age children spend much time in solitary make-believe, creating imaginary companions (special fantasized friends endowed with humanlike qualities)

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 -Two years exposure to cognitively enriching preschool was associated with increased employment and reduced pregnancy and delinquency rates in adolescence, at age 27 these individuals were also more likely than their no-preschool counterparts to have graduated from high school and college, have higher earnings, be married, and own their own home -A consistent finding is that gains in IQ and achievement test scores from attending Head Start and other interventions quickly dissolve. Head Start graduates did not differ from controls on any achievement measures at the end of third grade.

Which regions of the brain are involved in memory-based problem solving?

-Prefrontal Cortex -Hippocampus -Other areas in the cerebral cortex known to support long-term retention

Piaget: Lack of Hierarchical Classification

-Preoperational children have difficulty with hierarchical classification -Hierarchical Classification: the organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences. -Piaget's famous class inclusion problem demonstrates this limitation. -Class inclusion problem: children are shown 16 flowers, 4 of which are blue and 12 of which are red. Asked, "are there more red flowers of flowers?" the preoperational child responds, "more red flowers," failing to realize that both red and blue flowers are included in the category "flowers" -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.

Preschool vs Childcare

-Preschool: a program with planned educational experiences aimed at enhancing the development of 2 to 5 year olds. -Childcare: refers to a variety of arrangements for supervising children of employed parents, ranging from care in the caregiver's or the child's home to some type of center-based program. -In the US, children of higher income parents and children of very low income parents are more likely to be in preschools or child-care centers.

Prekindergarten

-Preschoolers from all SES backgrounds show gains in cognitive and social development still evident in elementary and secondary school -Up to a one-year advantage in kindergarten and first grade language, literacy, and math scores relative to those children not enrolled

Autobiographical Memory

-Representations of personally meaningful, one time events -Adults use 2 styles to elicit children's autobiographical narratives: 1. Elaborative Style: adults follow the child's lead, ask varied questions, add information to the child's statements, and volunteer their own recollections and evaluations of events 2. Repetitive Style: adults provide little information and keep repeating the same questions, regardless of the child's interest: "Do you remember the zoo? What did we do there? What did we do at the zoo" -Girls tend to have more organized and detailed narratives about past events than boys -When compared with Asian children, Western children produce narrative with more talk about their own thoughts and emotions whereas Asian children tend to highlight the roles of others

Piaget's Theory: The Preoperational Stage

-Spans the years 2 to 7 during which the most obvious change is an extraordinary increase in representational, or symbolic, activity

Min

-Strategy that minimizes work -Counting bags of marbles, a preschooler first counts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, but then realizes he could count from a higher number 2, 4, 5, 6, and get the the total number of marbles faster, or 4, 5, 6

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory

-Stresses the social context of cognitive development -In Vygotsky's view, the child and the social environment collaborate to mold cognition in culturally adaptive ways -Rapid growth of language broadens preschoolers participation in social dialogues -Soon children start to communicate with themselves in much the same way they converse with others. This greatly enhances the complexity of their thinking and their ability to control their own behaviors

Recognition Memory

-The ability to tell whether a stimulus is the same as or similar to one they have seen before -4 and 5 year olds perform nearly perfect -Example: show a young child a set of 10 pictures or toys. Then mix them up with some unfamiliar items, and ask the child to point to the ones in the original set.

Mutual Exclusivity Bias

-The assumption that words refer to entirely separate (non overlapping) categories -Two year olds seem to rely on mutual exclusivity when the objects named are perceptually distinct- for example, differ clearly in shape -Children's first several hundred nouns refer mostly to objects well-organized by shape -Because shape is a perceptual property relevant to most object categories for which they have already learned names, this "shape bias" helps preschoolers master additional names of objects, and vocabulary accelerates

Piaget: Irreversibility

-The most important illogical feature of preoperational thought -Irreversibility: an inability to mentally go through a series of steps in a problem and then reverse direction, returning to the starting point

Vygotsky: Intersubjectivity

-The process by which two participants who begin a task with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding -Between ages 3 and 5, children strive for intersubjectivity in dialogues with peers -"I think this way. What do you think?"

