Chapter 7 - Early Childhood Flashcards
Absence or deficiency of growth hormone produced by the
pituitary gland to stimulate the body to grow.
Growth hormone deficiency
Nerve cells are covered and insulated with a layer of fat cells
Myelination
Simple movements, such as hopping, jumping, and running back and forth, just for the sheer delight of performing these activities.
Gross motor skills
The ability to pick up the tiniest objects between their thumb and forefinger for some time, they are still somewhat clumsy at it.
Fine motor skill
A development that allows the child to move their eyes efficiently across a series of letters.
Perceptual development
Important for children’s development
Sleep
Extreme daytime sleepiness
Narcolepsy
Difficulty getting to sleep or staying asleep
Insomnia
Where 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.
Preoperational stage
These are reversible mental actions that allow children to do mentally what they formerly did physically.
Operations
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 and 4 years of age).
Symbolic function substage
The inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective.
Egocentrism
Belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action.
Animism
This is the second substage of preoperational thought, occurring between approximately 4 and 7 years of age. In this substage, children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions.
The intuitive thought substage
Focusing attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others.
Centration
In Piaget’s theory, awareness that altering an object’s or a substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties.
Conservation
Another developmental theory that focuses on children’s cognition
Vygotsky’s theory
The range of tasks that are too difficult for the child to master alone but can be learned with guidance and assistance from adults or more-skilled children.
Zone of proximal development (ZPD)
Limit of the ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently.
Lower limit
Level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistance of an able instructor.
Upper limit
Changing the level of support
Scaffolding
An approach that emphasizes the social contexts of learning and asserts that knowledge is mutually built and constructed. Vygotsky’s theory reflects this approach.
Social constructivist approach
Focusing of mental resources on select information.
Attention
Involves action planning, allocating attention to goals, error detection and compensation, monitoring progress on tasks, and dealing with novel or difficult circumstances.
Executive attention
Focused and extended engagement with an object, task, event, or other aspect of the environment.
Sustained attention
The retention of information over time—is a central process in children’s cognitive development.
Memory
An information that individuals can retain for up to 30 seconds if there is no rehearsal of the information.
Short-term memory
An umbrella-like concept that consists of a number of higher level cognitive processes linked to the development of the brain’s prefrontal cortex
Executive function
Refers to awareness of one’s own mental processes and the mental processes of others.
Theory of mind
A process that helps to explain how young children learn the connection between a word and its referent so quickly.
Fast mapping
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.
Child-center kindergarten
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.
Montessori approach
Which is based on knowledge of the typical development of children within an age span (age-appropriateness), as well as the uniqueness of the child (individual-appropriateness).
Developmentally appropriate practice
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.
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