CHD2210 Child Development Final Study Guide Child Growth and Development Dr Krantz Chapters 9 10 12 13 Chapter 9 Cognitive Development in the Preschool Years Gradually learn to think symbolically Thinking and premeditation Preoperational Development Preoperational development period from 3 6 years of age o Operational refers to the logical systems of thought which eventually emerge in middle childhood o Piaget describes preschoolers as incapable of advanced forms of reason pre operational o How a child perceives his world active seeking of information not cognitive Tend to miss the big picture Only focus in on detail The Symbolic Function Symbolic reasoning child passes second birthday o Able to create mental symbols aka images o That stand for objects events and actions in the real world o Children remain impulsive Deferred imitation children observe the behavior of a model and imitate that behavior after a delay and after the model is no longer present Store and retrieve information Achieved at best when child reaches certain goals Symbolic pretend play children pretend that an object is something other than what it really is Playing imaging fantasy worlds with toys or whatever Very important for social and emotional development Language tends to displace symbolic reasoning as the child reaches 4 5 years old o Unless you challenge children to use imagery displacement occurs o Distinct cognitive skills required to initiate and sustain pretend play Shifting Context 2 3 year old children require support from play setting to initiate and sustain their presence Real kitchen to play kitchen Substituting Objects Substitute one object for another in pretend play Young toddlers need a doll to play doll As they get older can use anything as a doll Typically appears around 3 4 years old Such as dolls talking to each other 3rd year in children Substituting Other Agents for Oneself How children use agents in their pretense Sequencing and Socialization of Pretend Episodes pretense begins with single acts children coordinate such acts into sequences of increasing length and complexity through the preschool years Police catch bad guys housekeepers clean o Mental Images internal representations of external objects or events Think about objects when they aren t present The Advent of Preconcepts Centration pre school aged children tend to focus their attention on minute and often inconsequential aspects of their experience o They think solely of one thing i e babysitter s earrings the zoo only a lion s head Preconcepts disorganized illogical representations of the child s experiences o Provide a less than adequate representation of children s experiences establishes a foundation for the eventual emergence of logical concepts in the subsequent stage of cognitive development o Kids get messed up on time sequences cause and effect imagine things that don t happen o Preconceptual understanding of everything in their life o Self preconcept they don t understand themselves o Syncritism describes gathering together of the little bits and pieces of the child s mind which forms the preconcept o Decenter their thinking as they grow older Transductive Reasoning Thinking with Preconcepts Preconcepts limits the quality of preschool age children s reasoning and problem solving o Induction we derive general principles from particular examples Teachers favor girls in each of his classes because girls are teacher s pets Look for commonalities that allow you to take individual samples to come up with an answer o Deduction general principles to predict particular outcomes Next teacher will be likely to favor girls o Transduction reasoning within the unsystematic collections of images which constitute their preconcepts Us at our worst vs preschoolers at their best Egocentrism Egocentrism the child s inability to conceptualize the perspective of other individuals o Difficulty seeing the world as others see it Three mountain problem children between 4 and 12 were shown a 3 dimensional model of a mountain scene Irreversibility Classification o Children under 8 consistently identified their own view as that of the doll Irreversibility the notion that preschoolers cannot mentally reverse their transductive sequences of thought o Unable of mentally reversing the concept of the sister relationship o Preschoolers can think things apart but cannot put them back together o Find way up a structure but cannot go back down Classification the tendency to group objects on the basis of particular sets of characteristics Piaget asked children to sort geometric forms that varied on two or more dimensions such as size shape and color Classify things into subclasses cows are animals animals are not cows o Stage 1 5 years and younger no overall plan for sorting pictures made with objects o Stage 2 6 8 slightly more organized non graphic collections children unable to classify on two dimensions simultaneously o Stage 3 later childhood to early adolescence understood the relationship the rule of class inclusion Successfully classified using multiple dimensions Quantitative Reasoning Quantitative reasoning refers to the ability to estimate the amount of things and changes in the amounts of things in terms of number size weight volume speed time and distance o Concepts of quantity children become aware that things in nature exist in specific amounts and that those amounts only change when certain actions are carried out Conservation the notion that certain attributes of objects and events may remain unchanged despite transformations or changes in other attributes o Concepts of Number o Concepts of Counting 1 1 correspondence understanding of quantity equivalence Not apparent in preoperational children Achieved at concrete operations 7 8 Preschool children can conserve number if the task is kept simple One to one principle one item counted once number used only once Stable order principle number names said properly and consistently The cardinal principle they understand that the last number they counted is how many items there are The abstraction principle virtually anything can be counted ideas values emotions Not a problem with tangible objects The order irrelevance principle the order in which objects counted is irrelevant These concepts are typically applied towards the end of the preschool years Appearance and Reality Distinguishing appearance and reality adults generally sense that appearances do not always reflect reality people do
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