2. Cognitive development in early childhood .

Berk:  Chapter 9  Outline of Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

I. PIAGET'S THEORY:      The preoperational stage, Piaget’s second stage, is marked by rapid growth in representational, or symbolic, mental activity.

•    Language is our most flexible means of mental representation.

•     Piaget believed that sensorimotor activity provides the foundation for language, just as  it underlies deferred imitation and make-believe.

• Make-believe play increases dramatically during early childhood.

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

Development of Make-Believe Play

•   Over time, make-believe play becomes increasingly detached from the real-life conditions.

•  The way the child as self participates in play changes with age. (‘actor’ to ‘director’ to ‘author’ who scripts all the roles and dialogue) 

•  Make-believe play gradually includes more complex scheme combinations.

•  Sociodramatic play is the make-believe play with peers that first appears around  2 1/2  and increases rapidly during the next few years.

• The emergence of sociodramatic play signals an awareness that make-believe play is  representational.

Piaget’s theories of make-believe play reconsidered
Today, Piaget’s view of make-believe as mere 'practice' of representational schemes is regarded as too limited.

•  In comparison to social non-pretend activities, during social pretend play preschoolers’  interactions last  longer, show more involvement, draw larger numbers of children into activities, and are more cooperative.

• Preschoolers who spend more time at sociodramatic play are advanced in general intellectual development and are seen as more socially competent by their teachers.

• In the past, creating imaginary companions - invisible characters with whom children  have a special relationship - was viewed as a sign of maladjustment. Yet recent research demonstrates that children who have imaginary companions display more complex pretend play,  are advanced in mental representation, and are more sociable with peers.        

Symbol-Real World Relations

•  2-year-olds have trouble with dual representation, or viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its own right as well as one with symbolic function (eraser as ice cream sandwich?)

•   Insight into one type of symbol-real world relation seems to help preschoolers understand others.  Providing children with many opportunities to learn about the functions of diverse  symbols, such as picture books, models, maps, and drawings, enhances their understanding that one object or event can stand for another.        

Children’s Cognitive Limitations in the  Preoperational Stage

• Piaget described preschool children in terms of what they cannot, rather than can, understand.

• Operations are mental representations of actions that obey logical rules.

• In the preoperational stage, children’s thinking is rigid, limited to one aspect of a situation at a time, and strongly influenced by the way things appear at the moment.

• Egocentric and Animistic Thinking:

  Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish the symbolic viewpoints of others from own. Piaget’s most convincing demonstration of egocentrism involves a task called the three mountains problem. Animalistic thinking is the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, such as  thoughts, wishes, feelings, and intentions, just like themselves. Young children’s thinking is so closely tied to their own point of view that they do not accommodate, or revise their thinking, in response to feedback.

•   Inability to Conserve: Conservation refers to the idea that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when outward appearance changes. Preoperational children’s inability to conserve highlights several related aspects of their thinking:

  Centration is the tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect other important features.  Perception bound describes thinking that is easily distracted by the concrete,  perceptual appearance of objects. In focusing on states rather than transformations, children treat the initial andfinal states in a problem as completely unrelated.   Irreversibility is the inability to mentally go through a series of steps in a problem and then reverse direction, returning to the starting point.

•  Lack of Hierarchical Classification: 

  Hierarchical classification is the organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences between the groups. Piaget illustrated preschoolers’ difficulties in hierarchical classification in his class inclusion problem.

Recent Research on Preoperational Thought

I.   Many Piagetian problems contain confusing or unfamiliar elements or too many pieces of  information for young children to handle at once. As a result, preschoolers’ responses do not reflect their true abilities.

2.  Egocentrism: When researchers change the nature of Piaget’s three mountains problem to include familiar objects and use methods other than picture selection, 4-year-olds show clear awareness of other’s views of reality.

• Animistic and Magical Thinking

•   Illogical Thought

  a.     When preschoolers are given tasks that are simplified and made relevant to their everyday lives, they do better than Piaget might have expected. b.     Research findings indicate that preschoolers notice transformations, reverse their thinking, and understand causality in familiar contexts. c. Transductive reasoning seems to occur only when preschoolers grapple with topics they  know little about.

