Chapter 9 9/30/2013 6:39:00 PM

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1 Chapter 9 9/30/2013 6:39:00 PM Describe advances in mental representation during the preschool years, including changes in make-believe play. Language is most flexible means of mental representation Piaget did not agree with this He believed that sensorimotor activity leads to internal images of experience, which children then label with words Make-believe play: o Excellent example of development o representation in early childhood o Three changes that reflect the preschool child s growing mastery Play detached from the real-life conditions associated with it Ex. Block as phone Play becomes less self-centered Starting out, make-believe is directed toward self Make-believe becomes less self-centered as children realize that agents and recipients of pretend actions can be independent of themselves Play includes more complex combinations of schemes Sociodramatic play- the make-believe play with others that is under way by the end of the second year and increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood Symbol-real-world relations o Ex. Arranging furniture in a dollhouse the way it is arranged in your house o When we understand that a picture, model, or map corresponds to something specific in everyday life, we can use these tools to find out about objects and places we have not experienced o Dual representation- viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its own tight and a symbol o Exposing young children to diverse symbols- picture books, photographs, drawings, make-believe, and maps- helps them appreciate that one object can stand for another

2 o With age, children come to understand a wide range of symbols that have little physical similarity to what they represent Describe what Piaget believed to be the deficiencies of preoperational thought. Young children are not capable of operations- mental actions that obey logical rules Egocentrism- failure to distinguish the symbolic viewpoints of others from one s own o Children focus on their own viewpoints and assume that others perceive, think, and feel same way they do o Animistic thinking- belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, such as thoughts, wishes, feelings, and intentions Conservation- refers to the idea that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes o Centration- in Piaget s theory, the tendency of preoperational children to focus on one aspect of a situation while neglecting other important features o Irreversibility- an inability to mentally go through a series of steps in a problem and then reverse direction, returning to the starting point Hierarchial classification- the organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences o Class inclusion problem Discuss recent research on preoperational thought and note the implications of such findings for the accuracy of Piaget s preoperational stage. When young children are given familiar and simplified problems, their performance appears more mature than Piaget assumed. Preschoolers recognize differing perspectives, distinguish animate from inanimate objects, have flexible and appropriate notions of magic, and notice and reason about transformations and causeand-effect relations They show impressive skill at categorizing on the basis of nonobservable characteristics and notice distinctions between

3 appearance and reality, revealing that their thinking is not dominated by perceptual appearances These findings challenge Piaget s concept of stage Rather than being absent in the preschool years, operational thinking develops gradually Describe three educational principles derived from Piaget s theory. Discovery learning o Children are encouraged to discover for themselves through spontaneous interaction with the environment Sensitivity to children s readiness to learn o Teachers introduce activities that build on children s current thinking, challenging their incorrect ways of viewing the world. o They do not try to speed up development by imposing new skills before children indicate they are interested and ready Acceptance of individual differences o All children go through the same sequence of development, but at different rates, thus teachers must plan activities for individual children and small groups, not just the whole class o Teachers evaluate each child s educational progress in relation to the child s previous development, rather than on the basis of normative standards, or average performance of same-age peers Contrast Piaget s view of children s private speech with the view of Vygotsky. In contrast to Piaget, Vygotsky regarded language as the foundation for all higher cognitive processes According to Vygotsky, private speech emerges out of social communication as adults and more skilled peers help children master challenging tasks within the zone of proximal development Eventually, private speech is internalized as inner, verbal thought Private speech- language used for self-guidance Describe features of social interaction that foster cognitive development. Intersubjectivity- the process by which two participants who begin a task with different understandings arrive as shared understanding o Creates a common ground for communication

