NOTES AND TEST
The Onset of Thinking: Piaget’s
Theory
1.
Basic Principles of Cognitive Development
a.
Thought is always adaptive and organized
b.
Assimilation – experiences are incorporated into existing
schemes
c.
Accomodation – schemes have to be modified
d.
Periodically a child’s cognitive structures undergo changes.
The result of these changes are different phases of mental
development which begin in infancy and continue through adulthood
2.
Sensorimotor thinking
Occurs during the first two years of life. The schemes are developed through changes in perceptual and motor skills.
3.
Preoperational Thinking
a.
Occurs from 2 to 7 years of age. Thought at this stage is
characterized by the use of mental symbols such a language.
b.
Thinking is egocentric, the child is unable to see the
world from another’s point of view.
c.
Children can not reverse mental operations and sometimes confuse
appearance with reality.
4.
Evaluating Piaget’s Theory
a.
His theory has be faulted because children’s performance on
task is sometimes explained by ideas that are not part of Piaget’s
theory
b.
Children’s performance is not constant from one task to the
next, as the theory predicts
c.
Piaget’s account of thinking underemphasizes sociocultural
influences
Information-Processing During Infancy and
Early Childhood
1.
General Information Processing Principles
Mental development involves changes in mental hardware and in mental software
2.
Attention
Preschoolers are less able to pay attention to task-relevant information.
3.
Memory
a.
Infants are able to remember and can also be reminded of events
that seem to have forgotten
b.
Preschoolers are able to remember events they experienced more
than a year ago
c.
Common activities that are consisting of events are stored in
memory as a script. d.Eyewitness testimony – when
questioned repeatedly preschoolers have trouble distinguishing
what they experienced from what other suggest they have
experienced.
4.
Quantitative Knowledge
a.
Infants are able to disstinguish small quantities, such as one
from three
b.
By three years old, children are able to count small set of
objects
c.
Learning to count larger numbers involves learning rules about
unit and decade name.
Mind and Culture: Vygotsky’s
Theory
The Zone of Proximal
Development
Vygotsky believed that cognition develops first in a social setting and gradually comes under the child’s independent control. The zone of proximal development defines what children can do with assistance and what they can do alone.
1.
Scaffolding
A teaching style in which teachers let children take on more and more of a task as they master the different components
2.
Private Speech
When a task is difficult or after they have made a mistake children often talk to themselves. This is type of speech is one way that children regulate their own behavior, and it represents a step in the transfer of control of thinking from others to the self
Language
1.
The Road to Speech
a.
Phonemes – basic unit of sound from which words are
constructed. Infants are able to hear phonemes soon after
birth.
b.
Caregiver speech – adult’s speech to infants that is
slower and has greater variation in pitch and loudness. Infants
prefer caregiver speech, because it provides them with additional
language
c.
Newborns in the beginning are limited to crying, but by about 3
months of age they start to coo. Then babbling follows, and
it consists of a single syllable; over time the babbling includes
longer syllables and intonation.
2.
First Words
a.
Most infants will begin to speak, after their first birthday.
This is the time that infants realize that words are symbols.
Soon, after their vocabulary expands rapidly.
b.
Some children use a referential style that emphasizes words as
names and that views language as an intellectual tool
c.
Other children prefer to use an expressive style that emphasizes
phrases and that views language as a social tool.
d.
Children’s vocabulary is stimulated by experience. It
is very important to actively involve children in language
related activities.
3.
Speaking in Sentences
a.
Soon after children begin to speak, they start to use two-word
sentences that are derived from their own experiences. This
movement from two-word sentences to more complex ones involves
adding grammatical morphemes. The first grammatical
morphemes express simple relations. Mastery of grammatical
morphemes involves learning rules as well as the exceptions to
the rules.
b.
Some linguists claim that grammar is too complex to learn only
from experiences, and the brain must be pre-wired to simplify the
task. However, language experience is very important and
parent’s speech serves as a model for their children.
4.
Communicating with Others
a.
Parents should encourage turn-taking even before their child
starts to talk. By age 3, children start to spontaneously
take turns.
b.
Preschool age children start to adjust their speech to fit the
listener’s needs.