Objectives:
- Analyze young children's characteristics and needs related to social/emotional/cognitive development. (InTASC 1, 3; NAEYC 1, 3, 4)
- Review the social/cultural/familial contexts that influence development. (InTASC 7, 10; NAEYC 2, 3)
- Interpret the NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct Section IV as it relates to equity and access to early learning. (InTASC 4, 9; NAEYC 5, 6)
Assignment:Part I:Factors Influencing Development
Research at least eight journal articles related to the effects of poverty, culture, access, linguistics, or family on early development of cognition and behavior.
Create a PowerPoint presentation of 15-20 slides, not including title and reference slides, that summarizes your findings and addresses the ethics and implications for classroom practices and public policy.
Part II: Observe a K-3 mentor teacher. Hypothesize the teacher's construct for discipline/management procedures using at least one of the theories presented in the textbook or assigned readings.
Compose a 750-1000 word defense of your hypothesis with specific examples from the classroom and corresponding concepts from the identified theory or theories. Include reinforcers and consequences.
Lecture Note1. ECH-135 Lecture 2
Read Lecture 2.
Factors that Influence Emotional/Social/Behavior Development
Introduction
This module looks atthe developmental stages and characteristics of young children's social, emotional and cognitive development. The influences of environmental factors such as poverty, access, linguistics, culture and family are assessed, and appropriate classroom environments are analyzed. Ethical practices related to policy are introduced.
The Developmental Stages of Brain Growth
Prenatal
The human brain begins growth and development at around 25 weeks gestation and continues at a rapid pace until about 1 year after birth. During the prenatal period, many factors influence the growth and development of the brain. The mother's diet and emotional state play key roles in the formation of cell systems that are the foundations for intelligence. Neurons are the cells that make up the brain. They go through a series of phases of rapid growth, migration and differentiation. Neurons travel, or migrate, to the areas of the brain where they specialize or differentiate according to their function. During this time, brain growth is inhibited and migration and specialization is impacted by exposure to smoking, drugs, alcohol, poor nutrition and stress.
Birth to Age 8
Neurologists consider birth to age 8 as the critical time of brain development during which "use it or lose it" is the rule of the day. By age 8, the brain loses some of its flexibility and malleability. While the brain still continues to grow, it is during this time that early experiences are key for the brain to create neural connections and synapses, in response to experiences. If these connections are not used and reinforced, the neurons are pruned. This term refers to the falling away process that occurs. Children who are raised in impoverished environments with little stimulation, conversation, and poor nutrition are faced with a greater amount of pruning. While the brain retains some plasticity throughout life, the window of time crucial to create neural pathways that are strong with many connections is from birth until the age of 8.
One study, which demonstrated the effects of an enriched environment, compared rats in spacious cages with toys, mazes, and exercise time to rats in small cages containing food and water only (Diamond, Krech, & Rosenszweig, 1964). When the rats' brains were examined and compared, the cerebral cortex of the rats in enriched environments were thicker than their impoverished counterparts. A thicker cortex translated into smarter rats. The implications for human growth and development are far reaching as we think in terms of ethics, society, poverty, and equity.
In terms of the classroom setting, it is important to create an environment that is rich in experience, language and literacy. Opportunities to be challenged, and to explore and interact with the environment are crucial for brain development and learning to take place.
Emotional Development
Emotions begin developing by birth and continue to form concurrently in relation to cognition or learning. They are interconnected and drive learning. Before verbal language is acquired, infants use movement and facial expressions to communicate emotions such as happiness, distress, pleasure, and excitement.
The theory of attachment advances the idea that deep emotional bonds with a specific person last over time. Secure early relationships promote healthy emotional development and allow the brain to grow during the appropriate stages. Failure to attach to a significant person causes "failure to thrive" in infants and children. Both emotional development and cognition are stunted when attachments are not made.
Teachers can provide a secure, positive attachment relationship with children in the classroom by being consistently responsive, reliable, and predictable in their interactions. They set the tone in the classroom of safety, trust, concern, and stability.
Emotions help the brain determine what is important. Emotions function in focusing attention, deriving meaning or stimulation from the environment, and creating memory and access. Keeping the emotional tone in the classroom positive and pleasant gives children the opportunity to learn without having to cope with emotional stress.
Self-Regulation
Self-regulation is the ability to adjust and control feelings and behavior. Self-regulation begins late in the third trimester of pregnancy; however, it becomes evident beginning with birth. The baby responds to intrauterine stimuli. After birth, this response to the environment continues and becomes more apparent as the infant's sleeping patterns change. As the need for sleeping during the day decreases, the amount of awareness increases. Toddlers begin to wrestle with impulse control. As the child matures, factors such as age, culture, family, and innate temperament influence the development of self-regulation. While much of self-regulation is learned, a difficult temperament can make the process of self-regulation challenging. Teachers need to understand the typical abilities and actions of young children at each stage and respond accordingly.
