Child Development 2011 Chapter 9 Cognitive Development in The Preschool Years Can have logic errors on content because it is a slow and difficult challenge for the child to learn to think symbolically Piaget s Preoperational Stage of Development 3 6 years preoperational stage of development Operational the logical systems of thought that emerge in middle childhood Preoperational learning the reverse of things and categories i e All horses are animals but not all animals are horses The Symbolic Function End of age 2 cognitive development s major turning Begin to use symbolic functioning ability to use symbols Forms of symbolic functioning Deferred Imitation Symbolic pretend play Mental images Language Deferred Imitation Imitating a model that is not present Imitates behavior when it is adapted Greatly expands children s ability to solve daily problems I e a toddler randomly trying to use a fork after watching their parents do it Child Development 2011 Symbolic or Pretend Play Pretending an object is something other than itself i e pretending to drink from an empty cup Makes the world unlimited for make believe Big impact on social and emotional development Shifting Context play Substituting Objects Using one object as another Substituting Other Agents for Oneself 2 and 3 yr olds need support from the play setting to start and keep their pretend i e pretending to eat in a kitchen older kids can shift context preform their behaviors outside of setting Instead of the child only talking to their doll other dolls can talk to their doll They develop the ability to use agents in their pretense The child can get their doll to run and play with other dolls Sequencing and Socialization of Pretend Episodes Increasing the length and complexity of pretense i e combing hair combing hair putting on makeup and getting dressed Mental images internal representation of external objects or events private idiosyncratic meanings derived from personal experience Child Development 2011 The Advent of Preconceptions Centration When children focus attention on minute and inconsequential aspects It is unsystematic samplings of isolated bits of info i e only remember babysitter s bright earing Disorganized illogical representations of the child s experiences i e only remembering popcorn and a cage after going to a zoo Establish a foundation for the eventual emergence of logical conceptions Transductive Reasoning Thinking with Preconcepts Preconcepts limits a child s ability for reasoning and problem solving Derive general principles from specific examples Preconcepts Induction Deduction Transduction Using general principles to predict particular outcomes Preoperational children cannot think inductively or deductively Insetead they think transductively Reasoning within the unsystematic collections of images which constitutes i e a child may reason that little red riding hood took her red hood from the wolf preconcepts because the wolf is bad Child Development 2011 Egocentrism Inability to conceptualize the perspective of other individuals Children struggle to see the world from another perspective Three Mountain problem Child look at the mountain and could not draw it as if they were looking through someone else s eye kids under 8 Irreversibility Preschoolers cannot mentally reverse their transductive sequence of thought i e Do you have a sister yes Does your sister have a sister no inability to reverse the concept of this relationship This limits the ability of problem solving i e can take something apart but cannot put it back together Child Development 2011 Reasoning in Specific Content Domains Classification Quantitative reasoning Distinguishing between appearance and reality Classification Class Inclusion The tendency to group objects on the basis of particular sets of characteristics A class must be smaller than any more inclusive class which it is contained Know that all dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs Piaget s Experiment with Kids and Sorting of Geometric Objects Stage 1 5 and younger No plan of sorting but produced graphic collections pictures i e arranging the shapes to form a house Stage 2 6 8 Stage 3 9 Quantitative Reasoning Produced a series of collections of objects based on different dimensions of similarity nongraphic collections Understood the relationship rule of class inclusion Ability to estimate the amount of things and changes in the things in terms of number Child Development 2011 size weight volume speed time and distance i e force needed to throw a ball Quantity Realizing that things in nature exists in specific amounts and that those amounts only change certain actions are carried out addition and subtraction conservation the notion that certain attributes of objects and events may remain unchanged despite transformations I e the video of the water in the glasses Glasses had the same amount Researcher poured one glass content into a taller glass The taller glass made it look like there was more in the glass Number had more Counting i e having two even rows of 6 beans Then spreading one row out and asking which row Young preoperational children show no understanding To give a child credit for counting ability the child must be able to systematically assign numbers to items in an array using the five principles of one to one stable order cardinal abstraction and order irrelevance One to one Stable Order The Cardinal Only one distinctive number name must be given to a number Preschoolers tend to error as the number of items increase Number names must be assigned in a stable repeatable order Sequence of number names is consistent The final number in a sequence is the total number of items in the sequence Child Development 2011 Abstraction Order Irrelevance Virtually anything can be counted Order in counting is irrelevant i e if a child were counting the stuffed animals in her room the bear could be counted first or second or third as long as it is eventually assigned a number Two year olds engage in counting like behavior they assign numbers to objects unsystematically repeating and reversing number assignments and violating 1 1 correspondence Appearance and Reality Young children have difficulty between appearance and reality DON T NEED TO KNOW THE REST OF CHAPTER 9 Memory and Language Chapter 10 We begin to observe social pretense by the end of the second year when toddlers begin to pretend that an object is something other than what it really is making believe a stick
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