Chapter 9

Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Learning Objectives

 

When students have studied the material in this chapter, they will be able to answer the following:

• Introduction
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• What major cognitive limitations do preschoolers have?
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• What can parents and preschool teachers do to foster preschoolers' cognitive development?
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• How does cognitive development in early childhood prepare children for the start of formal education?

 

• Preschoolers’ reasoning abilities

• How did Piaget characterize the preschool period?
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• Compare Piaget’s ideas about preschoolers’ causal reasoning and understanding of living and nonliving things to more recent research findings.
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• Trace the development of children’s understanding of conservation.
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• What do preschoolers understand about number and measurement?
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• Summarize preschoolers’ understanding of classification and other logical relations.
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• What problems do preschoolers have with the appearance-reality distinction?

 

• Preschoolers’ attention and memory abilities

• Describe preschoolers’ attentional limitations.
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• Summarize preschoolers’ memory strengths and weaknesses.

 

• Social cognition

• To what extent do preschoolers show evidence of egocentrism?
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• Describe the development of preschoolers’ theory of mind.
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• Explain how scripts help preschoolers to make the most of their cognitive resources.

 

• An overview of preschool cognitive development

 

• What are the major cognitive advances made during the preschool years?

Chapter Summary Outline

Note: Terms in bold print are chapter vocabulary words.

Introduction

• Preschoolers' thinking includes both mature and immature qualities and is qualitatively distinct from adult thinking.
• They are active participants in their own development—see a continued search for general patterns and rules. There is a continual interplay between children’s developing capacities and the environment in which they grow.
• Specificity vs. generality is more important. Domain specificity and culture specificity.
• Continuing limitations in their cognitive abilities include:
• Difficulty integrating multiple pieces of information = centration.
• Difficulty distinguishing between appearance and reality = appearance-reality problem.
• Difficulty managing attentional and memory processes – have trouble using memory strategies.
• Egocentrism - inability to take the perspective of another, although this is not absolute in young children especially when given simple tasks.

Preschoolers' Reasoning Abilities

• Preoperational period – Piaget’s stage 2, ages 2 to 7. Children do not use logical operations in reasoning.
• Reasoning about Causation
• Reality is defined by the superficial appearance of things. They use observations to construct their own understanding of cause-and-effect relationships. Piaget did not find mature causal reasoning until well into middle childhood. Other researchers have found that preschoolers can give good causal explanations for simple, familiar processes, but they do not yet have an abstract understanding of what constitutes a plausible cause. They do not yet understand what a good explanation is.
• Reasoning about Living and Nonliving Things
• Animism – a tendency to attribute life to nonliving things. Piaget noted that young children thought that anything that moved was alive. Others have found that their thinking is not as animistic as previously thought but that children do have a problem distinguishing between the categories of living and nonliving. There is progression in this understanding throughout this age period.
• Reasoning about Quantity
• Preschoolers' understanding of quantity includes some surprising inabilities, including a failure to understand rules of conservation.
• Concepts of Conservation
• Concepts of conservation all include the general idea that the amount of something remains the same (is conserved) despite changes in form, shape, or appearance Conservation is learned at different times; mature understanding of them does not emerge until middle childhood.
• Some evidence exists that children’s experiences affect the development of their understanding of various types of conservation. Piaget believed it depended on physical maturation and experience in the world, and thus efforts to teach conservation would not be very successful. Some have found that these concepts can be taught (e.g., Bruner).
• Young children have difficulty with conservation tasks because of their tendencies to be misled by appearances and to focus on only one aspect of a stimulus. They move from being nonconservers, through a transitional period, to a mature understanding of a particular form of conservation. As children move toward mature conservation, the justifications they offer in conservation tasks change.
• Concepts of Number
• An awareness of how many items are present and how addition, subtraction, and rearrangement affect this number.
• In the classic number task, preschoolers fail to conserve number if they focus on row length; performance is better with smaller numbers.
• Understanding the effects of addition and subtraction. Young children have some understanding of processes of addition and subtraction before they have mastered conservation concepts. The youngest children note that addition to a set increases number and subtraction decreases number. This is a primitive rule. Most 4- and 5-year-olds use a qualitative rule, taking into account any initial difference but not the magnitude (e.g., less than, equal to, more than). Most 6- to 7-year-olds develop a quantitative rule, where they take into account the magnitude of the differences between the initial groups, and this allowed them to give correct answers.
• Learning to count. By the end of the preschool period, children understand and are able to apply five principles of counting. These principles are the one-to-one principle, the stable order principle, the cardinal principle, the abstraction principle, and the order-irrelevant principle.
• Concepts of Measurement
• Piaget believed that knowledge of conservation was needed to understand measurement. They make measurement errors when the appearance of two equal quantities makes them look unequal but if there is no misleading perceptual information, preschoolers often perform reasonable measurement activities (the understanding is qualitative).
• Summing Up
• Preschoolers do not usually display an understanding that quantities are conserved despite changes in appearance. Failure to understand conservation does not prevent preschoolers from learning a substantial amount about counting, measurement, and small quantities, and about how numbers can be changed through addition and subtraction.
• Reasoning About Classes and Logical Relations
• Piaget’s research on preschoolers’ emerging logical reasoning focused on three skills:
• Classification, grouping by shared characteristics; seriation, ability to arrange things in logical progression; and transitive inference, the ability to infer the relationship between two objects by knowing their respective relationships to a third.
• Classification
• A class is any set of objects or events that we think of as having certain features in common and therefore as being the same in certain ways. Children show a primitive form of classification from infancy, but not until the preschool years do they become able to classify objects consistently. Centration limits preschoolers' classification skills, however.
• Seriation
• Although preschoolers can find the largest or smallest stick in a fairly large group, they have trouble placing the whole set of sticks in order from largest to smallest. Their problems with seriation are related to the appearance-reality problem and to centration.
• Transitive Inference
• Piaget found that children could not solve transitive inference problems until middle childhood, but more recent studies have indicated that 4-year-olds can solve them with the right training. However, they have more trouble learning the relationships involved than older children do.
• Distinguishing between Appearance and Reality
• At age 3, children are frequently misled by the surface appearance of a problem; by the time they are 5 or 6, their view of reality is less dominated by appearance. In natural settings, however, even 3-year-olds are beginning to make distinctions between appearance and underlying reality.