Metacognition

-Thinking about thought -Complex appreciation of inner mental worlds, which we use to interpret our own and other's behavior

Planning

-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, older preschoolers can follow a plan

Educational Television

-Time devoted to watching children's educational programs, including Sesame Street, is associated with gains in early literacy and math skills and with academic progress in elementary school -A link was found between viewing Sesame Street and getting higher grades, reading more books, and placing more value on achievement in high school -Preschoolers in low-SES families watch as much educational television as their economically advantaged age-mates. But parents with limited education are more likely to engage in practices that heighten TV viewing of all kinds including leaving the TV on all day and eating family meals in front of it -Background TV impairs young children's sustained attention to play activities and reduces the quantity and quality of parent-child interaction -Whereas watching educational programs can be beneficial, watching entertainment TV, especially heaving viewing, detracts from children's school success and social experiences

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. -Views development as occurring gradually, rather than discontinuous -Gradually they select strategies on the basis of two criteria: 1. Accuracy 2. Speed

Episodic Memory

-Your memory for everyday experiences

Which 3 educational principles derived from Piaget's Theory continue to influence teacher training and classroom practices?

1. Discovery Learning : children are encouraged to discover for themselves through spontaneous interaction with the environment 2. Sensitivity to children's readiness to learn: teachers build on children's current thinking, they do not try to speed up development by imposing new skills before children indicate they are interested 3. Acceptance of individual differences: teachers evaluate each child's educational progress in relation to the child's previous development rather than on the basis of normative standards.

Signs of Developmentally Appropriate Early Childhood Programs

1. Group Size: in preschools and child-care centers, group size is no greater than 18 to 20 children with two teachers 2. Teacher-Child Ratio: In preschools and child-care centers, teacher is responsible for no more than 8 to 10 children. In family child-care homes, caregiver is responsible for no more than 6 children 3. Daily Activities: Children select many of their own activities and learn through experiences to their own lives, mainly in small groups or individually. 4. Interactions between adults and children: Teachers move among groups and individuals, asking questions, offering suggestions, and adding more complex ideas. 5. Teach qualifications: Teachers have college-level specialized preparation in early childhood development, early childhood education, or a related field

Vygotsky: To promote cognitive development, social interaction must have which two vital features?

1. Intersubjectivity 2. Scaffolding

What factors contribute to the development of a theory of mind in young children?

1. Language (understanding the mind requires the ability to reflect on thoughts, which language makes possible) 2. Executive Function (ability to inhibit inappropriate responses, think flexibly, and plan- predict mastery of false-belief) 3. Make-believe play (these experiences may increase children's awareness that belief influences behavior 4. Social Experiences (children from interdependent cultural backgrounds, where talk about one's own opinions and emotions is discouraged, are delayed in passing false-belief tasks in relation to Western children.

Name two strategies for which adults often provide indirect feedback about grammar?

1. Recasts: restructuring inaccurate speech into correct form 2. Expansions: elaborating on children's speech, increasing its complexity

Piaget: The inability to converse highlights which aspects of preoperational children's thinking?

1. Their understanding is centered, or characterized by centration. They focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting other important features. 2. Children are easily distracted by the perceptual appearance of objects. 3. Children treat the initial and final states of the water as unrelated events, ignoring the dynamic transformation between them.

Some Cognitive Attainments of Early Childhood: 2-4 years

2- 4 years -Shows a dramatic increase in representational activity, as reflected in the development of language, make-believe play, understanding of dual representation, and categorization -Takes the perspective of others in simplified, familiar situations and in everyday, face to face communication -Distinguishes animate beings from inanimate objects; prefers natural over supernatural explanations for events -Grasps conversation, notices transformations, reverses thinking, and understands many cause-and-effect relationships in simplified, familiar situations -Categorizes objects on the basis of common function, behavior, and natural kind as well as perceptual features, depending on context; uses inner causal features to categorize objects varying widely in external appearance -Sorts familiar objects into hierarchically organized categories

Some Cognitive Attainments of Early Childhood: 4-7 years

4 to 7 years -Becomes increasingly aware that make-believe (and other thought processes) are representational activities -Replaces beliefs in magical creatures and events with plausible explanations -Passes Piaget's conservation of number, mass, and liquid problems

Piaget: Make-believe play

Piaget believed that through pretending, young children practice and strengthen newly acquired representational schemes

Piaget: Development of make-believe play

There are three important changes that reflect the preschool child's growing symbolic mastery: 1. Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it: -before age two, children have trouble using an object (cup) that already has an obvious use as a symbol of another object (hat). After age two, children pretend with less realistic toys- for example, a block for a telephone receiver. 2. Play becomes less self-centered: -at first, make-believe is directed toward the self -make-believe becomes less self-centered as children realize that agents and recipients of pretend actions can be independent of themselves 3. Play includes more complex combinations of schemes: -children learn to combine schemes with those of peers in socio-dramatic 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)