Cognitive Development in the Preschool Years

Chapter 9

Cognitive Development in the Preschool Years

Page
Learning Objectives / 141
Key Terms and Concepts / 141
Chapter Outline / 142
Lecture Suggestions / 146
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words / 146
Understanding Bilingual/Bicultural Young Children / 146
Homeless Families and Children / 147
How Kids Learn / 147
Class Activities / 147
Supplemental Reading List / 149
Prentice Hall PowerPoints available online / 150
Multimedia Ideas / 150
Handouts / 152

Learning Objectives

After reading Chapter 9, students will know:

• Describe the advances and limitations of Piaget’s stage of preoperational thinking.
• Evaluate Piaget’s approach to cognitive development.
• Describe the information-processing approach to cognitive development.
• Explain whether children make effective eyewitnesses.
• Evaluate the information processing approach to cognitive development.
• Describe Vygotsky’s view of cognitive development.
• Evaluate Vygotsky’s approach to cognitive development.
• Explain language advances during the preschool years.
• Understand the influence of poverty on language development.
• Describe early childhood education in terms of variety, effectiveness, and quality.
• Understand why the United States lags behind other countries in relation to preschool.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of Head Start.
• Describe David Elkind’s approach to academic success.
• Understand the influence of television on preschoolers.
• Describe how parents can improve the academic readiness of their children without creating undue stress.

Key Terms and Concepts

142

preoperational stage

operations

symbolic function

centration

egocentric thought

transformation

intuitive thought

conservation

autobiographical memory

zone of proximal development

scripts

developmentally appropriate educational practice

scaffolding

syntax

fast mapping

grammar

private speech

pragmatics

social speech

child care centers

preschools (or nursery schools)

school child care

142

Chapter Outline

I.  Intellectual Development

A.  Piaget’s Stage of Preoperational Thinking: During the stage that Piaget has described as preoperational, children are not yet able to engage in organized, formal, logical thinking. However, their development of symbolic function permits quicker and more effective thinking as they are freed from the limitations of sensorimotor learning.

1. Piaget saw the preschool years as a time of both stability and great change.

2. Preschoolers are in the Preoperational Stage, from age 2 to 7, characterized by symbolic thinking.

a. Mental reasoning and the use of concepts increases, but children are not capable of Operations, organized, formal, logical mental processes.

b. A key aspect of preoperational thought is Symbolic Function, the ability to use symbols, words, or an object to represent something that is not physically present.

3. Symbolic function is directly related to language acquisition.

a. Language allows preschoolers to represent actions symbolically, permitting much greater speed.

b. Language allows children to think beyond the present to the future.

c. Language can be used to consider several possibilities at the same time.

d. Addressing the question if thought determines language or if language determines thought, Piaget argued that language grows out of cognitive advances.

4. Centration—the process of concentrating on one limited aspect of a stimulus and ignoring other aspects—is a major characteristic of preoperational thought, and the major limitation of this period because it leads to inaccuracy of thought.

5. Preschoolers do NOT understand Conservation—the knowledge that quantity is unrelated to the arrangement and physical appearance of objects.

6. Preschoolers are unable to understand the notion of Transformation—the process in which one state is changed into another—because they ignore the intermediate steps.

7. Egocentrism, the inability to take others’ perspectives, is the hallmark of preoperational thinking.

a. Egocentric Thought takes two forms.

(1) Lack of awareness that others see things from different physical perspectives.

(2) Failure to realize that others may hold thoughts, feelings, and points-of-view different from one’s own.

b. Egocentrism is at the root of many preschool behaviors, for example, talking to oneself and hiding games.

8. A number of advances in thought occur in the preoperational stage.

a. Intuitive Thought—the use of primitive reasoning—develops.

b. Children begin to understand functionality—the concept that actions, events, and outcomes are related to one another in fixed patterns.

c. They begin to understand the concept of identity—that certain things stay the same regardless of changes in shape, size and appearance.

9. Critics of Piaget’s theory argue that he seriously underestimated children’s capabilities.

a. They argue that cognition develops in a continuous manner, not in stages.

b. They believe that training can improve performance in conservation tasks, and that conservation may appear earlier than he argued.

c. They also argue that Piaget focused too much on the deficiencies of young children’s thought.

