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Cognitive Developmental Theory

Cognitive Developmental Theory. Early Childhood. PREOPERATIONAL STAGE. The preoperational stage is the second stage. Rapid growth in representational, or symbolic, activity Language is the most flexible means of mental representation.

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Cognitive Developmental Theory

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  1. Cognitive Developmental Theory Early Childhood

  2. PREOPERATIONAL STAGE • The preoperational stage is the second stage. • Rapid growth in representational, or symbolic, activity • Language is the most flexible means of mental representation. • Stage characterized by a lack of mental operations…hence the name! • Operations: Mental representations of actions obeying logical rules

  3. PREOPERATIONAL STAGE • Two Substages: • Symbolic Function • 2-4 yrs • Can represent an object not present • Intuitive Thought • 4-7 yrs • Primitive reasoning accompanied by lots of questions • Know things but not do not know how things work • Thought is not rational, logical

  4. PREOPERATIONAL STAGE • What does the development of mental representations allow children to accomplish? • Language • Make-believe play

  5. Make-Believe Play • Increases dramatically during early childhood • Through pretending, young children practice and acquire representational schemes.

  6. Sociodramatic Play • Appears around age 2 1/2 and increases until 4 to 5 years. • Preschoolers who use sociodramatic play • Have advanced intellectual development • Are more social

  7. Limitations of Preoperational Thought • Children’s thinking is rigid, limited to the way things appear at the moment. • Preoperational! • Egocentrism • Inability to distinguish the symbolic viewpoints of others from one's own • Single point of view • Do not revise faulty reasoning

  8. Demonstration of Egocentrism • Three Mountain Problem • Animistic Thinking • Inanimate objects have lifelike qualities. • Egocentric speech • Children speaking to themselves • Related to a lack of perspective taking • Cognitive maturity and experiences bring an end to egocentric speech.

  9. Limitations of Preoperational Thought • Inability to conserve • Conservation • Physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when outward appearance changes.

  10. Piagetian Conservation Tasks

  11. Inability to Conserve • WHY? • Centration • Focus on one aspect and neglect others • Perception-bound • Easily distracted by concrete appearance of objects • States versus transformations • The initial and final state of problem are unrelated. • Irreversibility • Inability to follow series of steps in a problem and return to starting point

  12. Limitations of Preoperational Thought • Lack of hierarchical classification • Organization of objects into classes on the basis of similarities and differences • Piaget illustrated difficulties in the class-inclusion problem. Flowers blue flowers yellow flowers

  13. Research on Preoperational Thought • Piagetian problems confusing • Preschoolers' responses may not reflect abilities. • If visual display includes familiar objects • 4-year-olds are aware of others’ vantage points.

  14. THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT • Vygotsky • Infants are endowed with basic skills • Perceptual, attention, memory • At 2 years, language acquisition profoundly changes the nature of thought • Complex mental functions originate in social interaction. • Important developmental constructs • Scaffolding • Zone of proximal development

  15. Children’s Private Speech • Piaget’s View • Piaget called children’s utterances to themselves egocentric speech. • Vygotsky’s View • Children speak to themselves for self-guidance and self-direction. • Language is the foundation for all complex mental activities. • As children get older and tasks become easier, their self-directed speech declines and is internalized.

  16. Private Speech Research • Private speech is used more often when • tasks are difficult • after a child makes an error • when a child is confused about how to proceed • With age private speech changes from utterances spoken out loud into whispers and silent lip movements. • Almost all research findings support Vygotsky’s view.

  17. Make Believe Play • Piaget’s View • A symptom of increasing representational sophistication. • Vygotsky’s View • A unique zone of proximal development for children to try out challenging activities and acquire competencies

  18. Social Origins of Early Childhood Cognition: Research • Parents who are effective scaffolders have children who use more private speech and are more successful when asked to do a similar task by themselves. • Children’s planning and problem solving show more improvement when their partner is either an “expert” peer or an adult.

  19. Information Processing Early Childhood

  20. Early Childhood Attention • During early childhood, attention becomes more planful. Planninginvolves thinking out a sequence of acts ahead of time and allocating attention accordingly to reach a goal. • Even when young children do plan, they often fail to implement important steps. • Development of the prefrontal cortex

  21. Memory • Recognition • Preschoolers’ recognitionmemory is remarkably good. • Recall • Young children are less effective at using memory strategies, deliberate mental activities that improve the likelihood of remembering • Rehearsal • Organizing information

  22. The Young Child’s Theory of Mind • As children start to reflect on their own thought processes, they begin to construct a theory of mind, or set of ideas about the mental activities. This understanding is often called metacognition.

  23. The Young Child’s Theory of Mind • “Think,” “remember,” and “pretend” are among the first verbs to appear in children’s vocabularies. • Between ages 3 and 4, children figure out that beliefsand desires determine behavior. • By age 4, children realize that people can hold false beliefs that combine with desire to determine behavior. • They know that people have an internal mental life, but seem to view the mind as a passive container of information.

  24. The Young Child’s Theory of Mind • How Does a Theory of Mind Develop? • Various findings suggest that language, cognitive, and social experiences contribute to developing a theory of mind. • Language. • Cognitive abilities. • Make-believe play and reasoning about imaginary situations. • Social interaction. • Autism and Theory of Mind?

  25. Mathematical Reasoning Ordinalityis displayed by toddlers. Cardinality principle, grasped between the ages of 4 and 5 Cross-cultural research: basic arithmetic knowledge emerges universally Early Literacy Emergent literacy Move from direct representation to symbolic representation Development related to quantity of literacy related experiences SES correlation Early Literacy and Mathematical Development

  26. Language Development Early Childhood

  27. Early Childhood • Vocabulary • By 6, around 8000-14000 words • Fast mapping • Quickly connecting a new word with an underlying concept • Preschoolers acquire labels for objects, action words next, and then modifiers. • Grammar • Between 2 and 3, English-speaking children use simple sentences that follow a subject-verb-object order. • Overregularization • Application of regular grammatical rules to words that are exceptions

  28. Conversation • Pragmatics • Practical, social side of language; how to engage in appropriate communication • Children take turns, respond to partner, and maintain a topic over time. • Are able to talk about things that are not present • Preschoolers' speech is less mature in demanding situations.

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