Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: Understanding Piaget's Pre-Operational Stage

1. Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: Seminar Week 7

2. Chapter 10: Cognitive Development in Early Childhood • Piaget’s Pre-Operational Stage • Language Development • Memory Development • Intelligence Testing • Early Childhood Education

3. Overview:Early Childhood Ages 2-6 • Physically stronger, increased balanced, improved fine motor skills (draw a person, cut along a line, fold a paper in half) • Can dress with help • Need supervision due to a lack of understanding of consequences and danger • Large language gains • Understand numbers, letter recognition • Interpret emotions of others • Some control of feelings and expressions • Development of imagination (magical thinking)

4. Guideposts for Study • 1. What are typical cognitive advances and immature aspects of preschool children's thinking? • 2. How does language improve, and what happens when its development is delayed?

5. Guideposts for Study • 3. What memory abilities expand in early childhood? • 4. How is preschoolers‘ intelligence measured, and what factors influence it? • 5. What purposes does early childhood education serve, and how do children make the transition to kindergarten?

6. Piaget: Pre-Operational Thought • ______________ – thought not limited by ordinary rules of logic (dominated by perceptions and egocentrism) • Advances in symbolic thought with a growing understanding of space, causality, identities, categorization, numbers, and language • Limited in the ability to perform operations (mental activity; follows rules of logic)

7. Cognitive Advances and Limitations - Early Childhood

8. Cognitive Advances During Early Childhood • 1. Use of symbols • 2. Understanding of identities • 3. Understanding of cause and effect • 4. Ability to classify • 5. Understanding of number • 6. Empathy • 7. Theory of Mind

9. Advances • 1. Use of Symbols • __________________ - The ability to use or mental representations such as words, numbers, or images (“I want ice cream” without having seen anything to trigger it) • Having symbols for things helps children to remember and think about them without having them physically present • Examples: pretend play, deferred imitation, language

10. Advances con’t… • Early Symbolic Development • Until about age ____ or later, most children do not reliably grasp the relationship between pictures, maps, or scale models and what they represent • Representational thought (____ months) – begin to understand that a picture represents something else • Enables them make more accurate judgments about spatial relationships

11. Advances con’t… • 2. Understanding of Identities • _____________ – concept that people and many things are basically the same even if they change in form, size, appearance • _____________ alterations do not change the nature of things

12. Advances con’t … • 3. Understanding of cause and effect • Understanding of familiar events enables them to think ___________ about the cause and effect • ie. Seeing a ball roll from behind the wall, Marie looks behind the wall for the person who kicked the ball

13. Advances con’t… • 4. Ability to classify • Requires a child to identify similarities and differences • By age ____, many children can classify by two criteria (ie. colour, & shape) • Begin to order many aspects of their lives • ie. People who are ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘friend’, non-friend

14. Advances con’t • 5. Understanding of number • By age ______ children have words for comparing quantities (ie. bigger/smaller, longer/shorter) • By age _, most children can count to 20 & can do simple addition/subtractraction • Children intuitively devise strategies for counting • How quickly they learn depends on culture (Video 2: Young Brazilian Math)

15. Advances con’t… • 6. Empathy • Ability to put oneself in another person’s place and feel what that person feels • It may be ________ (ie. baby crying when they see another baby cry), definitely at an early age • Social ______________ • Learning to gauge the feelings and intentions of others enables us to function as members of a family and a society

16. Advances con’t… • 7. Theory of Mind • Children become more aware of mental activity and the functioning of the mind • Between ________, children come to understand that: • thinking goes on inside the mind • that it can deal with either real or imaginary things • someone can be thinking of one thing while doing or looking at something else • that thinking is different from seeing, talking, touching, & knowing

17. Limitations of Pre-operational Thought • 1. Centration: inability to decentre • 2. Transductive Reasoning • 3. Focus on states rather than transformations • 4. Irreversibility • 5. Egocentrism • 6. Animism • 7. Inability to distinguish reality

18. Limitations • 1. Centration: inability to decentre • __________ – tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others • Cannot ________– think about several aspects of a situation at one time • Preschoolers come to illogical conclusions due to this limitation

19. Limitations con’t… • 2. Irreversibiltiy • Failure to understand that an operation can go in two or directions • 3. Focus on states rather than transformations • Failure to understand the significance of the transformation between states • ie. different size container does not change amount

20. Limitations con’t… • Conservation • Pre-operational children _______ to understand the fact that two things that are equal remain so even if their appearance is altered, so long as nothing is added or taken away (ie. juice glasses) • Video1: Piaget Conservation

22. Limitations con’t… • 4. Transductive reasoning • View one situation as the basis for another situation even when there is no logical casual relationship • ______ from one particular to another and see cause where none exists • ie. Think their ‘bad’ behaviour caused their own or another child’s illness

23. Limitations con’t • 5. Egocentrism • Young children centre so much on their own point of view that they ________ take in another’s point of view • Difficulty separating reality from what goes on in their heads • ie. three mountain task

24. Piaget’s three-mountain task. A preoperational child is unable to describe the “mountains” from the doll’s point of view- an indication of egocentrism, according to Piaget.