Preschoolers' Attention and Memory Abilities

• Information-processing theorists describe the selection, storage, and retrieval of information in terms of the steps involved in processing (i.e., from the sensory register to short-term, or working memory, to long-term memory). This approach has been used to study the development of attention skills (transfer of information to working memory) and memory skills (processes that retain information in working memory), as well as to explain the development of other cognitive skills (e.g., social cognition).
• Deploying Attention
• Although preschoolers can pay attention to interesting events very well, their attentional system is not yet fully developed. For example, they use less systematic and organized scanning strategies than older children do, either scanning too little or too much. Not until middle childhood do children think of attention as a limited resource that must be deployed selectively.
• Preschoolers' Memory
• Young children are often oblivious to the memory demands of a situation.
• Abilities and Limitations
• Preschoolers demonstrate both recognition (ability to perceive a particular stimulus as familiar) and free recall (ability to spontaneously pull information out of long-term memory for current use) in their daily activities. They do best on recognition tasks, especially for spatial location.
• Usually do more poorly on recall tasks than older children and adults. They have a digit span of 3 to 4 items.
• Speed of information processing is slower in younger children.
• Tasks require more memory space for younger children.
• They lack skill at using memory strategies. Will use obvious strategies at times.

Social Cognition

• The field of social cognition deals with the impact of children's cognitive skills on their social relationships and the role of social interaction in supporting cognitive development. Children start to learn how other people think and feel, what their motives and intentions are, and what they are likely to do. They begin to understand that other people’s perspectives sometimes differ from their own, helping their communication abilities. Can respond more appropriately in their interactions with others.
• Egocentrism in Preschoolers
• Piaget believed preschoolers were limited by egocentrism, the inability to understand others’ perspectives.
• Preschoolers show perceptual egocentrism – not differentiating one’s own perceptual experience from that of another. Tested by Piaget with the Three Mountain Task. With less complex tasks children do not show the extent of egocentrism that Piaget found.
• Cognitive egocentrism – assume that others have the same knowledge, beliefs, and desires that they do (e.g., false belief tasks). By age 6, children demonstrate a sharp reduction in cognitive egocentrism (e.g., choosing appropriate gifts for others).
• The Child's Theory of Mind
• Preschool children are engaged in constructing an understanding of the human mind and mental concepts (such as "knowing," "wanting," "thinking," "remembering," and "intending") = theory of mind. Goes beyond empirical knowledge (direct observation) to include theoretical knowledge (not directly observed).
• According to Flavell, children developing a theory of mind come to understand five postulates or fundamental principles (e.g., "minds can represent objects and events accurately or inaccurately"):
• Minds exist (toddlerhood).
• Minds have connections to the physical world (3 – 4 year olds).
• Minds are separate and different from the physical world.
• Minds can represent objects and events accurately or inaccurately (5-year-olds). Related to false belief.
• Minds accurately interpret reality and emotional experiences (middle childhood).
• Acquire a theory of mind from experiences in the world, especially social experiences.
• Communication and the Decline of Egocentrism
• Preschoolers' speech and communication skills also show evidence of egocentrism and its decline. Egocentric speech is seen both when children talk to themselves while playing and in collective monologues. Preschoolers also often have difficulty communicating information to a listener in a nonegocentric way, especially if the task is abstract or complex (issue of maximum skill vs. typical performance). Preschoolers do show some evidence, however, of adjusting their speech to the needs of their listeners under certain circumstances.
• There is often a difference between what children are capable of doing under optimal circumstances (competence) and how they actually do on a particular task (performance), called the competence-performance distinction.
• Limited Cognitive Resources and Communication
• One reason preschoolers have trouble communicating about an unfamiliar task may be that their available cognitive resources are overtaxed. A knowledge of scripts (abstract representation of a sequence of actions needed to accomplish some goal) reduces the cognitive resources that must be used to communicate about commonly repeated routines. As children's knowledge of scripts increases, their communicative skills also increase.