• 
  Categorization

  a.   Everyday knowledge is organized into nested categories at an early age. b.   By the second year, children have formed a variety of global categories consisting of           objects that are the same type of thing. such as animals, plants, and furniture. c.  Over the preschool years, global categories differentiate and children form basic-level categories. By age 3 or 4, children can combine basic-level categories into general categories, and they can also break them down into subcategories. d.    Preschoolers’ rapidly growing vocabularies and expanding general knowledge support  their skill at categorizing. e.   Young children’s category systems arc not yet very complex, but the ability to classify hierarchically is present in early childhood.

•  
    Appearance versus Reality

  a.  In certain situations, preschoolers are easily tricked by the outward appearance of  things. b.  Experiencing the contrast between everyday and playful use of objects may help children refine their understanding of what is real and what is unreal in their environment.

Evaluation of the Preoperational Stage

•   When given simple tasks based on familiar experiences, preschoolers show the beginnings of  logical operations, long before the concrete operational state.

• Preschoolers have some logical understanding, which suggests that the attainment of logical operations is a gradual process.

• Children who possess part of a capacity will benefit from training, unlike those with no understanding at all.

• Researchers have differing opinions regarding the validity of Piaget’s stage concept.

Piaget and education

•   Three educational principles derived from Piaget’s theory are:

                        a.            An emphasis on discovery learning,
                        b.            Sensitivity to children’s readiness to learn. 
                        c.            Acceptance of individual differences.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to Piaget’s theory is his insistence that young children                        learn only through acting on the environment.                     

II. VYGOTSKY’S SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY:    Vygotsky believed that children use language to expand their cognitive abilities and that they learned in a social context,  with language as the medium.

•  Children’s Private Speech:  Piaget called children’s utterances to themselves egocentric speech. He believed that cognitive maturity and certain social experiences - particularly arguments with agemates -  eventually bring an end to egocentric speech.

• Vygotsky’s View : he believed that children speak to themselves for self-guidance and self-direction. He viewed language as the foundation for all complex mental activities. As  children get older and tasks become easier, their self-directed speech declines and is internalized as silent, inner speech.

Almost all research findings reside with Vygotsky’s view. As a result, children’s “speech to self” is now called private speech instead of egocentric speech. Private speech is used more often when tasks are difficult, after a child makes an error, and when a child is confused about how to proceed. With age, private speech goes underground, changing from utterances spoken out loud into whispers and silent lip movements, but many adults even use private speech to help themselves through a cognitively challenging task or to focus their attention.

•  Social Origins of Early Childhood Cognition:    During early childhood, communication in the zone of proximal development (ZPD) includes verbal dialogues, as adults and more skilled peers help children master  challenging activities.

• Effective Social Interaction: To promote cognitive development, social interaction must have certain features, including  insubjectivity (the process whereby two participants who begin a task with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding), scaffolding (changing the level of social support to suit child's needs)

• The term guided participation is a broader concept than scaffolding, calling attention to adult and child contributions to a cooperative dialogue without specifying the precise features of communication.

Research on Social Interaction and Cognitive Development

• Parents who are effective scaffolders have children who use more private speech and are more successful when asked to do a similar task by themselves.

• Children’s planning and problem solving show more improvement when their partner is either an “expert” peer or an adult.

• Achieving intersubjectivity by resolving differences of opinion and cooperating in peer interaction is more important in fostering cognitive development than are conflict or disagreement.

Vygotsky and Education

•   Both Vygotskian and Piagetian classrooms have opportunities for active participation and  acceptance of individual differences in cognitive development.

• Vygotskian environments promote assisted discovery.

• Assisted discovery is helped along by peer collaboration and the arrangement of cooperative learning experiences by teachers.

• According to Vygotsky, make-believe play is a unique zone of proximal development in which children try out a variety of challenging activities and acquire many new competencies.

Evaluation of Vygotsky’s Theory

• Verbal communication may not be the only means, or the most important means, through which children learn in some cultures.