25. Limitations con’t… • 6. Animism • Tendency to attribute _______ to objects that are not alive (ie. rocks, plants) • ie. Amanda says that spring is trying to come but winter is saying “I won’t go” • Culture can affect beliefs – Japanese children were likely to attribute life like qualities to stones and chairs which in their culture are sometimes viewed as if they were alive

26. Limitations con’t… • 7. Inability to distinguish appearance from reality • Children confuse what is real with ________ appearance • ie. Put on a Halloween mask and they become someone else

27. Piagetian Approach: The Preoperational Child • Do Young Children Have Theories Of Mind? • By age 3, children's understanding of others' emotional and mental states is becoming more _______. They realize that a person who does not immediately find what she wants will keep looking. • At age __, children tend to believe that everyone else knows what they know and believes what they do

28. Language Development • Vocabulary • Learning on average ____new words a day since about 1 ½ years of age (understands 20,000 by age ____) • Fast mapping: Process by which a child absorbs the meaning of a new word after hearing it once or twice in conversation • The use of ________, a figure of speech in which a word or phrase that usually designates one thing is applied to another, becomes increasingly common in the preschool years (“grumpy old bear”)

29. Language Development • Private Speech (Table 10-4) • Talking aloud to oneself with no intent to communicate • _______ year olds playfully repeat rhythmic sounds; older children “think out loud” • Vygotsky believed that it helps young children to integrate language with thought • Normal and common in childhood, accounting for 20 to 50 percent of what _________ year-old children say

30. Language Development • Delayed Language Development • Some late speakers have a history of otitis media between ___ and ___months of age • Delayed language development can have far-reaching cognitive and psychosocial consequences • Children who do not speak or understand as well as their peers tend to be judged negatively by adults and other children

31. Language Development • Social Interaction and Preparation for Literacy • ____________ literacy: Preschoolers’ development of skills, knowledge, and attitudes that underlie reading and writing • Social interaction can promote emergent literacy • Reading to children is one of the most effective paths to literacy • Handout: Early Literacy

32. Information-Processing Approach: Memory Development • Forming Childhood Memories • ________ memory: Memory that produces scripts of familiar routines to guide behavior • age _____ • ________ memory: Long-term memory of specific experiences or events, linked to time and place (fade after a few weeks, months) • (age ___) • Autobiographical memory: Memory of specific events in one’s own life • age ___, increases slowly from ______

33. Intelligence: Psychometric & Vygotskian Approaches • Traditional Psychometric Measures • Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Individual intelligence test used to measure memory, spatial orientation, and practical judgment • Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, Revised: Individual intelligence test for children ages 3 to 7, which yields verbal and performance scores as well as a combined score

34. Intelligence: Psychometric andVygotskian Approaches • Influences on Measured Intelligence • The IQ score is a measure of how well a child can do certain tasks in comparison with others of the same age not about quantity of information • Factors that influence test results include temperament, match between cognitive style and the tasks posed, social and emotional maturity, ease in the testing situation, preliteracy or literacy skills, socioeconomic status, and ethnic background

35. Intelligence: Psychometric andVygotskian Approaches • Testing and Teaching Based on Vygotsky's Theory • Adults direct children's learning most effectively in the zone of proximal development (ZPD) with regard to tasks children are almost ready to accomplish on their own (tasks children are almost ready to accomplish on their own) • The ZPD, along with scaffolding, can help parents and teachers efficiently guide children's cognitive progress • This approach emphasizes potential rather than present achievement

36. If you were a preschool or kindergarten teacher, how helpful do you think it would be to know a child's IQ? the child's ZPD? • Example: 2 children with mental age of 7 yrs. With the help of leading questions, examples, & demonstrations, one can easily solve problems geared to mental age of 9, but the other one given the same assistance can only to tasks at a 7 ½ year old level • If we measure children by what they can do on their own (as traditional IQ tests do), their intelligence is about the same; but if we measure them by their immediate potential development (ZPD), they are quite different

37. Early Childhood Education • Compensatory Preschool Programs • Project Head Start, a federally funded program, was started in 1965 for children of low-income families in the United States (Aboriginal Head Start Program in Canada) • Aim of preparing children for elementary school • Effective in improving school readiness • The program provides medical, dental, and mental health care, social services, at least one hot meal a day, involves the community, cultural sensitivity • Highlights need for earlier and longer-lasting intervention

38. Is publicly funded compensatory education the best way to help poor children catch up?

39. Early Childhood Education • The Transition to Kindergarten • Many kindergartners now spend a full day in school rather than the traditional half day • Children spend less time on self-chosen tasks and more on worksheets and preparing to read & includes critical evaluation of abilities • Children who are close to their teachers tend to do well academically • Parents who had happy childhoods, were happily married in the child’s early years, & had an authortative parenting style had children who did better in kindergarten