1. Infants, Children, and Adolescents
Chapter 9
Cognitive Development in Early Childhood
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2. Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
Ages 2 to 7
Gains in mental representation
Make-believe play
Dual representation
Sensorimotor activity leads to internal images of experience, which children then label with words.
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3. Development of Make-Believe Play
With age, make-believe gradually becomes
more detached from real-life conditions.
less self-centered.
more complex, sociodramatic play.
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4. Benefits of Make-Believe Play
During social pretend, interactions last longer, show more involvement, and draw more children into the activity in a more cooperative manner.
Make-believe strengthens a variety of mental abilities, including sustained attention, logic, memory, reasoning, and creativity.
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5. Enhancing Make-Believe Play in Early Childhood
Provide sufficient space and play materials.
Supervise and encourage children’s play without controlling it.
Offer a variety of both realistic materials and materials without clear functions.
Ensure that children have many rich, real-world experiences to inspire positive fantasy play.
Help children solve social conflicts constructively.
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Dual Representation
Viewing a symbolic object as both object and symbol
Mastered around age 3
Adult teaching can help
provide lots of maps, photos, drawings, make-believe playthings, etc.
point out similarities to the real world.
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Egocentrism
Failure to distinguish others’ views from one’s own
Figure 9.1
Piaget’s 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.
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Animistic Thinking
Belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, such as thoughts or wishes
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9. Piagetian Conservation Tasks
Figure 9.2
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10. Piagetian Class Inclusion Problem
Figure 9.3
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11. Follow-Up Research on Preoperational Thought
Egocentric, Animistic, and Magical Thinking
Can adjust language to others and take others’ perspectives in simple situations
Animistic thinking comes from incomplete knowledge of objects.
Illogical Thought
Can do simplified conservation
Can reason by analogy
Use causal expressions
Categorization
Everyday knowledge is categorized.
Appearance versus Reality
Make-believe helps children tell the difference.
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12. Categories of Imaginary Animals Shown to Preschoolers
Figure 9.4
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13. Children’s Questions: Catalyst for Cognitive Development
Majority of children’s questions are information-seeking (not requests).
Provides precise knowledge when children need it
Content related to cognitive development
Context shapes questions.
Adults seem to formulate answers based on children’s maturity.
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14. Educational Principles Derived from Piaget’s Theory
Discovery learning
Sensitivity to children’s readiness to learn
Developmentally appropriate practice
Acceptance of individual differences
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15. Children’s Private Speech
Piaget called “egocentric speech”
Vygotsky viewed as foundation for all higher cognitive processes
Helps guide behavior
Used more when tasks are difficult, after errors, or when confused
Gradually becomes more silent
Children with learning and behavior problems use longer
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Relationship of Private Speech to Task Difficulty Among 5- and 6-Year-Olds
Figure 9.5
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17. Social Origins of Early Childhood Cognition
Intersubjectivity
Scaffolding
Guided participation
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18. Vygotsky’s Theory and Early Childhood Education
Vygotskian classrooms promote assisted discovery.
Teachers guide children’s learning with explanations and verbal prompts.
Peer collaboration is also emphasized.
Challenges to Vygotsky’s theory:
Verbal communication is not the only way new information is mastered.
The theory says little about how basic motor, perception, attention, memory, and problem-solving skills contribute to higher cognitive processes.
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Children in Village and Tribal Cultures Observe and Participate in Adult Work
Western Cultures
School prepares children for work.
Parents focus on preparing children for school success.
Child-focused activities
Village/Tribal Cultures
Little schooling
Children observe adults at work to learn.
Children assume adult responsibilities early.
Children make more decisions for themselves.
Limited make-believe play and scaffolding
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20. Improvements in Attention
Sustained attention increases sharply between 2 and 3½ years.
Frontal lobe growth
Increasingly complex play goals
Adult scaffolding
Quality preschooling
Planning improves.
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Gains Between Ages 3 and 7 in Performance on Tasks Requiring Children to Inhibit an Impulse and Focus on a Competing Goal
Figure 9.6
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22. Memory in Early Childhood
Recognition better than recall
Beginnings of memory strategies
Limited by working memory
Familiar events remembered
as scripts
More elaborate with age
Elaborative style best
Adults help with autobiographical memories.
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23. Problem Solving in Early Childhood
Overlapping Waves Theory
Try variety of strategies.
Observe how well they work.
Gradually select those leading to rapid, accurate answers.