The following developmental continuum of abilities and actions is based on the "Theory of Mind" construct developed by Cole, Cole and Lightfoot (2005):
Birth to 12 months
· beginning of self-regulation through interactions with parents/caregivers
· no self awareness yet
· emotional states not experienced on a conscious level
1 year to 2.5 Years
· beginnings of awareness of own emotions
· development of early forms of empathy
· identification of basic emotions (happiness, sadness)
· emerging ability to identify secondary emotions (anger, fear)
3-4 Years
· continued development of awareness of own emotions
· development of ability to pretend and act out emotions
· emergence of the ability to match emotions to situations
· emergence of the ability to understand that others may feel or think differently
· continued development of empathy
5-6 Years
· differentiation of emotions in self and others
· awareness of more secondary emotions
· ability to cover or hide emotions
· ability to navigate social situations using understanding of emotions
7-8 Years
· development of self-regulation to the point of thinking about emotions and controlling reactions to situations
· development of a strong sense of self
· desiring to please others
· recognizing emotions in others
· growth in independence
Conclusion
Children's social and emotional development follows fairly predictable patterns. External environmental forces can influence the stages. Poverty, culture, language, nutrition and the early bonding experiences all impact emotional, social, cognitive and behavioral development in early childhood. Effective teachers in early learning situations provide enriched environments that take into consideration the developmental stages of children. Teachers create rooms that are built upon trust, consistency, and positive experiences that facilitate the development of self-regulation.
Reference
Cole, M., Cole, S., & Lightfoot, C. (2005). The Development of Children. New York: Worth Publishers.
Diamond, M. C., Krech, D., & Rosenzweig, M. R. (1964). "The effects of an enriched environment on the rat cerebral cortex." Journal of Comparative Neurology,123,111-119.
Electronic Resource1.
The Challenge of Studying Culture
Read "The Challenge of Studying Culture," by Shonkoff & Phillips, from From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development (2000).
(Note: As you read, pay close attention to the difficulties related to studying child development with respect to the influence of culture. You might want to take notes on the difficulties as you read.)
3
The Challenge of Studying Culture
Revolutionary advances in communications technology and increasing globalization have resulted in unprecedented access to the richness of human variation. In this context, as understanding of the dynamic interaction between nature and nurture continues to grow, the concept of culture offers a promising framework for thinking about the full meaning of nurture in the process of human development.
Interest in the influence of culture on child development, particularly as it is mediated through early childrearing practices, extends across a range of scholarly disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and psychology. Building on the seminal contributions of Margaret Mead, to Murchison's Handbook of Child Psychology (Murchison, 1931), and Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology (Carmichael, 1946), all of the leading authoritative volumes on child development research had incorporated a cross-cultural perspective by the middle of the 20th century (e.g., Greenfield and Suzuki in Damon et al., 1998; Whiting in Lindzey, 1954; Whiting and Whiting in Mussen, 1960), and specialized volumes on infancy began to appear (e.g., Mead and Macgregor, 1951; Whiting and Child, 1953).
Notwithstanding this early establishment of a firm cross-cultural foundation for the science of early childhood development, the explosion of cognitive psychology in the 1960s paid relatively little attention to the effects of environmental influences on the emerging competencies of young
2. Making Causal Connections
Read "Making Causal Connections," by Shonkoff & Phillips, from From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development (2000).
Making Causal Connections
Studies of child development encompass an enormously varied universe of research strategies drawn from disciplines as diverse as economics and anthropology. These strategies include moment-by-moment ratings of interactions between adults and children and among peers, administration of psychological tests and questionnaires, ethnographic field work, laboratory research using standardized protocols, and clinical observations. Researchers select these strategies to address different goals. They may be most interested in elucidating associations among different facets of development, identifying emerging capacities of children as they develop, or describing the contexts in which children grow up, to name several objectives that studies are designed to address. In this chapter, we focus on studies that seek to identify causal connections between a specific influence (e.g., mothers' talk to children, an intervention program) and child development (e.g., the child's vocabulary, scores on a test of school readiness).
The subset of studies that attempt to establish causal connections are often critical in testing theories about the role of early experience in child development, and they absorb much of the interest of policy makers and practitioners. They can, however, be exceedingly difficult to implement in practice and sometimes involve ethical problems. Currently, a great deal of controversy surrounds the role of experimental studies in understanding the effects of early interventions, in part as a result of the high-stakes policy decisions regarding program funding that are often involved. In this con-
3. Ethics Today in Early Care and Education: Review, Reflection, and the Future
Read "Ethics Today in Early Care and Education: Review, Reflection, and the Future," by Feeney, from NAEYC (2010).
4. NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct and Statement of Commitment
Study pages 6 and 7 of Section IV of the NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct and Statement of Commitment, located on the NAEYC website.
5. Toward an Early Care and Education Agenda for Hispanic Children
Read "Toward an Early Care and Education Agenda for Hispanic Children," by Collins and Ribeiro, from Early Childhood Research & Practice (2004).
6. Supporting Vulnerable Learners in the Primary Grades: Strategies to Prevent Early School Failure
Read “Supporting Vulnerable Learners in the Primary Grades: Strategies to Prevent Early School Failure,” by Stormont, Espinosa, Snipping, & McCathren, from Early Childhood Research & Practice (2003).
e-Library Resource1. Preschool Is School, Sometimes: Making Early Childhood Education Matter
Read "Preschool Is School, Sometimes: Making Early Childhood Education Matter" by Pianta, from Education Next (2007).
2. Cumulative Risk and Low-Income Children's Language Development
Read "Cumulative Risk and Low-Income Children's Language Development," by Stanton-Chapman, Chapman, Kaiser, & Hancock, from Topics in Early Childhood Special Education (2004).