CH. 7: KEY TERMS

Question 1

Animism

Answer 1

the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action

Question 2

Centration

Answer 2

focusing attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others

Question 3

Child-centered kindergarten

Answer 3

education that involves the whole child by considering both the child’s physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development and the child’s needs, interests, and learning styles

Question 4

Conservation

Answer 4

in Piaget’s theory, awareness that altering an object’s or a substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties

Question 5

Developmentally appropriate practice (DAP)

Answer 5

education that focuses on the typical developmental patterns of children (age-appropriateness) and the uniqueness of each child (individual-appropriateness)

Question 6

Egocentrism

Answer 6

the inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s (salient feature of the first substage of preoperational thought)

Question 7

Executive attention

Answer 7

aspects of thinking that include planning actions, allocating attention to goals, detecting and compensating for errors, monitoring progress on tasks, and dealing with novel or difficult circumstances

Question 8

Executive function

Answer 8

an umbrella-like concept that consists of a number of higher-level cognitive processes linked to the development of the brain’s prefrontal cortex; involves managing one’s thoughts to engage in goal-directed behavior and to exercise self-control

Question 9

Fast mapping

Answer 9

a process that helps to explain how young children learn the connection between a word and its referent so quickly

Question 10

Growth hormone deficiency

Answer 10

absence or deficiency of growth hormone produced by the pituitary gland to stimulate the body to grow

Question 11

Intuitive thought substage

Answer 11

Piaget’s second substage of preoperational thought, in which children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions (between 4 to 7 years of age)

Question 12

Montessori approach

Answer 12

an educational philosophy in which children are given considerable freedom and spontaneity in choosing activities and are allowed to move from one activity to another as they desire

Question 13

Myelination

Answer 13

the process by which the nerve cells are covered and insulated with a layer of fat cells, which increases the speed at which information travels through the nervous system

Question 14

Operations

Answer 14

in Piaget’s theory, these are reversible mental actions that allow children to do mentally what they formerly did physically

Question 15

Preoperational stage

Answer 15

Piaget’s second stage, lasting from about 2 to 7 years of age, during which children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings, and symbolic thought goes beyond simple connections of sensory information and physical action; stable concepts are formed, mental reasoning emerges, egocentrism is present, and magical beliefs are constructed

Question 16

Project Head Start

Answer 16

a government-funded program that is designed to provide children from low-income families with the opportunity to acquire the skills and experiences important for school success

Question 17

Short-term memory

Answer 17

the memory component in which individuals retain information for up to 30 seconds, assuming there is no rehearsal of the information

Question 18

Social constructivist approach

Answer 18

an approach that emphasizes the social contexts of learning and asserts that knowledge is mutually built and constructed. Vygotsky’s theory reflects this approach.

Question 19

Sustained attention

Answer 19

focused and extended engagement with an object, task, event, or other aspect of the environment

Question 20

Symbolic function substage

Answer 20

Piaget’s first substage of preoperational thought, in which the child gains the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present (between about 2 to 4 years of age)

Question 21

Theory of mind

Answer 21

awareness of one’s own mental processes and the mental processes of others

Question 22

Zone of proximal development (ZPD)

Answer 22

Vygotsky’s term for tasks that are too difficult for children to master alone but can be mastered with the assistance of adults or more-skilled children