Transcript Section Four - Black Hawk College

Chapter 8
Physical and
Cognitive
Development in Early
Childhood
Physical and Cognitive
Development in Early Childhood
Physical
Development
in Early
Childhood
Cognitive
Development
in Early
Childhood
Language
Development
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Early
Childhood
Education
2
Physical
Development
in Early
Childhood
Body Growth
and Change
Motor
Development
Nutrition
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Illness and
Death
3
Body Growth and Change
• Height and Weight
• The Brain
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Height and Weight
• The average child grows 2½ inches and gains
between 5 and 7 pounds a year in early
childhood.
• The percentage of increase in height and weight
decreases with each additional year.
• Body fat shows a steady decline during this time.
• Girls are only slightly smaller and lighter than
boys, but they have more body fat while boys
have more muscle tissue.
• Boys and girls slim down as their trunks lengthen.
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Individual Differences
• Much of the variation in body size is due
to heredity.
• The two most important contributors to
height differences are:
– Ethnic origin
– Nutrition
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Contributors to Short
Stature
• Congenital Factors (genetic or
prenatal problems)
• Physical Problems That
Develop in Childhood
• Emotional Difficulties
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Congenital Factors’
Influence on Height
• Preschool children whose
mothers smoked regularly
during pregnancy are shorter
than their counterparts whose
mothers did not smoke.
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Physical Problems’
Influence on Height
• Children who are chronically
sick are shorter than their
counterparts who are rarely
sick.
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Emotional Problems’
Influence on Height
• Children who have been
physically abused or neglected
may not secrete adequate
growth hormone, which can
restrict their physical growth.
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The Brain
• The brain and the head grow more rapidly than any
other part of the body.
• By age 3, the brain is three-quarters of its adult size,
and by age 5, the brain has reached about ninetenths of its adult size.
• Some of this size increase is due to increase in size
and number of nerve endings and an increase in
myelination.
• Myelination is believed to be important in the
maturation of a number of children’s abilities.
• From 3-6 years of age, researchers have found that
the most rapid brain growth occurs in the frontal lobe.
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Motor Development
• Gross Motor Skills
• Fine Motor Skills
• Handedness
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Gross Motor Skills
• At 3 years of age, children enjoy simple
movements, such as hopping, jumping,
and running, just for the fun of it and the
pride they feel in their accomplishment.
• At 4 years of age, children become more
adventurous—taking on jungle gyms and
climbing stairs with one foot on each step.
• At 5 years of age, children begin to perform
hair-raising stunts on anything they can climb
on, and they enjoy racing with each other and
with parents.
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Fine Motor Skills
• At age 3, children are still clumsy at picking up very
small objects between their thumb and forefinger.
• Three-year-olds can build very high block towers, but
the blocks are usually not in a perfectly straight line.
• Puzzles are approached with a good deal of
roughness and imprecision.
• By age 4, their coordination has improved and
become more precise.
• By age 5, children are no longer interested in building
towers, but rather houses, churches, and buildings
with more detail.
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Handedness
• Preference for one hand is linked with the dominance
of one brain hemisphere with regard to motor
performance.
• Right-handers have a dominant left hemisphere,
while left-handers have a dominant right hemisphere.
• Evidence of handedness is present in infancy, as
babies show preferences for one side of their body
over the other.
• Many preschool children use both hands without a
clear preference emerging until later in childhood.
• The origin of hand preference has been explored with
regard to genetic inheritance and environmental
experience.
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Nutrition
• Energy Needs
• Eating Behavior
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Energy Needs
• What children eat affects their skeletal growth, body
shape, and susceptibility to disease.
• An average preschool child requires 1,700 calories
per day.
• Energy requirements for children are determined by
the basal metabolism rate (BMR): the minimum
amount of energy a person uses in a resting state.
• Differences in physical activity, basal metabolism,
and the efficiency with which children use energy are
among the possible explanation as to why children of
the same age, sex, and size vary in their energy
needs.
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Eating Behavior
• Eating habits become ingrained very early in life.
• It is during the preschool years that many
children get their first taste of fast food.
• Our changing lifestyles, in which we often eat on
the run and pick up fast food meals, contribute to
the increased fat levels in children’s diets.
• Although such meals are high in protein, the
average American child does not need to be
concerned about getting enough protein.
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Obesity in Childhood
• Being overweight can be a serious problem in
childhood.
• Overweight preschool children are usually not
encouraged to lose a great deal of weight, but
to slow their rate of weight gain so they will
grow into a more normal weight for their height.