Figure 9.7
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24. Young Child’s Theory of Mind
Theory of mind, or coherent set of ideas about mental activities (metacognition)
Milestones:
Age 1: view others as intentional beings who are available for communication
Age 2: aware of others’ emotions and desires
Age 3: realize that thinking is internal, but focus on desires
Age 4: realize both beliefs and desires determine behavior; awareness of false beliefs
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25. Example of a False-Belief Task
Awareness of mental life: infancy to age 3
Mastery of false beliefs: around age 4
Figure 9.8
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26. Factors Contributing to Preschoolers’ Theory of Mind
Language and verbal reasoning
Cognitive skills
Make-believe play
Social interaction
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27. Early Literacy and Mathematical Development
Preschooler’s understanding occurs before practical usage.
Emergent literacy
“Read” but don’t understand symbolism
Gradual mastery of functions and phonological awareness
More informal experiences contribute to earlier and better literacy.
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28. Supporting Emergent Literacy in Early Childhood
Provide literacy-rich homes and preschool environments.
Engage in interactive book reading.
Provide outings to libraries, museums, parks, zoos, and other community settings.
Point out letter–sound correspondences, play rhyming and language–sound games, and read rhyming poems and stories.
Support children’s efforts at writing, especially narrative products.
Model literacy activities.
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29. Reading Readiness Skills at Kindergarten Entry by SES
Figure 9.10
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30. Early Childhood Mathematical Reasoning
Builds on informal knowledge
Ordinality
Order relationships between quantities
Cardinality
Last number when counting is the total.
Estimation
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31. Individual Differences in Early Childhood Mental Development
Factors
Home environment
Quality of child care, preschool, or kindergarten
Child-centered versus academic
Early intervention programs
Television
Educational TV
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Features of a High-Quality Home Life for Preschoolers: The HOME Early Childhood Subscales
Sources: Bradley, 1994; Bradley et al., 2001.
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33. Types of Preschool and Kindergarten
Child-centered programs: Teachers provide activities from which the children select and most of the day is devoted to play. Academic programs: Teachers structure children’s learning through formal lessons, often using repetitive drills (an approach that can undermine motivation and well-being, especially for low-SES children). Montessori education: Child-centered approach with equal emphasis on academic and social development
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34. Early Intervention for At-Risk Preschoolers
Project Head Start
Parent involvement essential
Long-term benefits:
Better early school achievement
Less special education and grade retention
More high school graduation, college enrollment
Advantages still evident at age 40
Jumpstart for Young Children provides extra enrichment.
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Some Outcomes of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project on Follow-up at Age 27
Figure 9.12
Source: Adapted from Schweinhart et al., 2005.
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Child Care
Center-based care has a greater association with cognitive gains than other child-care arrangements.
In another investigation of 2- to 4-year-olds from very-low-income families, the more time spent in high-quality child-care centers, the less likely children were to display emotional and behavioral problems, even after many family characteristics were controlled.
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37. Signs of Developmentally Appropriate Practice
Physical setting
Group size
Caregiver–child ratio
Daily activities
Adult–child interactions
Teacher qualifications
Relationships with parents
Licensing and accreditation
Photodisc
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Educational Media
Computers:
85% of U.S. children have computers at home; about 2/3 have Internet access.
70% of 4- to 6-year-olds have used a computer.
Often used for entertainment and game playing
Television:
Remains dominant youth media, even for infants
One study links Sesame Street viewing with higher grades, reading more books, and valuing academic achievement.
Slow-paced narratives like Barney and Friends can lead to more extensive make-believe play.
Low-SES children are more frequent viewers.
Entertainment-only programming can detract from academic and social success.
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39. Vocabulary Development in Early Childhood
Fast-mapping
Mutual exclusivity bias
Syntactic bootstrapping
Inventing own words
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40. Grammar Development in Early Childhood
Basic rules
Overregulation: applying rules without appropriate exceptions
Complex structures
Explaining grammatical development
Semantic bootstrapping
Relying on word meanings to figure out grammatical rules
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Children Using a New Verb in the Subject-Verb-Object Form After Hearing It in Another Construction
Figure 9.13
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Conversation
Around age 2, preschoolers begin to master pragmatics.
Presence of sibling helps.
Adapt language to social expectations by age 4
Telephone talk improves significantly from ages 4 to 8.
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43. Supporting Language Learning in Early Childhood
Recasts: restructuring incorrect speech into correct form
Expansions: elaborating on children’s speech
Role of adults:
Listening attentively
Elaborating on what children say
Modeling correct usage
Stimulating children to talk further
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