Chapter 8 Flashcards
preoperational thought
Thought characterized by the use of mental representations (symbols) and intuitive thought.
operations
Logical processes that can be reversed.
egocentrism
The child’s inability to take another person’s perspective.
intuitive thought
Thought and logic that is based on a child’s personal experience rather than on a formal system of rules.
animism
That idea that inanimate objects have a conscious life and feelings.
artificialism
The notion that natural events or objects are under the control of people or of superhuman agents.
conservation
The understanding that some basic properties or objects remain the same even when a transformation changes the physical appearance.
centration
The tendency to focus on only one aspect of a situation at a time instead taking several aspects into consideration.
static endpoints
Children on the static endpoints of the transformation (how things look before and after) rather than considering what happened in the transformation itself. Children look at the beginning state, then at the ending state, and they conclude that the higher level must have more. They fail to consider the transformation itself.
reversibility
Children do not imagine what would happen if they reversed the transformation; they don’t visualize pouring the liquid back into its individual container to demonstrate that the amount would still be the same. Remember, their thought is preoperational at this stage.
social speech
Speech that we hear as people talk around us or to us.
private speech
Speech that children say aloud to themselves; later internalized to form inner speech and mental activity.
internalization
The process of taking external speech and activity and making it internal and mental.
mediation
The process adults and more skilled peers use to introduce concepts and cognitive structures to less skilled children.
zone of proximal development
The distance between the current maximum independent performance level of a child and the tasks the child can perform if guided by adults or more capable peers.
scaffolding
Support given to a child as he or she develops a new mental function or learns to perform a particular task.
collaborative learning
Process where children work together to help one another solve problems, share their knowledge and skills, and discuss their strategies and skills.
processing capacity
The amount of information a person can remember or think about at one time.
processing efficiency
The speed and accuracy with which a person can process information.
automaticity
The ability to carry out a process with little or no conscious effort, leaving more cognitive capacity to carry out other attacks.
attention
The ability to focus on a particular stimulus without becoming distracted by other stimuli.
metacognition
The understanding or knowledge that people have about their own thought process.
theory of mind
An integrated understanding of what the mind is, how it works, and why it works that way.
mirror neurons
Neurons that fire when an individual produces an action and when the individual observes someone else making the action; the neurons “mirror” the behavior of someone else.
overregulirization
Incorrect application of the linguistic rules for producing past tenses and plurals, resulting in incorrect forms of irregular words such as “goed” or “deers.”
social rules of disclosure
Conversations that speaks of a language follow when having a conversation.
bilingual
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Project Head Start
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Abcederation Project
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High/Scope Perry Preeschool Program
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