An Overview of Preschool Cognitive Development

• Preschoolers have made great advances beyond toddlers in cognitive development. The advances are:
• Emerging understanding of causation, especially in simple or familiar systems.
• Ability to make clear distinctions between living and nonliving things.
• A qualitative understanding of many concepts related to quantity and an ability to reason about small numbers.
• A beginning understanding of classification and other logical relations.
• Gradual development of the ability to distinguish between appearance and reality.
• Expanding attention and memory skills.
• Steadily increasing understanding of other’s perspectives and thoughts.
• They are still limited in their use and evaluation of cognitive strategies.
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Lecture Topics

The following are lecture topic suggestions to complement Chapter 9 reading material.

Topic 1: Imaginary Companions and Children's Theory of Mind

• Research Questions: Are children with active fantasy lives different from other children? How is children's understanding of fantasy related to their knowledge about mental processes?
• Recent research on children's theory of mind has investigated links to children's understanding of fantasy, pretense, and magic (e.g., Samuels & Taylor, 1994; Woolley & Phelps, 1995). Marjorie Taylor and her colleagues have studied young children who invent imaginary companions.
• Research Literature:
• Bender, L., & Vogel, B. F. (1941). Imaginary companions of children. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 11, 56-65.
• Myers, W. A. (1976). Imaginary companions, fantasy twins, mirror dreams, and depersonalization. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 45, 503-524.
• Samuels, A., & Taylor, M. (1994). Children's ability to distinguish fantasy events from real-life events. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 12, 417-428.
• Taylor, M., & Carlson, S. M. (1995, March). Children who create imaginary characters. In K. S. Rosengren & C. N. Johnson (Chairs), Uses of magic and fantasy in childhood: Individual, developmental, and contextual differences. Symposium conducted at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Indianapolis, IN.
• Taylor, M., Cartwright, B. S., & Carlson, S. M. (1993). A developmental investigation of children's imaginary companions. Developmental Psychology, 29, 276-285.
• Woolley, J. D., & Phelps, K. (1995, March). Magical thinking: Young children's beliefs about imagining and wishing. In K. S. Rosengren & C. N. Johnson (Chairs), Uses of magic and fantasy in childhood: Individual, developmental, and contextual differences. Symposium conducted at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Indianapolis, IN.
• Methods and Results:
• Taylor, Cartwright, and Carlson (1993) examined understanding of the pretend-real distinction and the fantasy-reality distinction among 4-year-olds. In Session 1 of the study, children with and without imaginary companions (IC’s) were asked to describe an IC or a real friend. They were then asked to pretend that the IC or real friend was present. The experimenter asked the children questions about the IC or (imagined) real friend, such as whether the experimenter could see and touch the IC or (imagined) real friend. Parents were interviewed about their children's IC’s. Later, at Session 2, children's descriptions of IC's or real friends were compared with their original descriptions. Children were then compared in terms of their ability to distinguish fantasy and reality in a picture task, inclination to engage in pretend play during free play, style of pretend play in an elicited pretense task, and understanding of mental and physical entities (e.g., a real versus a pretend cookie).
• Taylor et al. found that the degree of change from Session 1 to Session 2 was similar for real and imaginary companions. All children were able to distinguish between fantasy and reality in the picture task. However, children with IC's became involved in fantasy very easily and had a strong inclination to engage in fantasy spontaneously. In addition, children with IC's performed differently from children without IC's on elicited pretense tasks. Children who had IC's were more likely than children without IC's to use imaginary objects rather than their own bodies when acting out pretend actions (e.g., they pretended to hold a toothbrush rather than using their finger as a toothbrush). Finally, children with IC's were as adept as children without IC's when asked to distinguish between a real and pretend object .
• Taylor and Carlson (1995) examined the relation between early fantasy and children's knowledge about mental life. Three- and 4-year-old children were interviewed about their fantasy lives (e.g., imaginary companions, impersonation of imagined characters). They were also given tasks assessing their level of pretend play and verbal intelligence. One week later, the children were given a series of theory of mind tasks (e.g., measures of appearance-reality, false belief, representational change, and perspective taking). Among 4-year-olds, children who created imaginary characters performed better on the theory of mind tasks than the other children. Taylor and Carlson found no relation between theory of mind, the creation of imaginary characters, and verbal intelligence.
• In combination, these findings indicate that children who create imaginary companions are not psychologically disturbed, as some early clinical observations suggested (e.g., Bender & Vogel, 1941; Myers, 1976). To the contrary, children who invent IC's have a clear grasp of the distinction between reality and the worlds of fantasy and pretense. They differ from children without IC's, however, in the spontaneity and style of their pretend play.
• Discussion Questions: How many people had an IC when they were younger? Why do you think some children create ICs?
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Topic 2: Project Head Start: Effects of Preschool Intervention

