Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

1
Cognitive Developmentin Early Childhood

• Psychology 333
• Child Psychology
• Dennis H. Karpowitz

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Piaget - Preoperational Stage

• Language
• Make-Believe Play
• Spatial Representation.

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Limitations of Preoperational Thought

• Rigid thinking
• Egocentrism
• Animistic thinking
• Inability to conserve
• Transductive reasoning
• Difficulties with hierarchical classification

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Recent Research on Preoperational Thought

• Unfamiliar
• Complex
• Illogical thought
• Hierarchical classification
• Appearance versus reality.

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Evaluation of thePreoperational Stage

• Familiar
• Gradually more logic
• Training helps

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Piaget and Education

• Discovery learning
• Sensitivity to childrens readiness to learn
• Acceptance of individual differences.

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Vygotskys SocioculturalTheory

• Childrens private speech
• Piagets view
• Vygotskys view
• Social origins of early childhood cognition
• Intersubjectivity
• Scaffolding.

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Vygotsky and Education

• Active participation
• Acceptance of individual differences
• Assisted discovery
• Peer collaboration
• Cooperative learning experiences.

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Information Processing

• Attention
• Memory
• Less effective at using memory strategies
• Rehearsal
• Organizing
• Episodic memory gtgt autobiographical memory
• Scripts become increasingly complex
• Application to child sexual abuse cases

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Young Child'sTheory of Mind

• Metacognition
• Development
• Think, remember, pretend
• Beliefs and desires
• False beliefs
• Similarities across cultures

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Where does the Theoryof the Mind Originate?

• Early forms of communication
• Joint attention social referencing
• Imitation modeling
• Language
• Social interaction

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Limitations of the ChildsTheory of the Mind

• Process thinking de-emphasized
• Outcome thinking emphasized
• Mind as a passive container of info.

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Early Literacy

• Understand written language
• Emergent literacy
• Writing as a direct representationof people and
  objects
• Experience is the key.

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Mathematical Reasoning

• Ordinality
• Cardinality

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Individual Differences

• Verbal and nonverbal
• Cultural bias in testing issues
• Home environment gt rich instimulating
  experiences
• gt64 of Mothers of young childrenare employed.

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Preschools

• Part-time learning and developing centers
• Child centered preschools
• Academic preschools
• May undermine motivation emotional well-being
• At-Risk-Preschoolers
• Project Head Start

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Day Care

• Full-time development centers
• 17 High Quality
• Poor quality day care results in
• Lower cognitive abilities
• Lower social abilities

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Day Care Quality

• Stability continuity of teachers/programs
• Group size
• Caregiver/child ratio
• Caregivers education
• Caregivers personal commitment
• Safe and stimulating environment

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Educational Television

• Boys watch more TV than girls
• Low SES watch more TV than middle SES
• Sesame Street is effective
• May widen gap between advantagedand disadvantaged

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Sesame Street
HI
Advantaged
Ability
Disadvantaged
Low
Time
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Language Development

• Fast mapping
• Mutual exclusivity myth
• Syntactic bootstrapping
• From simple sentences tocomplex grammar
• Overregularization
• Semantic bootstrapping.

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Conversation

• Pragmatic
• Face-to-face
• Older siblings help
• Less mature in low queue situations

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Adult Help with Language

• Give-and-take opportunities
• Sensitive caring adults - feedback
• Explicit feedback
• Avoid overcorrection
• Adult expansions
• Adult recasts..