chapter 7- part 2: the preschool years

Discovering the Lifespan - Robert S. Feldman

Copyright © 2009 Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458. All rights reserved.

Chapter 7- part 2: The Preschool Years

Module 3

Cognitive Development inthe Preschool Years



INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT



PIAGET- A Quick Review

• Knowledge is product of direct motor behavior

• All children pass through series of stages– Universal– Fixed order

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What does Piaget tell us?

• Quantity and quality of knowledge changes

• Focus on change in children’s understanding

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Preoperational Thinking

• Preoperational Stage

• Time of stability and change

• Use of operations at end of stage

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Relationship Between Language and Thought

• Symbolic function:– Ability to use symbols, words, or object to

represent something that is not physically present

• Language allows preschoolers to:– Represent actions symbolically– Think beyond present to future– Consider several possibilities at same time

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Centration

What you see is what you think!

Which row has more buttons?

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Incomplete Understanding of Transformation

Preoperational children

• Unable to envision successive transformations

• Ignore middle steps

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Egocentrism

• Preschoolers do not understand that others have different perspectives from their own

• Egocentric thought takes two forms– Lack of awareness that others see things from

a different physical perspective– Failure to realize that others may hold

thoughts, feelings, and points of view that differ from theirs

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Emergence of Intuitive Thought

• Curiosity blossoms and answers to wide variety of questions sought

• Often act as authorities on particular topics

• Leads preschoolers to believe that they know answers to all kinds of questions, but there is little or no logical basis for this confidence

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Late Stages of Intuitive Thought

• Slowly certain qualities prepare children for more sophisticated forms of reasoning – Begin to understand the notion of functionality– Begin to show an awareness of the concept of

identity

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Evaluating Piaget’s Approach

Positive• Masterful observer• Useful way to consider

progressive advances in child cognition

Negative• More recent experimental

work suggests higher child performance on tasks involving conservation, reversibility, transformation, and ability to count

• Contentions about continuity of development as theorized in Piaget’s stages

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Review and ApplyREVIEW• According to Piaget, children in the

preoperational stage develop symbolic function, a qualitative change in their thinking that is the foundation of further cognitive advances.

• Preoperational children are hampered by a tendency toward egocentric thought.

• Recent developmentalists, while acknowledging Piaget’s gifts and contributions, take issue with his underestimation of preschoolers’ capabilities.

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Review and Apply

APPLY• Do you think it is possible to break a preschooler’s habit

of egocentric thought by directly teaching him to take another person’s point of view? Would showing him a picture of himself “hidden” behind a chair change his thinking? Why?

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INFORMATION PROCESSING AND VYGOTSKY’S

APPROACH TO COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT



Focus of Approaches

• Changes in kinds of “mental programs” that children use when approaching problems

• Changes analogous to way computer program becomes more sophisticated as a programmer modifies it on basis of experience

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Two Approaches

• Understanding numbers

• Memory development

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1, 2, 3, 7…11-T-hundred!

How can we tell when a preschooler knows how to count?



You must remember this…maybe!

• Recollections of events are sometimes, but not always, accurate – Typically accurate in responses to open-ended

questions – Partly determined by how soon memories are

assessed – Affected by cultural factors

• Autobiographical memory– Largely inaccurate before age 3– Not all last into later life

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Why are some preschool memories inaccurate?

• Preschoolers’ memories of familiar events often organized in scripts

• Scripts become more elaborate with age• Frequently repeated events meld into scripts• Particular instances of scripted event are

recalled with less accuracy than those that are unscripted in memory

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Any other causes of inaccuracies?

• Difficulty describing certain kinds of information, such as complex causal relationships, may oversimplify recollections

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SHE did it…I think!!Children’s Eyewitness Testimony

• Forensic developmental psychology– Embellishment characteristic of fragility, impressionability, and

inaccuracy of memory

– Memories susceptible to suggestions of adults asking them questions, especially repeatedly

– Children more prone to make inaccurate inferences about reasons behind others’ behavior and are less able to draw appropriate conclusions based on their knowledge of a situation

– Error rate is heightened when same question is asked repeatedly

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Information Processing in Perspective

PRO• Relies on well-defined

testable, processes which alternative approaches traditionally have paid little attention

• Provides a clear, logical, and full account of cognitive development

CON• Focuses on series of

single, individual cognitive processes

• Individual sequence of processes never adequately paint whole, comprehensive picture of cognitive development

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Vygotsky’s View of Cognitive Development

• Cognition result of social interactions in which children learn through guided participation

• Children gradually grow intellectually and begin to function on their own because of assistance that adult and peer partners provide

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Culture and Society Influences

• Nature of the partnership between developing children and adults and peers determined largely by cultural and societal factors

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Zone of Proximal Development

• Cognition increases through exposure to information that is new enough to be intriguing, but not too difficult

• Greater improvement with help = greater increases in zone of proximal development

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Scaffolding

• Support for learning and problem solving that encourages independence and growth

• Aids in development of overall cognitive abilities

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Cultural Tools

• Actual, physical items or intellectual and conceptual framework for solving problems– Language– Alphabetical and numbering schemes– Mathematical and scientific systems– Religious systems

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Assessing Vygotsky’s Perspective

PRO• Increasingly influential in

the last decade • Helps explain growing

body of research about importance of social interaction in promoting cognitive development

• Consistent with growing body of multicultural and cross-cultural research

CON• Lack of precision in

conceptualization of cognitive growth

• Sparse information about attention and memory develop and how children’s natural cognitive capabilities unfold

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Review and ApplyREVIEW• Proponents of information processing approaches argue

that quantitative changes in children’s processing skills largely account for their cognitive development.