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• Research Question: Do cognitively oriented preschool intervention programs increase success in school for children from low-income families?
• During the 1960's, a number of cognitively oriented preschool intervention programs were started as part of the War on Poverty. The largest of these was the federally funded Project Head Start. By the late 1970's, it was popular to label such programs a failure and to assert that they had no significant effects on the children who participated in them. Whether such programs are judged successes or failures depends on the criteria used to evaluate them. Both the content of the programs and the evaluation criteria reflect underlying theories of development and assumptions about the role of cognitive development in children's functioning.
• One reason Head Start and other preschool intervention programs are often labeled failures is that they are victims of overly high expectations. In the mid-1960's, the major theoretical approach in American developmental psychology was environmentalism--the belief that environmental factors produced most of the variations in children's abilities and that relatively minor changes in children's environments could have major effects on their later functioning. At the same time, the emphasis was clearly on cognitive, rather than social-emotional development. It was assumed that low-income children's problems in school were mainly the result of cognitive deficits due to shortcomings in their preschool environment. It was also assumed that early cognitive intervention would be permanent.
• Research Literature:
• Benson, M. S. (1993, March). Promoting literacy: The storytelling skills of Head Start parents. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans, LA.
• Campbell, F. (1993, March). Growing into a wider world: Transition from Head Start to kindergarten in Chapel Hill-Carrboro. In P. Davis (Chair), Results from the first testing period of the Head Start Transition Project: The transition process. Poster symposium conducted at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans, LA.
• Committee on Labor and Human Resources. (1993). New challenges for Head Start: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Children, Family, Drugs, and Alcoholism of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources (S.HRG. 103-166). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
• Lazar, I., & Darlington, R. (1982). Lasting effects of early education: A report from the consortium for longitudinal studies. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 48 (2-3, Serial No. 195).
• Lee, V., Brooks-Gunn, J., & Schnur, E. (1988). Does Head Start work? A one-year followup comparison of disadvantaged children attending Head Start, no preschool, and other preschool programs. Developmental Psychology, 24, 210-222.
• Lee, V. E., & Loeb, S. (1995). Where do Head Start attendees end up? One reason why preschool effects fade out. Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 17, 62-82.
• Mason, J. M., Sinha, S., Kerr, B., & McCormick, C. E. (1992). Emergent literacy intervention: Theory and application. In Conference proceedings: New directions in child and family research: Shaping Head Start in the 90's (pp. 277-280). Washington, DC: Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
• McNamara, J. R., Hollman, C., & Riegel, T. (1994). A preliminary study of the usefulness of the behavioral assessment system for children in the evaluation of mental-health needs in a Head Start population. Psychological Reports, 75, 1195-1201.
• Piotrkowski, C. S., Collins, R. C., Knitzer, J., & Robinson, R. (1994). Strengthening mental health services in Head Start: A challenge for the 1990s. American Psychologist, 49, 133-139.
• U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. (1993). Creating a 21st century Head Start: Final report of the Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion. Washington, DC: Author.
• Zigler, E. (1994). Reshaping early-childhood intervention to be a more effective weapon against poverty. American Journal of Community Psychology, 22, 37-47.
• Zigler, E., Piotrkowski, C. S., & Collins, R. (1994). Health services in Head Start. Annual Review of Public Health, 15, 511-534.
• Zigler, E., & Styfco, S. J. (1993). Head Start and beyond: A national plan for extended childhood intervention. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Zigler, E., & Styfco, S. J. (1994). Head Start: Criticisms in a constructive context. American Psychologist, 49, 127-132.
• Zigler, E., & Valentine, J. (1979). Project Head Start: A legacy of the War on Poverty. Free Press.
• Methods and Results: Since 1965, Project Head Start has served over 13 million children and their families. Many critics of Head Start have focused on its failure to produce permanent increases in IQ among program participants. The most common pattern in evaluation studies is to find a significant increase in IQ among preschool program graduates when they enter school and for the next three or four years (compared to similar children who were not in such programs). By the end of elementary school, program participants' IQ scores are generally no higher than those of children who did not participate in an intervention program. IQ scores are not the only measure on which preschool intervention programs can be judged, however. They are certainly one measure of cognitive functioning, but raising IQ's was not the principal goal of Project Head Start. Instead, it was intended to improve children's overall functioning, including their physical health and social competence as well as their cognitive abilities.
• What long-term effects do preschool intervention programs have on the children who participate in them? Evaluation studies that followed up graduates of 12 programs at ages 9 through 19 (reported by Lazar & Darlington, 1982) revealed lasting effects in four areas: school competence, developed abilities, children's attitudes and values, impact on the children's families.
• Children who attended preschool programs were more likely to meet their school's basic requirements, were less likely to be placed in special education classes or forced to repeat a grade, exhibited raised IQ scores for several years after the programs ended, performed better on achievement tests, were more likely to give achievement-related reasons for being proud of themselves, and rated their school performance more highly than comparison groups did.
• Mothers of children who attended preschool programs were more satisfied with their children's school performance, and had higher vocational aspirations for their children.
• The major overall effect of the programs seems to have been to help the child adapt to the intellectual, behavioral, and social demands of school.
• If these effects seem modest, it must be remembered that the interventions were also modest, generally lasting only a short time (8 weeks to 1 year) and in some cases not making a serious attempt to change anything in the children's environment outside of school. The most effective programs, in terms of producing measurable long-term results, are those that extend the intervention to the home through parental involvement and include further educational intervention after the children reach elementary school. Both of these factors serve to expand the scope of the intervention in both time and place, thereby increasing the likelihood that it will produce long-term effects.
•  Zigler--one of the creators of Head Start--and Styfco (1993) evaluate the three existing Head
• Start programs (Head Start, Follow Through, and Chapter I) and describe the newly created Head Start Transition Project. They propose a new plan to consolidate the programs in order to achieve a coherent, comprehensive policy for the nation's impoverished young children. Research (reported at the 1993 and 1995 biennial meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development) has focused on the first testing period of the Head Start Transition Project. Outcome measures used in these studies include social aspects such as locus of control, family supports, and self-concept as well as measures of academic achievement.
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• Discussion Questions: If the graduates of the first Head Start preschool programs were studied today, which developmental outcome variables would be most appropriate and informative? Should adult IQ scores be included in a follow-up study of Head Start? Why or why not? From a methodological perspective, what are the advantages of carrying out research on preschool intervention programs? What are the disadvantages of this kind of research? How much control over variables--and developmental outcomes--do researchers have in this kind of research? What are some of the ethical factors to be considered in intervention research?
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Topic 3: School Readiness