• The kind of assistance offered to children varies from culture to culture; depending on  the tasks that must be mastered to become a contributing member of society.

• Vygotsky said little about how basic motor, perceptual, attention, memory,  categorization, and problem-solving skills contribute to socially transmitted, complex mental activities.

III.            INFORMATION PROCESSING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

•   Attention

  Preschoolers spend only a short time involved in tasks, have difficulty focusing on details, and are easily distracted. During early childhood, attention becomes more planful.  Planning involves thinking out a sequence of acts ahead of time and allocating attention so as  to reach a goal.   Even when young children do plan, they often fail to implement important steps.

•   Memory

  Preschoolers have the language skills to describe what they remember, and they can follow directions on simple memory tasks. Recognition and Recall:  Preschoolers’ recognition memory is remarkably good and becomes even more accurate by the end of early childhood. Young children’s memory is much poorer for recall than recognition. Young children are less effective at using memory strategies, deliberate mental activities that improve the likelihood of remembering.  Some strategies they begin to use include rehearsal (repeating items over and over), and organizing information (intentionally grouping together items that are alike).Preschoolers do show the beginnings of memory strategies. However, preschoolers do not yet rehearse or organize items into categories when asked to recall a set of items.

• Autobiographical Memories:

            a.   Memory for Familiar Everyday Experiences.  Episodic memory involves selecting experiences, relating them to one another, and interpreting them on the basis of previous knowledge. Scripts are general descriptions of what occurs and when it occurs in a particular situation. With age, children’s scripts become more elaborate and can be used to predict what will happen on similar occasions in the future.
            b.   Memory for One-Time Events: As preschoolers’ cognitive and conversational skills improve, their descriptions of one-time events become better organized, more detailed, and related to the larger context of their lives.

Adults use two styles for eliciting children’s autobiographical narratives. Those using the elaborative style ask many, varied questions, add information to children’s statements and volunteer their own recollections and evaluations of events. Those using the repetitive style provide little information and ask the same questions over and over.

• Problem Solving

            a.   According to the overlapping-waves theory, when given challenging problems, children generate a variety of strategies. Gradually, they select strategies that result in rapid, accurate  solutions. As children discover more successful strategies, they learn more about the problem  at hand. As a result, correct solutions become more strongly associated with problems,  and children display the most efficient strategy.
            b.   Children often discover a faster procedure by using a more time-consuming technique.
            c.    Many factors, including practice, reasoning tasks with new challenges and adult assistance contribute to improved problem solving.
            d.    Children also profit from experimenting with less mature strategies. In times of stress or when tired, etc, they revert to earlier strategies.               

 The Young Child’s Theory of Mind:      As children start to reflect on their own thought processes, they begin to construct a theory of mind, or set of ideas about the mental activities. Thinking about one’s own thinking is often called metacognition. We rely on understandings of our mental activities to interpret our own and others’ behavior as well as to improve our performance on various tasks.

• 'Think', 'remember', and 'pretend' are among the first verbs to appear in children’s vocabularies.

•  Between ages 3 and 4, children figure out that beliefs and desires determine behavior.

•  By age 4, children realize that people can hold false beliefs that combine determine behavior.

• Various findings suggest that language, cognitive, and social experiences aid in developing a theory of mind.

          1)   Language. Understanding the mind requires the ability to reflect on thoughts, made possible by language. 
          2)   Cognitive abilities. Skills such as the ability to inhibit a previously rewarded response,  think flexibly, and plan enhance children’s capacity to reflect on their experiences and  mental states.
          3)  Make-believe play and reasoning about imaginary situations may trigger an awareness that belief influences behavior.
          4) Social Interactions enhance these abilities. Having older siblings may allow for more interactions that highlight the influence of beliefs on behavior. Interacting with more mature members and preschool friends  of society is also helpful. 
          5)  Children with infantile autism, who are indifferent to other people and display poor knowledge of social rules, are impaired in mental understanding.

Limitations of the Young Child’s Theory of Mind

•    Preschoolers’ awareness of mental activities is far from complete.