• Instead of focusing on children’s cognitive limitations, developmentalists using an information processing approach focus on the cognitive advances that enable children to develop considerable abilities.

• Vygotsky believed that children develop cognitively within a context of culture and society. His theory includes the concepts of zone of proximal development and scaffolding.

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Review and Apply

APPLY• Do you agree with the view that information processing

approaches see too many trees and lose sight of the forest? Or do you think that Piaget saw too much forest without accounting for enough trees? Explain.

• In what ways have educators and others begun to apply Vygotsky’s ideas in schools and communities? Should governments take an active role in this?

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GROWTH OF LANGUAGE AND LEARNING



Language Development

During preschool years:• Sentence length increases at a steady pace• Syntax doubles each month• Enormous leaps in number of words used

through fast mapping

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What is fast mapping?

• New words are associated with their meaning after only brief encounter– By age 6, the average child has a vocabulary

of around 14,000 words– Vocabulary acquired at rate of nearly one new

word every 2 hours, 24 hours a day

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Preschool Language on the Grow

• Use plurals and possessive forms of nouns

• Employ the past tense

• Use articles

• Ask, and answer, complex questions

• Extend appropriate formation of words to new words

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Learning what is not said…

• Preschoolers also learn what cannot be said as they acquire principles of grammar

• Although they still make frequent mistakes, 3-year-olds – Follow principles of grammar most of time– Are correct in their grammatical constructions

more than 90 percent of time

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Do you ever talk to yourself?



I’m not talking to YOU…

Private Speech of Children• Speech by children that is spoken and

directed to themselves – Performs important function. – Serves to try out ideas, acting as sounding

board– Facilitates children’s thinking and helps them

control their behavior – Serves an important social function

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What about practical communication?

• Pragmatics is the aspect of language relating to communicating effectively and appropriately with others

• Helps children to understand the basics of conversations– Turn-taking– Sticking to a topic– What should and should not be said, according to the

conventions of society– Use of different language in various settings

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Social Speech

• Before the age of 3:– Speak only for their own entertainment– Apparently unaware if anyone else can understand

• During preschool years:– Begin to direct their speech to others– Want others to listen– Become frustrated when they cannot make

themselves understood– Begin to adapt their speech to others through

pragmatics 169



Learning from the Media

What do children learn from television?

What do children learn from the media?

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Saying No to the Show

American Academy of Pediatrics– Recommends that exposure to television

should be limited– Suggests that until age of 2, children watch no

television, and after that age, no more than 1 to 2 hours of quality programming each day

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What are the limits of preschoolers’ “television literacy”?

Preschool children • Often do not fully understand plots• Unable to recall significant story details • Make limited and often erroneous inferences

about motivations• Difficulty separating fantasy from reality

• Not able to critically understand and evaluate advertising messages

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So…would you let your young child watch?



Taking the pre out of preschool

• Increasing number of children in out-of-home care

• Some benefits to educational activities before formal schooling– Cognitive and social benefits from high

quality preschool experiences

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Varieties of Early Education

• Child care centers

• Family child care programs

• Preschools – Montessori– Reggio Emilia

• School-age child care

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How effective are early education programs?

Children in EE programs • Are more verbally fluent, show memory and

comprehension advantages, and achieve higher IQ scores than at-home children

• Are more self-confident, independent, and knowledgeable about social world in which they live than those who do not participate

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Any downside?Not all outcomes of outside-the-home

care are positiveChildren in child care:

– Are found to be less polite, less compliant, less respectful of adults, and sometimes more competitive and aggressive than their peers

– Have a slightly higher likelihood of being disruptive in class extending through the sixth grade (when spending 10+ weeks)

– Poor programs actually may harm children

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What makes a good program great?

Characteristics of Quality Child Care• Providers are well trained • Appropriate overall size and ratio of care providers to

children. • Curriculum is carefully planned and coordinated among

teachers • Language environment is rich• Caregivers are sensitive to children’s emotional and

social needs• Materials and activities are age appropriate• Basic health and safety standards are followed

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Why does the US lag behind?

• No coordinated national policy on preschool education– Decisions about education have traditionally

been left to states and local school districts– No tradition of teaching preschoolers– Status of preschools in United States is

traditionally low

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The Purpose of Preschool: An International View

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What justification could you use to support preschool readiness

programs with your tax dollars?

• Graduates of high quality programs less likely to repeat grades and more likely to graduate

• For every dollar spent on program, taxpayers saved seven dollars by time graduates reached age of 27



What do you know about Head Start?



Review and ApplyREVIEW• In the preschool years, children rapidly

increase in linguistic ability, developing an improved sense of grammar and shifting gradually from private to social speech.

• Preschoolers watch television at high levels with mixes consequences.

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Review and Apply

REVIEW• Preschool educational programs are

beneficial if they are of high quality, with trained staff, good curriculum, proper group sizes, and small staff-student ratios.

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Review and Apply

APPLY• Is private speech egocentric or useful? Do

adults ever use private speech? What functions does it serve?

• In your view, how do thought and language interact in preschoolers’ development? Is it possible to think without language? How do children who have been deaf from birth think?

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chapter 7- part 2: the preschool years

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