• Background: How can we prepare our early childhood aged children for school? Kindergarten is a nearly universal experience for children in the U.S., and there is a wide range of skills with which children enter kindergarten, which challenges teachers of this age group. At the Web site for McGraw-Hill (http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/devel/kid-c/resources/1-lecture/l-17.htm) is a lecture topic on “School Readiness” which lists 10 activities that children could be learning from parents to assist them in more successful experiences by first grade. These activities are: familiarity with the alphabet; recognizing their own name in print and maybe being able to print it; counting to 10 and recognizing the different numbers; understanding the concept of “less” and “more”; naming basic colors; telling right from left; telling which objects are similar and which are different; engaging in fundamental self-care and physical tasks such as skipping, holding a pencil correctly, and turning pages of a book.
• Reading success is very important to future school achievement. Researchers have noted that children who read, and read widely, become better readers. Reading and writing are complementary skills, and parents are important role models and supporters of their children’s reading efforts. Parents can (and should) play a role in getting their children interested in reading and encouraging reading skills, even before they begin formal schooling. A summary of points gathered from researchers available at the KidSource Web site on “How Can I Improve My Child’s Reading” (1993) is:
• Be a good role model by reading yourself and reading to your child.
• Provide varied reading material.
• Encourage activities that require reading (e.g., reading directions to construct a toy).
• Establish a reading time.
• Write notes to our school-aged child and encourage written responses.
• Ask your child to bring a library book home to read to a younger sibling.
• Establish one evening a night for reading (instead of television viewing).
• Encourage your child in all reading efforts.
• It is important to consider risk factors that are associated with problems in learning in kindergarten. For instance, as discussed by Zill, Colins, West, and Hausken (1995), there are five family risk factors: mother has less than a high school education, family is below the official poverty line, mother speaks a language other than English as her primary language, mother was unmarried at the time of the child’s birth, and only one parent is present in the home. Half of all preschoolers are affected by at least one of these risk factors and about 15 % are affected by three or more of them. Hispanic preschoolers had fewer signs of emerging literacy and more difficulties with attention. The authors emphasize the importance of intervention, such as Head Start (see Lecture Topic 2) for high-risk children since these programs have been linked to higher emerging literacy scores in 4-year-olds.
• Research Literature:
• Loveday, E., & Simmons, K. (1988). Reading at home: does it matter what parents do? Reading, 22(2), 84-88.
• Moore, S.A., & Moore, D. W. (1990). Emergent literacy: children, parents, and teachers together. Reading Teacher, 43(4), 330-331.
• West, J., Hausken, E., & Collins, M. (1993). Readiness for kindergarten: parent and teacher beliefs. Washington, D.C. National Center for Education Statistics.
• Zill, N., Collins, M., West, J., & Hausken, E. (1995). Approaching kindergarten: a look at preschoolers in the United States. Young Children, 51(1), 35-38.
• Articles on early childhood and education are available at http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/pages/preschoolers.html.
• Discussion Questions: What community efforts could be designed to assist parents to assist their children in preparing for school? Have your students comment on how well prepared they felt for school and what factors influenced their feelings of preparation. Do this with points one through eight above. What type of encouragement did they receive for reading? How can parents make reading and the “prereading” skills seem like fun?