• Prevention of obesity in children includes
helping children and parents see food as a way
to satisfy hunger and nutritional needs, not as
proof of love or a reward.
• Routine physical activity should be a daily
event.
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Illness and Death
• The United States
• The State of Illness and
Health of the World’s
Children
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The United States
• Accidents are the leading cause of death in
young children: motor vehicle accidents, drowning,
falls, and poisoning are high on the list.
• The disorders most likely to be fatal during early
childhood today are birth defects, cancer, and heart
disease.
• Despite the greatly diminished dangers of many childhood
diseases, it is still very important for parents to keep
young children on an immunization schedule.
• Exposure to tobacco smoke increases children’s risk for
developing a number of medical problems, such as
pneumonia, bronchitis, ear infections, burns, asthma, and
cancer in adulthood.
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The State of Illness and
Health of the World’s Children
• One death of every three in the world is the death of a
child under 5 years of age.
• Every week, more than a quarter million children die in
developing countries due to infection and undernutrition.
• The leading cause of childhood death in the world is
dehydration and malnutrition as a result of diarrhea.
• This could be prevented if parents had available a lowcost breakthrough known as oral rehydration therapy
(ORT).
• Oral rehydration therapy involves a range of techniques
designed to prevent dehydration during episodes of
diarrhea by giving the child fluids by mouth.
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Cognitive
Development
in Early
Childhood
Piaget's
Preoperational
Stage of
Development
Vygotsky's
Theory of
Development
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Information
Processing
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Piaget’s Preoperational
Stage of Development
• Characteristics of the
Preoperational Stage
• Definition of Operations
• Symbolic Function Substage
• Intuitive Thought Substage
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Characteristics of the
Preoperational Stage
• The preoperational stage lasts from 2-7 years
old.
• During this time stable concepts form, mental
reasoning emerges, egocentrism begins, and
magical beliefs are constructed.
• Thought is flawed and not organized.
• This stage involves a transition from primitive to
more sophisticated use of symbols.
• Children still do not yet think in an operational
way.
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Definition of Operations
• Operations are internalized
sets of actions that allow the
child to do mentally what
before she did physically.
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Symbolic Function
Substage
• The ability to think symbolically and to represent
the world mentally predominates in this substage.
• It occurs roughly between the ages of 2-4.
• Symbolic function is demonstrated by the child’s
ability to mentally represent an object not
present.
• Symbolism is evident in scribbled designs,
language, and pretend play
• Two important limitations in thought at this stage
are egocentrism and animism.
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Egocentrism
• Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish
between one’s own perspective and someone
else’s perspective.
• It is a salient feature of preoperational
thought.
• Perspective-taking doesn’t develop uniformly
in preschool children, as they frequently show
perspective skills on some tasks, but not
others.
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Animism
• Animism is the belief that inanimate
objects have “lifelike” qualities and
are capable of action.
• A child may believe that a tree pushes
its leaves off in the Fall, or that the
sidewalk made him trip and
fall down.
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Intuitive Thought Substage
• In this stage, children begin to use primitive
reasoning and want to know the answers to
all sorts of questions.
• It occurs roughly between the ages of 4-7.
• Piaget used the term intuitive because
children say they know something, but they
know it without the use of rational thinking.
• Children in this stage also ask a barrage of
questions, signaling the emergence of their
interest in reasoning and why things are the
way they are.
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Centration
• Centration is the focusing or centering
of attention on one characteristic to the
exclusion of all others.
• It is a major characteristic of
preoperational thought, evidenced in
young children’s lack of conservation.
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Conservation
• Conservation refers to an awareness that
altering an object’s or a substance’s
appearance does not change its basic
properties.
• Although obvious to adults, preoperational
children lack conservation.
• A lack of conservation not only demonstrates
the presence of centration, but also an
inability to mentally reverse actions.
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Vygotsky’s Theory of
Development
•
•
•
•
The Zone of Proximal Development
Scaffolding in Cognitive Development
Language and Thought
Evaluating and Comparing Vygotsky’s
and Piaget’s Theories
• Teaching Strategies Based on
Vygotsky’s Theory
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The Zone of Proximal
Development
• The zone of proximal development is Vygotsky’s term
for the range of tasks too difficult for children to master
alone, but which can be learned with the guidance and
assistance of adults or more skilled children.
• The lower limit is the level of problem solving reached
by the child working independently.
• The upper limit is the level of additional responsibility
the child can accept with the assistance of an able
instructor.
• Vygotsky’s emphasis on the ZPD underscores his belief
in the importance of social influences, especially
instruction, on children’s cognitive development.