B.  Information-Processing Approaches to Cognitive Development

1. Preschoolers may demonstrate a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of number.

a. By age 4, most are able to carry out simple addition and subtraction problems by counting.

b. Preschoolers are able to compare different quantities quite successfully.

2. Autobiographical Memory, memory of particular events from one’s own life, is not very accurate until after age 3.

a. Preschoolers’ autobiographical memories fade, they may not be accurate (depending when they are assessed), and they are susceptible to suggestions.

b. Preschoolers have difficulty describing certain information and oversimplify recollections.

3. According to information-processing approaches, cognitive development consists of gradual improvements in the ways people perceive, understand, and remember.

a. Preschoolers begin to process information with greater sophistication.

b. They have longer attention spans, attend to more than one dimension of an object, and can better monitor what they are attending to.

C.  Vygotsky’s View of Cognitive Development: A different approach to cognitive development is taken by proponents of information processing theories, who focus on preschoolers’ storage and recall of information and on quantitative changes in information-processing abilities (such as attention).

1. Vygotsky proposed that the nature and progress of children’s cognitive development are dependent on the children’s social and cultural context.

a. Cognition proceeds because of social interactions where partners jointly work to solve problems.

b. This partnership is determined by cultural and societal factors.

2. According to Vygotsky, children’s cognitive abilities increase when information is provided within their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), the level at which a child can almost, but not fully, comprehend or perform a task on his own.

3. The assistance provided by others has been termed Scaffolding, the support for learning and problem solving that encourages independence and growth.

4. Accomplished individuals provide learners with cultural tools, physical items (e.g., pencils, paper, calculators, computer) and intellectual and conceptual frameworks for solving problems.

5. Vygotsky’s view has become increasingly influential in the last decade.

a. His writings are more widely disseminated in good English translations.

b. His work had been banned until the breakup of the Soviet Union, when it became freely available to the former Soviet countries.

c. His ideas are a consistent theoretical system that contributes to increasing appreciation of the importance of social interaction in cognitive development.

d. Criticism of Vygotsky centers on the lack of precision in his conceptualization of cognitive growth.

e. Vygotsky was largely silent on how basic cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and natural cognitive capabilities unfold.

II.  Language Development: Children rapidly progress from two-word utterances to longer, more sophisticated expressions that reflect their growing vocabularies and emerging grasp of grammar. The development of linguistic abilities is affected by socioeconomic status. The result can be lowered linguistic—and ultimately academic—performance by poorer children.

A.  Language Advances During the Preschool Years

1. Between late 2’s and mid-3’s, sentence length increases.

2. Syntax, the ways words and phrases are combined to make sentences, doubles each month.

a. By age 3, children use plurals and possessive forms of nouns (boys/boy’s), employ the past tense (adding -ed), use articles (the/a), and can ask and answer complex questions (“Where did you say my book is?”).

b. By 6, the average child has a vocabulary of 14,000 words.

c. Preschoolers acquire a new word every 2 ½ hours, 24 hours a day.

3. They manage this feat through a process known as Fast Mapping, in which new words are associated with their meaning after only one or two presentations.

B.  Preschoolers begin to acquire the principles of Grammar, the system of rules that determine how our thoughts can be expressed.

1. Preschoolers engage mostly in Private Speech, language not intended for others.

a. Vygotsky argues that private speech facilitates children’s thinking, helps them control their behavior, solve problems and reflect.

b. Piaget suggests that private speech is egocentric.

2. Preschooler’s Pragmatics, the aspect of language relating to communicating effectively and appropriately with others, also grows.

3. Social Speech, speech directed toward others, increases during the preschool years.

C.  The language children hear at home influences their language development.

1. Hart and Risley (1995) researched the effects of poverty on language.

2. Economic level was a significant factor in the amount of parental interactions, types of language children were exposed to, and kinds of language used.

3. Poverty was also related to lower IQ scores by age 5.

III.  Early Childhood Education

A.  Three quarters of children in the U.S. are enrolled in some kind of care outside the home.

1. Major factor is working parents.

2. Evidence suggests that children can benefit from early educational activities.

B.  There are a variety of early education programs.

1. Child Care Centers provide all-day care.

a. Some are home care.

b. Others are provided by organized institutions.