•    Preschoolers pay little attention to the process of thinking and focus on the outcomes of  thought. They do not        
     understand that mental inferences can be a source of knowledge.

•   They know that people have an internal mental life, but seem to view the mind as a  passive container of information.

Early Literacy and Mathematical Development

1.    Literacy:             Most preschoolers understand a great deal about written language long before they learn to read or write in conventional ways. Children’s active efforts to construct literacy knowledge through informal experiences are called emergent literacy.  During the early period of literacy development, children view writing as a direct representation of objects and people.  Gradually, preschoolers become aware of general characteristics of written language, such as figuring out that letters are parts of words and are linked to sounds in systematic ways.

•     The more literacy-related experiences young children have in their everyday lives, the better prepared they are to tackle the complex tasks involved in becoming skilled readers and writers.

• Low-SES preschoolers generally have far less access to storybooks than do their higher SES peers. Regularly providing low-SES parents with children’s books along with guidance in how to stimulate emergent literacy greatly enhances literacy activities in the home. (Remember the video about the Vermont early intervention program?)

2.      Numeracy

•   A beginning grasp of ordinality, or order relationships among quantities, is displayed by  toddlers.

•   In the early preschool period, children start to attach verbal labels to different amounts and states.('more', 'less')

•   By age 4, most children have established an accurate one-to-one correspondence between a short sequence of   
    number words  ('one', 'two', 'three') and the items they represent, usually having to point while counting.

• The cardinality principle, grasped between the ages of 4 and 5, states that the last number in a counting sequence 
    indicates the quantity of items in the set. ("One, two three. There are three crayons.")

•  Blocks that have mathematical proportions teach numeracy at a sensorimotor level, including a 'gut' feeling for    
    addition,  fractions and division. (It takes two medium blocks to make one long block and one medium block is only 
   half as long as the long block, but you need four of the long small blocks to make a wall as long as the long block.

•  Cross-cultural research suggests that basic arithmetic knowledge emerges universally, although ways of representing number vary.

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN MENTAL DEVELOPMENT:
Tests for preschoolers sample a wide range of mental abilities, but are not good predictors of later intelligence and academic achievement until age 5 or 6..

1.    Verbal questions on intelligence tests measure capacities such as vocabulary and sentence  memory. Nonverbal questions assess spatial reasoning.
2.    Intelligence tests do not sample the full range of human abilities, and performance can be affected by cultural and situational factors. Specific testing conditions help low-SES preschoolers improve performance.
3. Cultural bias in intelligence testing is a hotly debated topic.

Home Environment and Mental Development This is a special version of the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) test which assesses aspects of 3- to 6-year-olds’ home lives that support intellectual growth.

Preschoolers who develop well intellectually have homes rich in educational toys and books, and parents who arc warm and affectionate, who stimulate language and academic knowledge, who make reasonable demands for mature behavior, and who solve conflicts with reasoning rather than force.

The home environment plays a major role in the generally poorer intellectual performance of low-SES children in comparison to their higher-SES peers.

Preschool and Child Care

1.   Currently, 65 percent of American preschool-age children have mothers who are employed.
2.   ‘Preschool’ usually  refers to half-day programs with planned educational experiences aimed at enhancing development In contrast, ‘child care’ identifies a variety of arrangements
3.   Types of Preschool
           a.  Child-centered preschools have teachers who provide a wide variety of activities to choose from,  and   most of 
                the day is devoted to free play.
           b.  In academic preschools, teachers structure the program with academic repetition and drill;  informal play is 
                de-emphasized.
           c.  Research shows that emphasizing formal academic training in early childhood  undermines motivation and 
                emotional well-being.
4.   Early Intervention for At-Risk Preschoolers

• Project Head Start is a federal program that provides low-income children with a or two of preschool education before school entry and that encourages parental involvement in children’s development.

• Research with Head Start children reveals that children who attended the programs scored higher in IQ and academic achievement than did controls during the first 2 to 3 years of elementary school. In addition, they  remained ahead on measures of real-life adjustment into adolescence. They were less  likely to be placed in special education classes or retained in grade, and a greater number graduated from high school. A separate report showed benefits lasting into  young adulthood.

