Early ChildhoodCognitive Development

Early Childhood

Age group 2-6 years.Period of rapid physical, mental, emotional, social and language development

Early Childhood

•Foundation period of life.•Period of slow growth and rapid development.•“Pre-School age”.

Cognitive Development

(Conservation Concepts, Classifying, Ordering Objects, Memory Abilities)

Pre-operational Stage

Capable of representational thought such as through drawings.

Ability to engage in pretend play.

Cognitive Development

Limitations inPre-operational

Stage

• Egocentrism• Concept of

Conservation• Logical Inferences

Cognitive Development

Limitations in Pre-operational Stage

EgocentrismPiaget noted that children do not yet understand concrete

logic, cannot mentally manipulate information, and are unable to take the point

of view of other people.

Concept of Conservation

The fact that some of properties of objects remain the same while other properties are changing.

In Piaget’s theory, preoperational children do not grasp this concept.

Limitations in Pre-operational Stage

Limitations in Pre-operational Stage

Logical Inferences Children's thinking in pre-operational is dominated by the concrete reality of the

way things look.

Concept of Conservation

By Jean Piaget

Conservation of Number

Conservation of Length

Conservation of Mass

Conservation of Area

Conservation of Displaced Liquid

Development of Memory Skills

NO FACE LIKE NO OTHER

Recognition

•Ability to identify an object, person, or quality that was encountered before.Recall

•Ability to reproduce material from memory

Recognition vs. Recall

4-year olds are usually able to recall only three or four items

Pre-schooler’s recognition memory is much better than their recall

Because they have taken in-or encoded- information and retained over time.

Poor Recall attributed to

Use of strategies for retrieval Pre-schoolers don’t memorize Use of Categorization strategies Not based from semantic content

Lack of knowledge about the materials

Poor Recall attributed to

Lack of knowledge about memory itself Metamemory

• Knowledge about memory itself- about memory tasks, strategies and conditions

• Pre-schoolers cannot explain that remembering the gist of a short story is easier that reciting it verbatim.

Young Children’s Theory of Mind• The young child’s ideas about the nature of

mental activities, especially those of people around them.

• Children who have daily interactions are more advanced in their understanding of false beliefs than those with fewer interactions

Preliteracy & Early Mathematical Skills

Phonemic Awareness -the ability to hear and manipulate sounds of spoken language

Cardinality – the concept that the last number in a counting series represents the quantity of objects in a set. Dialogic reading Exposure to the alphabet and to printed

materials of all kinds.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Approach• He emphasized the contexts in

which children’s learning takes place.

• He stressed the role of guided participation in children’s learning.

• Children learn how to perform the to become independent participants in activities that are valued by their culture.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Approach

Scaffolding– adults support that allow young children to begin to participate in family activities.• By gradually decreasing the

amount of scaffolding they provide, parents enable children to act independently.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Approach• Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) the distance

between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers

• Private speech arises out of children’s internalization of speech that they have heard from others.