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Scaffolding in Cognitive
Development
• Scaffolding refers to changing the level of support.
• Over the course of a teaching session, a more skilled
person adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the
student’s current performance level.
• Dialog is an important tool of scaffolding in the zone
of proximal development.
• As the child’s unsystematic, disorganized,
spontaneous concepts meet with the skilled helper’s
more systematic, logical, and rational concepts,
through meeting and dialogue, the child’s concepts
become more systematic, logical, and rational.
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Language and Thought
• Vygotsky believed that young children use language both
for social communication and to plan, guide, and monitor
their behavior in a self-regulatory fashion.
• Language used for this purpose is called inner speech or
private speech.
• For Piaget, private speech is egocentric and immature, but
for Vygotsky it is an important tool of thought during early
childhood.
• Vygotsky believed all mental funtions have social origins.
• Children must use language to communicate with others
before they can focus on their own thoughts.
• Researchers have found support for Vygotsky’s view of
the positive role of private speech in development.
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Evaluating and Comparing
Vygotsky’s and Piaget’s Theories
• Vygotsky’s theory is a social constructivist approach, which
emphasizes the social contexts of learning and that knowledge is
mutually built and constructed.
• Piaget’s theory does not have this social emphasis.
• For Piaget, children construct knowledge by transforming, organizing,
and reorganizing previous knowledge.
• For Vygotsky, children construct knowledge through social interaction.
• The implication of Piaget’s theory for teaching is that children need
support to explore their world and discover knowledge.
• The implication of Vygotsky’s theory for teaching is that students need
many opportunities to learn with the teacher and more skilled peers.
• Vygotsky’s theory has been embraced by many teachers and
successfully applied to education.
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Teaching Strategies Based
on Vygotsky’s Theory
• Use the child’s zone of proximal
development in teaching.
• Use scaffolding.
• Use more skilled peers as teachers.
• Monitor and encourage children’s use
of private speech.
• Assess the child’s ZPD, not IQ.
• Transform the classroom with Vygotskian
ideas.
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Information Processing
• Attention
• Memory
• Strategies
• The Young Child’s Theory
of Mind
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Attention
• The child’s ability to pay attention changes
significantly during the preschool years.
• Preschool children are influenced strongly by
the features of a task that stand out, or are
salient.
• This deficit can hinder problem solving or
performing well on tasks.
• By age 6 or 7, children attend more efficiently
to the dimensions of a task that are relevant.
• This is believed to reflect a shift in cognitive
control of attention.
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Memory
• Short-Term Memory
• How Accurate Are Young
Children’s Long-Term
Memories?
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Short-Term Memory
• In short-term memory, individuals retain
information for up to 15-30 seconds, assuming
there is no rehearsal, which can help keep
information in STM for a much longer period.
• Differences in memory span occur across the
ages due to:
– Rehearsal: older children rehearse items more than
younger children.
– Speed and efficiency of processing information: the
speed with which a child processes information is an
important aspect of the child’s cognitive abilities.
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How Accurate Are Young
Children’s Long-Term
Memories?
• Young children can remember a great deal
of information if they are given appropriate
cues and prompts.
• Sometimes the memories of preschoolers
seem to be erratic, but these
inconsistencies may be to some degree
the result of inadequate prompts and cues.
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Strategies
• Strategies consist of using deliberate mental
activities to improve the processing of
information:
– Rehearsal
– Organizing information
• Young children typically do not use rehearsal
and organization.
• Children as young as 2 can learn to use other
types of strategies to process information.
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The Young Children’s Theory of Mind
• Theory of mind refers to individuals’ thoughts
about how mental processes work.
• Even young children are curious about the nature
of the human mind.
• Children’s developing knowledge of the mind
includes the awareness that:
– The mind exists.
– The mind has connections to the physical
world.
– The mind can represent objects and events
accurately or inaccurately.
– The mind actively interprets reality and
emotions.
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Becoming Aware that the
Mind Exists
• By the age of 2 or 3, children refer to needs,
emotions, and mental states.
• They also use intentional action or desire
words, such as wants to.
• Cognitive terms such as know, remember,
and think usually appear after perceptual and
emotional terms, but are used by age 3.
• Later children distinguish between guessing
vs. knowing, believing vs. fantasizing, and
intending vs. not on purpose.
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Understanding Cognitive
Connections to the Physical
World
• At about 2 or 3 years of age, children develop
an awareness of the connections among
stimuli, mental states, and behavior.
• This provides them with a rudimentary mental
theory of human action.
• Children can infer connections from stimuli to
mental states, from mental states to behavior
or emotion, and from behavior to mental
states.