 

Classroom Discussion Topics and Activities

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• Special Needs Children – A Discussion with Parents: Have students visit the following Web sites on the challenges of parenting special needs children. They should develop a list of questions (that meet with your final approval) for parents that you might invite to the classroom to talk about their special needs children and their lives together. Have the parents describe the child. Have the parents address the special challenges of parenting this child. Talk about dealing with the stressors, what do they do to cope? It would be good to have the parents address the personal benefits of parenting this child. And, seek advice from these parents. http://specialchildren.about.com/library/weekly/aa032603a.htm http://specialchildren.about.com/library/weekly/aa030500a.htm, http://www.irsc.org/, http://specialchildren.about.com/library/weekly/aa031103a.htm, http://www.our-kids.org/
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• Teaching Reading: Teaching children to read is a fundamental task. There are two major perspectives about how best to teach reading. The first is called the whole language method and the second is called the phonics method. A third perspective is to combine the two. Have students read about the issues and the controversies at http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr029.shtml. Then, have the students consider what type of early literacy skills parents and others can teach children. There are a number of ideas of ideas on this topic presented at                    http://www.teach-nology.com/teachers/early_education/subject_matter/language_arts/.
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• School Readiness: (See the School Readiness Box in Chapter 9.) Have students consider what they believe would be important for the preparation of children for the classroom? Success in school often depends on the match between what is expected of the child and what the child’s performance (knowledge, skill, behavior) is. Given what your students know about cognition in early childhood, what could they feasibly suggest for academic skill development (e.g., vocabulary building, concept acquisition of numbers, color naming, alphabet knowledge, recognition of how simple strategies can help problem solving, offering mnemonics that adults devise involving rhyme such as when parents compose a song about the child’s address and telephone number in case of emergencies)? What could they suggest regarding the limitations of young children’s skills—what parents and teachers should not expect yet? Have them discuss why it is important that expectations of children be reasonable and age-appropriate (on the part of parents and teachers). This discussion could be used in conjunction with information in Lecture Topic 3 on “School Readiness.”
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• Children as Eyewitnesses: Have students consider, on the basis of their reading on cognitive skills in early childhood, what the challenges are of having young children as eyewitnesses. Have students discuss the reliability of this type of testimony from young children. What are the limitations likely in having children as eyewitnesses? Relate this discussion to cognitive strengths and limitations of this age period. How has research on the topic influenced policy outcomes regarding interview strategies, etc.? Have students read the article at http://www.uoregon.edu/~kreis/fundamentals.html on “Fundamentals of Memory as Related to Children’s Testimony” and discuss the issues.
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• Interview on Childhood Minds: Have students interview parents of early childhood aged children to see what evidence there is for the following: animism, appearance-reality problem, beginnings of a theory of mind, egocentric speech, lack of false belief, and existence of imaginary friends. How have these parents found it effective to deal with the “problem of monsters under the bed.”  The students will need to define these items for the parents and have some examples prepared as prompts for their queries. Further, have students comment on why it is easier to trick young children than older children. Refer to Lecture Topic 2 on “Imaginary Companions and Children’s Theory of Mind” for more information on some of these topics. Perhaps it would be interesting to ask students about whether it is appropriate for us to feed into these imaginary characters in our children’s lives by presenting fictional yet significant beings to them such as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Is it OK to “lie” to children about their existence?
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• Interaction with a Preschooler: If students have preschool-aged family members with whom they could conduct an interview, have them investigate the following: presence of egocentrism in how well a child will retell a story; lack of conservation (students could attempt to conduct the number, liquid, and mass examples); estimation of how many items the “subject” can remember in a list of 10 words; test the “subject’s” memory with the 10-item list; examine spontaneous strategy usage of rehearsal regarding list learning; determine whether the “subjects” uses the strategy of rehearsal to learn a new list if the adult tells the child about this strategy. What attentional challenges do students face when attempting this interview with a preschooler? If possible, have your students ask the child to create a drawing. Have the child tell a story about the drawing—look for imagination and egocentrism, as well as level of fine motor skill development.
