Chapter 8 Cognitive Development in Early Childhood Educational Principles Derived from Piaget s Theory o Discovery learning the idea that children learn through discovering themselves o Sensitivity to children s readiness to learn play to your child s interests Developmentally appropriate practice o Acceptance of individual difference Piaget called egocentric speech Vygotsky viewed as foundation for all higher cognitive processes Children s Private Speech o Helps guide behavior o Used more when tasks are difficult after errors or when confused when in the Zone zone of proximal development o Gradually becomes more silent Decreases as the child grows older But may reappear when confronted by an especially difficult task Children with learning and behavior problems use for longer o Arises out of children s internalization of speech they have heard from others o Especially likely when the child is working on challenging problems Relationship of Private Speech to Task Difficulty Among 5 and 6 Year Olds Vygotsky s Sociocultural Approach o Cognitive growth seems to originate in their social experience with older children and adults o Vygotsky challenged some of Piaget s views o Agreed Kids are active motivated learners Seeking to understand the world Emphasized how culture and social interaction guides cognitive development o Focus What can a child do with assistance o Center of Socio cultural Theory o ZPD Zone of Proximal Development o ZPD made up of skills ideas and understandings abilities just beyond reach but can occur with support They can t do it by themselves YET but they CAN do it with some assistance o The role of the adult or older child Support child s efforts with scaffolding Scaffolding o Occurs when people provide learning opportunities Materials Hints Clues o When a child is stuck Key only give as much support as needed because they can do it with assistance o Once skill is mastered scaffold not needed Social Origins of Early Childhood Cognition o To promote cog dev social interaction must have Scaffolding Lev Vygotsky a sensitive structuring of the young child s participation in learning encounters The tutor s role is o to lead the child o to arouse the child s interest o simplify the task o maintain the child s interest by keeping the activity within her o make sure the task is appropriate to the child s level of cognitive ability development o control frustration by anticipating problems o convey enthusiasm o Vygotsky said that people did this naturally A teacher lifts a child to help her place another block on a tower of blocks Changing the level of support given as a child begins to master an activity o When the child has little notion of how to do a task the adult uses direct instructions breaking down the task into manageable units suggesting strategies o As competence increases effective scaffolders gradually Guided participation withdraw support Broader than scaffolding Kids learn values practices via participation in family and community activities Not necessarily communication Learning social and cultural lessons on their own via observations Vygotsky s Theory and Early Childhood Education o A Vygotskyan classroom promotes Assisted discovery with teachers guiding children s learninf with explanations verbal prompts An emphasis on peer collaboration o Make believe play is the ideal context for fostering cognitive development in preschool o Make believe play rich in private speech Information Processing Approach o Recall Looks at intelligence by breaking it down into its component processes Paying attention to a stimulus Encoding Info Retrieving Info from memory Comparing Different Pieces of Info Information Processing How preschoolers process information o Limitations and advances in preschoolers ability to Pay attention to the environment Remember Develop strategies and solve problems Understand their own mental processes and those of others o Increases in abilities in Attention Memory skills Sustained attention increases sharply between 2 and 3 1 2 years Impulsivity decreases in early childhood From brain changes and caregiving o Frontal lobe basal ganglia growth o Child s environment and parenting o Children who are experiencing warm and sensitive caregiving and stimulating responsive homes gain control of their attention earlier Attention ability o Greatly improves during preschool years o Deficits of child s control of attention Salient vs relevant only pay attention to the most catching things Planfulness o Child s ability related to achievement related skills and social Memory retention of information over time o Memory comes in many forms Sensory Memory o Subconscious picking up of sensory information from environment o Fleeting impressions Working Short term memory o Conscious short term representations of what one is actively thinking with at a given time o Digital Span Task Span increases during early childhood How many numbers a kid can remember 2 digits at ages 2 to 3 5 digits at age 7 o Memory abilities stimulated by interactions with adults as well as brain growth Long Term Memory Development o In the first few years of life children are capable of basic information processing o They do remember some events and details quite clearly o But their memories seem unpredictable because they do not encode store retrieve information in the way they will when they are older In the first few years of life the human brain is not yet fully mature o The corpus callosum a network of structures connecting the two hemispheres is not fully myelinated and their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed o As a result retrieving encoded memories may be more difficult for young children than for adults Memory Development o Young children have had little experience with retrieval strategies that let them pull information from long term storage easily o Memories of emotional experiences are easier to form store o Source memory the ability to recall who said or did something and retrieve remember or where the event occurred Is difficult for everyone especially difficult for young children o Children do however have an ability to store useful representations of past events o One especially useful tool is the script generic memory a mental road map of a familiar recurring set of events o Most children have developed some scripts for o eating meals going to bed taking a bath celebrating a birthday by the age of 3 Memory in Early Childhood o Recognition is better than