• However, the benefits of Head Start are easily undermined when children do not have continuing access to high-quality educational supports. Despite Head Start children’s declining test scores, their ability to meet school requirements is a remarkable intervention outcome. This may be due to program effects on parents, who create better rearing environments. By emphasizing developmental goals for both parents and children, program benefits might be extended.

• Head Start currently serves only about 1/3 of eligible children. Yet, Head Start and other interventions like it are highly cost effective.  Because of its demonstrated returns to society, a move was underway, prior to this administration,  to expand and strengthen Head Start by starting intervention earlier, sustaining it longer, and intensifying services directed at parents and children.

5. Child Care 

• Preschoolers exposed to poor-quality child care in the United States score lower on measures of cognitive and social skills.

• Four important factors in high-quality child care are group size, caregiver-child ratio, caregiver’s educational preparation, and caregiver’s personal commitment to learning about and caring for children.

Educational Television

• In early and middle childhood, boys watch slightly more TV than girls do. In addition, low SES, ethnic minority children are more frequent viewers.

• Research shows that Sesame Street works well as an academic tutor.

• Children’s programs with slow-paced action and easy-to-follow story lines lead to more elaborate make-believe play.

• Some evidence suggests that heavy TV viewing takes children away from activities that promote cognitive development.

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

  1.  By age 6, a child will have acquired around 10,000 words, having made rapid gains in vocabulary.

• Fast mapping is connecting a new word with an underlying concept after only a brief encounter.

• Young preschoolers seem to acquire labels for objects especially rapidly. Words for actions are soon added in large numbers, as well as modifiers that refer to noticeable features.

  2.   Strategies for Word Learning

• The principle of mutual exclusivity is the assumption by children in the early stages of vocabulary growth that words mark entirely separate (nonoverlapping) categories.

• According to the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, children deduce many word meanings by observing how words are used in the structure of sentences.

• Preschoolers often rely on social cues to identify word meanings.

• As early as age 2, children coin new words, and preschoolers extend language meanings through metaphors involving concrete, sensory comparisons.

• Children’s cognitive capacities in interaction with the environment guide word learning.

   3.   Grammatical Development

• Grammar refers to the way we combine words into meaningful phrases and sentences.

• Between ages 2 and 3, English-speaking children use simple sentences that follow a subject-verb-object word order

• Overegularization is the application of regular grammatical rules to words that are exceptions.

• By age 4 to 5, children form embedded sentences, tag questions, and indirect objects. By the end of early childhood, children use most of the grammatical constructions of their language competently.

    4.  Strategies for Acquiring Grammar 

• According to semantic bootstrapping, young children rely on word meanings to figure out grammatical rules.

• Others take the view that children acquire grammar through direct observations of the structure of their language.

• Other theorists propose that children do not start with an innate knowledge of grammatical rules, as Chomsky hypothesized, but they do have a special language-making capacity, a set of procedures for analyzing the language they hear that supports their discovery of grammatical regularities.

• Intense controversy continues over how children acquire language.

 Becoming an Effective Conversationalist 

      1.   Pragmatics is the practical, social side of language that is concerned with how to engage effectively and 
            appropriately in communication with others.
      2.   At the beginning of early childhood in face-to-face interactions, children take turns, respond appropriately to their 
            partners’ remarks, and maintain a topic over time.
      3.   The presence of older siblings provides a language environment that supports acquiring language pragmatics.
      4.   Preschoolers’ speech appears less mature in highly demanding situations in which they cannot see their listeners’ 
            reactions or rely on conversational aids, such as gestures and objects to talk about.

 Supporting Language Learning in Early Childhood 

      1.    Opportunities for conversational give-and-take with adults promote language progress.
      2.    Sensitive, caring adults give helpful, explicit feedback and do not overcorrect a child’s language mistakes.
      3.    Expansions are adult responses that elaborate on a child’s comments, thereby increasing its complexity.
      4.    Recasts are responses that restate children’s incorrect speech into a more mature form.