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• TV Programs: You could record segments of some of the popular programs for young children (e.g., Sesame Street, Barney, Blue’s Clues) to point out why these programs are popular for children in terms of their cognitive level, or you could have students watch these types of programs on their own and have them comment on their relevance and appropriateness for young children’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses.
• An additional activity that can be integrated with the above suggestion pertains to an evaluation of race and class in children’s television programming. Children of all races watch a great deal of television and they are most likely to see Caucasian males having the most representation in programs (such as those on Saturday morning TV). Have students note the gender, the race/ethnic groups of the characters, and social class of the characters in the shows they are reviewing. How do they feel about the messages that children are receiving from TV? Some information is available regarding TV viewing and children at the following Web site: http://www.childrennow.org. This Web site has the results of a large-scale study of children’s perceptions of race and class.
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• Application to Other Domains: In anticipation of Chapter 10, have your students reflect on how cognitive capacities of early childhood underlie their understanding of self, parents, and the conceptualization of friendship.
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• Preschool Curricula: What implications does the information presented in Chapter 9 have for the design of preschool curricula? What kinds of subject matter and activities seem best suited to children of this age? What would be better left until children have reached elementary school age?
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• Referential Communication Task: A referential communication task makes an interesting classroom demonstration and gives students a clearer idea of what is involved in that type of research. Seat two students with their backs to each other at the front of the classroom. Give one a fairly simple model constructed of Legos or similar building blocks and the other all the blocks needed to construct the same model, plus a few extras. The task is for the first student to tell the second student how to construct the model, without being able to show the second student how to do it or see what the second student is doing. Afterward, ask the two participants to describe their experience. How was it similar to or different from more typical communication situations? What special demands did it place on them? Ask the class if they observed any instances of egocentric communication. Is this type of task a valid way to measure egocentrism in children? How does it differ from the communication tasks a child would more typically face?
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• False-Belief Task: An interesting and relatively simple way to evaluate children's developing theory of mind is with a false-belief task. Tasks assessing children's understanding of false beliefs about the location or properties of objects are described in Wimmer and Perner (1983) and Perner, Leekam, and Wimmer (1987). Gross and Harris (1988) report an experiment using a story task to test children's understanding of false beliefs about emotion.
• Gross, D., & Harris, P. L. (1988). False beliefs about emotion: Children's understanding of misleading emotional displays. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 11, 475-488.
• Perner, J., Leekam, S. R., & Wimmer, H. (1987). Three-year-olds' difficulty with false belief: The case for a conceptual deficit. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5, 125-137.
• Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103-128.
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• Piagetian Task Video: A live or taped demonstration of children of various ages attempting Piagetian tasks is an effective way to illustrate Piaget's ideas and research methods. Please refer to the video listing below for suggestions. Further another way of providing such a demonstration is to conduct it yourself, either in class or on videotape. Another way, which encourages greater student involvement, is to assign students to test children on the tasks, as an in-class demonstration or an out-of-class assignment. In-class demonstrations need not be done live; instead, they can be videotaped in advance, which is often preferable for the children involved.
• Appropriate tasks for use with preschoolers include the standard conservation of liquid task; a conservation of number task using coins, poker chips, or buttons; the seriation task; and the three-mountain perspective-taking task. (The three-mountain task can be carried out using three colors of construction paper cones to represent the mountains.) It is also interesting to compare preschoolers' performance on these tasks with that of elementary-school-aged children; you may want to include older children in this activity as well, anticipating material to be covered in Chapter 11. Or, you might repeat some of the tasks later with older children.
• Students need specific instructions to carry out Piagetian demonstrations. A handout listing materials and providing detailed procedures should be prepared. One source: Ormrod, J. E. & Carter, K. R. (1985). Systematizing the Piagetian clinical interview for classroom use. Teaching of Psychology, 12, 216-219. Another, which also includes instructions for using videotaped student demonstrations in class, is: Balch, W. R. (1986). The use of student-performed developmental exercises in the classroom. Teaching of Psychology, 13, 140-142.

