Chapter Nine

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Chapter Nine

• The Play Years
• Cognitive Development

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Development Fact or Myth

• A 3-year-old is likely to believe that the same
  amount of ice cream is actually more when it is
  transferred from a large bowl to a small bowl.
• Research reveals that 2- to 6-year-old children
  are much less logical than Piaget believed.
• Older children use private speech less
  effectively than younger ones.
• Most 3 year-olds understand that beliefs can be
  false.
• Having an older brother or sister delays the
  development of Theory of Mind
• Early childhood seems to be a sensitive period
  for emergent literacy.
• By age 6, childrens vocabulary includes an
  average of 10,000 words
• A preschooler who says, You comed up and hurted
  me is demonstrating a lack of understanding of
  English grammar
• Preschool education programs such as Head Start
  have been a disappointing failure in terms of
  compensating for childrens impoverished home
  environments.

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How Young Children Think

• Piaget
• believed young children were limited by their
  egocentric perspective

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Preoperational Thought

• 1. Appearance ignores all attributes except
  appearance
• A girl given a short haircut may think shes a
  boy
• 2. Static Reasoning assumes the world is
  unchanging
• Surprised to see preschool teacher shopping!
• 3. Irreversibility cannot reverse a process to
  restore attribute
• -cry about lettuce on hamburger, watch mom take
  it off, but still cry
• Secretly take the hamburger and bring it BACK!

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Piaget believed that childrens thoughts were
rigid and influenced by the way things appear at
the moment

• Centration child focuses on one aspect of a
  situation
• Lions and tigers are not cats
• Daddy is not a brother
• - Egocentric everyone thinks and sees as
  I do
• (3 mountain problem)
• Animistic Thinkers inanimate objects have
  lifelike qualities
• (the sun is mad at the clouds)

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Conservation and Logic

• Thinking is intuitive rather than logical
• Conservationprinciple that amount of substance
  is unaffected by changes in appearance
• applied to liquids, numbers, matter, length
• understanding develops after age 7, and then
  slowly and unevenly

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Conservation and Logic, cont.

• Appearance
• Static Reasoning
• Irreversibility

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Piaget

• Limitations of Piagets Research
• Piaget underestimated the conceptual ability of
  young children and infants
• designing his experiments to reveal what children
  seemed not to understand, rather than to identify
  what they could understand
• relied on the childs words rather than the
  childs nonverbal signs in play context

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Vygotsky

• Children as Apprentices
• cognitive development is embedded in a social
  context
• curious and observant
• ask questions

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Vygotsky

• Children as Apprentices
• apprentice in thinking
• a person whose cognition is stimulated and
  directed by older more skilled members of society
• guided participation
• the process by which people learn from others who
  guide their experiences and explorations

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Vygotsky

• Children do not strive alone their efforts are
  embedded in social context
• How do they do this?
• Children ask QUESTIONS!
• How do machines work? Why weather changes? Where
  the sky ends?
• parents guide young childrens cognitive growth
  in many ways
• present new challenges for learning
• offer assistance and instruction
• encourage interest and motivation

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Vygotsky

• Children as Apprentices
• guided participation

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Scaffolding

• Scaffoldingsensitive structuring of childs
  participation in learning encounters
• Zone of proximal development (ZPD) skills too
  difficult for child to perform alone but that can
  be performed with guidance and assistance of
  adults or more skilled children
• lower limit of ZPD can be reached independently
• upper limit of ZPD can be reached with assistance
• ZPD is a measure of learning potential

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How to Solve a Puzzle

• Guidance and motivation
• structure task to make solution more attainable
• provide motivation
• Guided participation
• partners (tutor and child) interact
• tutor sensitive and responsive to needs of child
• eventually, because of such mutuality, child able
  to succeed independently

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Scaffolding, cont.

• Private speech internal dialogue when people
  talk to themselves through which new ideas are
  developed and reinforced
• verbal interaction is a cognitive tool
• Helps guide behavior
• Gradually becomes more silent
• Used more for hard tasks
• Peaked at age 4 for the most intelligent
  children, age 5-7 for average and disappeared by
  age 9 for almost all. (Kolhberg)
• What does this finding say to early childhood
  educators?
• Social mediation use of speech to bridge gap
  between childs current understanding and what is
  almost understood

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Vygotsky

• Language as a Tool
• private speech
• internal dialogue that occurs when people talk to
  themselves (either silently or out loud)
• social mediation
• a function of speech by which a persons
  cognitive skills are refined and extended through
  both formal instruction and casual conversation

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Childrens Theories

• Theory-Theory
• the idea that children attempt to explain
  everything they see and hear by constructing
  theories

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Childrens Theories

• Belief and Reality Understanding the Difference
• a sudden leap of understanding occurs at about
  age 4
• between age 3 6 children come to realize that
  thoughts may not reflect reality

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Language

• Three-year-olds ask approximately how many
  questions per day?
• 50
• 100
• 200
• 300

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Language

• critical period
• a time when a certain development must happen if
  it is ever to happen
• sensitive period
• a time when a certain type of development is most
  likely to happen and happens most easily

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Language

• Vocabulary
• Age 2 200 words
• Age 6 10,000 words
• 10 words per day
• HOW DO THEY DO THIS?
• Fast-mapping connect a new word with a concept
• Label
• 1. Objects (dog),
• 2. Actions (ran),
• 3. Modifiers (big)
• Use words creatively to fill in the gaps (fire
  engine in my tummy stomach)

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Language

• Emergent literacyskills needed to learn to read
• Is early childhood a sensitive or a critical
  period for language development?
• Ages 2 to 6 do seem to be a sensitive perioda
  time when a certain type of development occurs
  most rapidly

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Language

• Grammar the way we combine words
• Preschoolers grasp of grammar is remarkable
• Overregularization applying grammatical rules to
  words that are exceptions.
• I breaked my car
• I runned fast
• My foots hurt
• Conversation
• Pragmatics how to engage in communication with
  others? When to take turns? When to respond?
• Adults responses to children fosters this
• Less effective when a child cannot see the
  speaker (telephone)

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Language

• Supporting Language Development
• 1. Conversational give-and-take with adults
• 2. Adult feedback without overcorrecting
  mistakes

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Language

• Two ways adults can foster language development
• Expansions elaborating on the childs speech
• I went swimming
• Recasts restructure childs incorrect speech
  into a more mature form
• I gotted a new pair of shoes.

• Expansions
• 1. This is my doggie
• 2. Were going to grandmas
• 3. I went fishing.
• Recasts
• 1. I goed to Joeys house.
• 2. My puzzle broked.
• 3. I falled down.
• 4. Daddy goed to work.

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Early-Childhood Education
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Early-Childhood Education

• Costs and Benefits
• quality early-childhood education matters
• financial aspects are especially significant
• parents pay the bulk of the cost or preschool in
  the United States
• quality child care
• safety
• adequate space and equipment
• low adult-child ratio
• positive social interaction among children and
  adults
• trained staff and educated parents
• continuity helps
• How long has each staff member worked at the
  center?