2. Preschools (nursery schools) provide care for several hours a day, and are designed primarily to enrich the child’s development.

3. School Day Care is provided by some school districts.

C.  There are pros and cons of attending early education programs.

1. Advantages might include increases in verbal fluency, memory, and comprehension advantages, higher IQ scores than at-home children, and advantages in social development.

2. Disadvantages found included children being less polite, less compliant, less respectful of adults, and sometimes more competitive and aggressive.

D.  The key factor in determining the effects of early education programs is quality.

1. Well-trained care providers.

2. Overall size of the group and the child-care provider ratio.

3. Curriculum.

4. The U.S. lags behind almost every other industrialized country in the quality of its day care, as well as quantity and affordability.

E.  The U.S. differs from other countries in their purpose for early education programs, generally emphasizing independence and self-reliance.

F.  In the U.S., the best-known program designed to promote future academic success is
Head Start.

1. Head Start began in the 1960s when the U.S. declared a “War on Poverty.”

2. It was designed to serve the “whole child,” including children’s physical health, self-confidence, social responsibility, and social and emotional development.

3. Graduates of Head Start programs tend to:

a. Show immediate IQ gains, although these do not last;

b. Be better prepared for future schooling;

c. Have better future school adjustment;

d. Be less likely to be in special education classes or be retained in first grade; and

e. Show higher academic performance at the end of high school, although the gains are modest.

f. Detractors argue that there are other programs that children should be exposed to which are much more cost effective.

G.  David Elkind argues that U.S. society tends to push children so rapidly that they begin to feel stress and pressure at a young age.

1. It is better to provide an environment where learning is encouraged, not pushed.

2. Children require Developmentally Appropriate Educational Practice that is based on both typical development and the unique characteristics of a given child.

H.  Television: Learning From the Media

1. Average preschooler watches 20 to 30 hours of TV a week.

2. Consequences of TV viewing are unclear.

a. Children do not fully understand the plots.

b. They may have difficulty separating fantasy from reality.

c. Some information is well understood by young viewers, i.e., facial expressions.

3. Yet, much of what is viewed is not representative of events in the real world.

4. Television may be harnessed to facilitate cognitive growth.

a. Sesame Street is the most popular educational program in the U.S.

b. Viewers had significantly larger vocabularies.

c. Lower income viewers were better prepared for school, scored higher on tests of cognitive ability, and spent more time reading.

d. Critics of Sesame Street suggest that viewers may be less receptive to traditional modes of teaching.

5. There are difficulties in assessing the effects of educational viewing, (e.g., the effects may be related to parenting).

Lecture Suggestions

Use Developmental Psychology, Prentice Hall Lecture Launcher, DVD & textbook CD

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

You might use this with the “Let’s Share, Show or Recall” activity. (See Class Activities).

Young children sometimes have difficulty recalling information. A recent study suggests that drawing can enhance children’s memories for events.

Santa Butler, of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, led a study involving 5- and 6-year-olds that took a field trip to a fire station. While there, the children clambered on the fire engines, watched drills performed by the firefighters, tried on the firefighting gear, and even watched as one of their chaperons slid down the fire pole, much to the displeasure of the tour leader, who reprimanded her. (This event, and several others, were prearranged ahead of time.) Both one day and one month later, the children were asked about their outing. Those children who were asked to draw and describe the events of that day—how they got there, what they saw, the events that transpired—accurately reported much more information than those children who were simply asked to tell what happened. This effect was not observed among 3- to 4-year-olds, although among both groups drawing did not appear to increase errors in recall.

This research indicates that memory for pleasant events may be increased by coupling words and pictures. It remains to be seen whether the same effect would hold for negative events. If so, this technique may hold promise for boosting children’s recall of abuse, incest, or other traumatic events.

Source:

Staff (1995). Kids Draw on Their Memories. Science News, 148, p. 111. Reprinted from Giuliano, T & Swinkels, A. (1996). Instructor’s Resource Manual for Understanding Psychology by C. G. Morris. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.