4 Scaffolding- adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child s current level of performance Guided participation- a broader concept than scaffolding. It refers to shared endeavors between more expert and less expert participants, without specifying the precise features of communication Discuss how Vygotsky s ideas have been applied in educational settings A Vygotskian classroom emphasizes assisted discovery, in which both teacher guidance and peer collaboration are vitally important. Make-believe play is a unique, broadly influential zone of proximal development in early childhood Summarize recent challenges to Vygotsky s theory Describe the development of attention, memory, and problem solving during early childhood Sustained attention increases sharply between ages 2 ½ and 3, due to increased activation of prefrontal cortex, the capacity to generate complex play goals, adult scaffolding, and high-quality preschool education. Planning also improves, though on tasks with several steps, they are often unsystematic o Planning- thinking out a sequence of acts ahead of time and allocating attention accordingly to reach a goal Young children s recognition memory is remarkably accurate. But their recall of listlike information is poor because they use memory strategies less effectively than older children o Memory strategies- deliberate mental activities that improve the likelihood of remembering Episodic memory, or memory for everyday experiences, improves greatly in early childhood Like adults, preschoolers remember recurring events as scripts, which become more elaborate with age o Scripts- general descriptions of what occurs and when it occurs in a particular situation, used to organize, interpret, and predict everyday experiences

5 As cognitive and conversational skills improve, children s autobiographical memories become better organized, detailed, and related to the larger context of their lives, especially when adults use an elaborative style to talk about the past According to overlapping-waves theory, children try out various strategies to solve challenging problems, gradually selecting those that result in rapid, accurate solutions Practice with strategies, reasoning, tasks with new challenges, and adult assistance contribute to improved problem solving o Overlapping-wave theory- a theory of problem solving, which states that when given challenging problems, children try out various, children try out various strategies and gradually select those that are fastest and most accurate Discuss preschoolers understanding of mental activities, noting factors that contribute to early metacognition, as well as limitations of the young child s theory of mind. Preschoolers begin to construct a theory of mind, indicating that they are capable of metacognition, or thinking about thought Form age 4 on, they realize that both beliefs and desires can influence behavior, in that they pass verbal false-belief tasks Language and cognitive skills, make-believe play, and mental-state talk with older siblings, friends, and adults all contribute to young children s awareness of false belief Preschoolers regard the mind as a passive container of information As a result, they have difficulty inferring what people know or are thinking about Trace the development of vocabulary, grammar, and conversational skills in preschool children, and cite factors that support language development in early childhood. Supported by fast mapping, preschoolers vocabularies increase dramatically. o Fast mapping- children s ability to connect new words with their underlying concepts after only a brief encounter According to one view, children are innately biased to induce word meanings using a mutual exclusivity bias and syntactic bootstrapping

6 o Mutual exclusivity bias- early in vocabulary growth, children s assumption that words refer to entirely separate, nonoverlapping categories o Syntactic bootstrapping- figuring out word meanings by observing how words are used in syntax, or the structure of sentences An alternative perspective is that children use the same cognitive strategies they apply to nonlinguistic information According to one account, preschoolers figure out word meanings from a coalition of cues-perceptual, social, and linguistic-which shift in importance with age Between ages 2 and 3, children adopt the word order of their language. As they master grammatical constructions, they occasionally overregularize, applying the rules to words that are exceptions. By the end of the preschool years, children have acquired a wide variety of complex grammatical forms o Overregularize- extension of regular grammatical rules to words that are exceptions Some experts believe that grammar is a product of general cognitive development. According to one view, children engage in semantic bootstrapping, relying on word meanings to figure out grammatical rules. Others agree with the essence of Chomsky s theory that children s brains are innately tuned for acquiring grammar o Semantic bootstrapping- using semantics, or word meanings, to figure out grammatical rules Pragmatics refers to the practical, social side of language. In faceto-face interaction with peers, young preschoolers are already skilled conversationalists. By age 4, they adapt their language to social expectations Conversational give-and-take with more skilled speakers foster preschoolers language skills Adults provide both explicit feedback on the clarity of children s utterances and indirect feedback about grammar through recasts and expansions

7 o Recasts- adult responses that restructure children s grammatically inaccurate rate speech into correct form o Expansions-adult responses that elaborate on children s speech, increasing its complexity However, these strategies, which are not used in all cultures, may be less important than mere exposure to a rich language environment

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9 9/30/2013 6:39:00 PM