• Children also develop an understanding that
the mind is separate from the physical world.
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Detecting Accuracies/
Inaccuracies of the Mind
• Children develop an understanding
that the mind can represent objects
and events accurately.
• Understanding of false beliefs
doesn’t usually occur until 4 or 5
years.
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Understanding the Mind’s Active
Role in Emotion and Reality
• Children develop an understanding that the
mind actively mediates the interpretation of
reality and the emotion experienced.
• In the elementary school years, children
change from viewing emotions as caused by
external events without any mediation by
internal states to viewing emotional reactions
to an external event as influenced by a prior
emotional state, experience, or expectation.
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Language
Development
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Language Development
• Young children’s understanding sometimes
gets ahead of their speech.
• Many of the oddities of young children’s
language sound like mistakes to adult
listeners, but from the children’s perspective,
they are not.
• As children go through early childhood, their
grasp of the rules of language increases
(morphology, semantics, pragmatics).
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Morphology
• As children move beyond two-word
utterances, they know morphology rules.
• They begin using plurals and possessive
forms of nouns.
• They put appropriate endings on verbs.
• They use prepositions, articles, and various
forms of the verb to be.
• Children demonstrate knowledge of
morphological rules with plural forms of
nouns, possessive forms of nouns, and the
third-person singular and past tense forms of
verbs.
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Semantics
• As children move beyond the two-word
stage, their knowledge of meanings
rapidly advances.
• The speaking vocabulary of a 6-year-old
ranges from 8,000 to 14,000 words.
• According to some estimates, the
average child of this age is learning
about 22 words a day!
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Pragmatics
• No difference is as dramatic as the difference
between a 2-year-old’s language and a 6-yearold’s language in terms of pragmatics—the rules
of conversation.
• At about 3 years of age, children improve their
ability to talk about things that are not physically
present—referred to as “displacement.”
• Displacement is revealed in games of pretend.
• Large individual differences seen in
preschoolers’ talk about imaginary people and
things.
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Early
Childhood
Education
The
ChildCentered
Kindergarten
The
Montessori
Approach
Developmentally
Appropriate and
Inappropriate
Practices
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Does
Preschool
Matter?
Education
for
Disadvantaged
Children
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The Child-Centered
Kindergarten
• In the child-centered kindergarten, education involves
the whole child and includes concern for the child’s
physical, cognitive, and social development.
• Instruction is organized around the child’s needs,
interests, and learning styles.
• The process of learning, rather than what is learned,
is emphasized.
• Experimenting, exploring, discovering, trying out,
restructuring, speaking, and listening are all part of
an excellent kindergarten program.
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The Montessori Approach
• The Montessori Approach is a philosophy of
education in which children are given considerable
freedom and spontaneity in choosing activities.
• They are allowed to move from one activity to
another as they desire.
• The teacher acts as a facilitator, rather than a
director of learning.
• While it fosters independence, it deemphasizes
verbal interaction.
• Criticism of the approach is that it neglects children’s
social development and restricts imaginative play.
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Developmentally Appropriate and
Inappropriate Practices in the
Education of Young Children
• Young children learn best through active, hands-on
teaching methods.
• Schools should focus on improving children’s
social as well as cognitive development.
• Developmentally appropriate practice is based on
knowledge of the typical development of children within
an age span, as well as the uniqueness of the child.
• Developmentally inappropriate practice ignores the
concrete, hands-on approach to learning.
• Direct teaching largely through abstract paper-andpencil activities presented to large groups of young
children is believed to be developmentally
inappropriate.
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Does Preschool Matter?
• Preschool matters if parents do not have the
commitment, time, energy, and resources to
provide young children with an environment
that approximates a good early childhood
program.
• If parents have the competence and resources
to provide young children with a variety of
learning experiences and exposure to other
children and adults, along with opportunities for
extensive play, this may be sufficient.
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Education for Children Who
Are Disadvantaged
• Project Head Start is a compensatory
education program designed to provide
children from low-income families the
opportunity to acquire skills and experiences
important for success in school.
• Project Follow Through was implemented as
an adjunct to Project Head Start to determine
which types of educational programs were the
most effective, and those were then carried
through the first few years of elementary
school.
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Findings on Early Childhood
Compensatory Education
• Children in academically oriented, directinstruction approaches did better on achievement
tests and were more persistent on tasks than
were children in other approaches.
• Children in effective education programs were
absent less often and showed more
independence.
• Long-term effects have included lower rates of
placement in special education, dropping out of
school, grade retention, delinquency, and use of
welfare programs.
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