Films, Videos, and Internet Resources

Films and Videos:

• Among Equals (1991, 57 min., Ambrose Video). Childhood Series -- Explores the importance of peer relationships as cameras capture children at play in Japan, America, and Cameroon.
• The Brain: Effects of Childhood Trauma (2002, 29 min., Insight Media).Current research confirms that childhood trauma can activate various systems in the brain that actually change neuron response and cognitive pathways, resulting in severe problems in learning ability, mood, bonding and attachment, and problem solving. Emphasizing prevention and timely intervention, this video offers suggestions to caregivers, teachers, and health-care providers on how to avoid and deal with trauma-induced brain damage. The program has been updated to include information relating to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
• Cognitive Development (1990, 30 min., Insight Media). Focusing on the influential theories of Jean Piaget, this program explains the stages of cognitive development through examples of children’s cognitive skills at various levels of development.
• Concepts, Memories, and Reasons (1992, 30 min., Insight Media). Looks at cognitive changes between ages five and seven, including development of memory strategies, logical reasoning, and problem solving. Considers how these changes influence relationships to family and society.
• Developing Language: Learning to Question, Inform, and Entertain (1994, 25 min., Films for the Humanities and Sciences). Starting right from infancy, this classic program charts the development of language during childhood. Basic language acquisition, learned from rudimentary and higher-level child/caregiver interactions, is described. Aspects of competence that go beyond the purpose of simple communication are also considered, including the skill of using conversation for establishing and furthering social relationships, the ability to employ language as a part of games, the capacity to understand jokes, and the awareness of what other people know and understand at various stages of maturation.
• Early Childhood Cognitive Development: Weighing the Evidence (1999, 22 min., Films for the Humanities and Sciences). Does early brain stimulation really build a better baby? ABC News correspondent Chris Bury takes a look at the Barney-or-Bach controversy with John Bruer, author of The Myth of the First Three Years, on one side and renowned child psychoanalyst Dr. Stanley Greenspan and Don Campbell, author of The Mozart Effect, on the other. Guest anchor Cokie Roberts leads a thoughtful discussion on the subject between Harvard Medical School’s Alvin Poussaint, Ellen Galinsky, and Danielle Crittenden.
• How Boys and Girls Differ: the First Six Years (2002, 20 min., Insight Media). This video discusses the developmental differences between boys and girls, looking at cognitive, social, emotional, and physical growth in the early years of development. It explores what these differences mean for parents and caregivers and addresses gender stereotypes.
• How Children Learn (1997, 23 min., Insight Media). Designed as an introduction to cognitive theory, this video stresses the importance of early childhood experiences in preparing children for school learning. It illustrates the interaction of experience and brain development and presents factors that influence educational success in models based on the work of Erikson, Piaget, and Vygotsky.
• How Does the Mind Grow? (1991, 60 min., Insight Media). Defining cognition, this video examines the three major schools of thought on cognitive development and two types of theories that have developed from them. It investigates Piaget’s theory, showing children at each stage of development. It then explores Case’s information-processing approach.
• In the Land of Giants (1991, 57 min., Ambrose Video). Childhood Series, video 4. Urie Bronfenbrenner characterizes the family as “the most efficient means for making human beings human.” This program examines models of behavior and codes of discipline used to mold children to a culturally desirable social image.
• Mind Games (2002, 47 min., Films for the Humanities and Sciences). From childhood, we are told that lies are bad, but without them, human relationships would fall apart. With a wide variety of children to demonstrate key developmental stages, this program presents the story of how we all learn to read and manipulate each other’s minds. Observed behavior and classic child psychology experiments show this progression in an entertaining way, from learning the boundaries of the body and the mind, through the birth of the imagination, to the ability to lie for good as well as bad—lying as a subtle expression of human empathy. A Discovery Channel Production.
• Piaget's Developmental Theory: Concrete Operations (1993, 30 min.). Dr. David Elkind presents Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development of children. Structured interviews with children aged 4 to 9 years illustrate the development of transitive thinking and reversibility as children move from the preoperational to concrete operational stage. Explores children's construction of the unit concept and examines recent criticisms of Piaget's theory.
• Preschool in Three Cultures (1989, 55 min., Yale University Films). Shows a typical day in a preschool in Japan, China and the U.S., with evaluations by teachers of their own and each other’s schools. A companion videotape to the book Preschool in Three Cultures by Joseph J. Tobin, David Y. H. Wu, and Dana H. Davidson.
• Preschooler Mental Development (1994, 30 min., Insight Media). Focusing on the mental development of children during the preschool years, this lesson reviews the stages of development in the Piagetian model and compares this model with the behavioristic approach to mental development and learning.
• Preschool Physical Development (1994, 30 min., Insight Media). Examines the child’s physical development during the preschool ages of three to six—a period of rapid growth in motor skills.

 

A-V Resource List Information:

• List of providers for most of the videos listed above:
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• Ambrose Video at www.ambrosevideo.com or 800-526-4663
• Davidson Films at www.davidsonfilms.com or 888-437-4200.
• Films for the Humanities and Sciences at http://www.films.com or 800-257-5126.
• Insight Media at www.insight-media.comor 212-721-6316.
• Public Broadcasting Service at 1-800-949-8670 or www.shop.pbs.org
• Yale University Films at 203-432-0148.

 

Additional Internet Resource Options for Chapter 9:

• http://www.mhhe.com/dehart5
• A variety of teaching tools for this textbook are available from the Web site for McGraw-Hill.
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• http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/episode2/faq/index.html
• A look at seizure disorder and the choice and outcomes of hemispherectomy.
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http://www.kidshealth.org

• Kids Health. This site, from Nemours Foundation, offers extensive articles on childhood illness and health issues, and provides information to parents, children and even professionals. The articles are well-written and annotated.
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http://www.rand.org/publcations/MR/MR898
"Investing in Our Children: What We Know and Don't Know About the Costs and Benefits of Early Childhood Interventions" An independent cost-benefit analysis published by the Rand Corporation on the impact of early childhood intervention on child health and development, educational attainment, and economic well-being.

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http://ericps.ed.uuc.edu/npin/
National Parent Information Network. This is a gold mine of annotated, categorized information, culled from the massive repository of ERIC, the federally funded Educational Resource Information Center. The NPIN offers news, book reviews, a Parents AskERIC feature, discussions and so on. Emphasis is on professional as well as parental aspects of child development. It contains links to other parent resources.

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• http://www.parentsplace.com/fertility/adoptioncentral/articles/0,,166271_253105,00.html
• “What Children Understand About Adoption at Different Ages” – preschool, middle childhood and adolescence.
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http://www.esrnational.org
Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR) helps educators create safe, caring, respectful, and productive learning environments. We also help educators work with young people to develop the social skills, emotional competencies, and qualities of character they need to succeed in school and become contributing members of their communities.

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http://www.conectforkids.org/benton_reviews1560/benton_reviews_show.htm?doc_id=8855

• Article on “How Men Can Get Involved in Early Childhood Education” which discusses the important role fathers can play in the social, emotional, and cognitive development of their children. Suggestions for fathers and links to further resources are included.
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