Child topic 4 - Cognitive development and education

Question 1

What was the aim of Wood et al’s study?

Answer 1

To observe natural tutorial sessions in the hope of gaining knowledge about how an adult might best teach a child to do a problem solving task

Question 2

What was the sample of Wood et al’s study?

Answer 2

30 children from Massachusetts, split equally between ages 3,4 and 5 and gender

Question 3

How was the sample of Wood et al’s study collected?

Answer 3

Parents responded to adverts asking for volunteers

Question 4

Outline the procedure of Wood et al’s study

Answer 4

Child was brought into a room and invited to play with 21 blocks which would form a pyramid when assembled - left on their own for 5 minutes
The tutor would then show them how two of the blocks could be put together to form a pair - tutor would then respond to the reaction of the child in predetermined ways.
Each child was seen individually in sessions lasting from 20 minutes to one hour

Question 5

What were the notes of behaviour taken for the child of Wood et al’s study?

Answer 5

Assisted or unassisted
Matched or mismatched (and what the child did with wrongly paired blocks

Question 6

What were the notes of behaviour taken for the tutor of Wood et al’s study?

Answer 6

All of her interventions were noted and placed in three categories:
Direct assistance
A verbal error prompt
a straight forward verbal attempt to get the child to make more constructions

Question 7

What was the evidence of interrater reliability in Wood et al’s study

Answer 7

Two observers looked at the video recordings and achieved 94% agreement across the 594 events

Question 8

What were the six scaffolding functions found in Wood et al’s study?

Answer 8

Recruitment
Reductio in degrees of freedom
Direction maintenance
Marking critical features
Frustration-control
Demonstration

Question 9

What were the proportions of the times verbal error prompts (telling and speaking ) succeeded in the different ages?

Answer 9

Speaking - 3 = 40%, 4 = 63%, 5 = 87.5%
Telling - 3 = 18%, 4 = 40%, 5 = 57%

Question 10

What was the proportion of constructions which were unassisted in Wood et al’s study?

Answer 10

3 = 64.5%
4 = 79.3%
5 = 87.5%

Question 11

What was the role of the tutor for each of the ages in Wood et al’s study?

Answer 11

3 = luring the child into the task - but was mostly ignored
4 = prodder and corrector - verbal
5 = confirmer or checker

Question 12

What are Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development?

Answer 12

Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)
pre-operational (3-6 years)
Concrete operational (7-11)
Formal operational stage (11+)

Question 13

What can children do in the formal operational stage?

Answer 13

people can think logically and abstractly using symbols to represent abstract concepts

Question 14

What can children do in the concrete operational stage?

Answer 14

Loses their egocentric view and can start to think logically - understand concepts like conservation

Question 15

What can children do in the pre-operational stage?

Answer 15

memory and imagination used more often as child can develop their use of symbols to represent objects
Egocentric

Question 16

What can children do in the Sensorimotor stage?

Answer 16

Gain knowledge through physical touch - develops object permanence - start to acquire language and are able to use symbols to represent real objects

Question 17

What is a schema?

Answer 17

A mental framework we use to organise our thoughts

Question 18

What are assimilation and accommodation?

Answer 18

assimilation - taking in new information
accomodation - changing the schema to fit this new information

Question 19

What did Vygotsky suggest?

Answer 19

language is the key to enable learning
children learn through interaction with a knowledgeable other
The carer can guide the child through their cognitive development by providing a stimulating environment
(Zone of proximal development)

Question 20

What were Bruner’s three stages?

Answer 20

Enactive stage - 0-1 years - the child needs physical touch and sight to understand objects
Iconic stage - 1-6 years - objects no longer need to be actually there but can be represented by picture or icon
Symbolic state - 7+ - words and numbers can be represent the object

Question 21

did Bruner think going through the stages had to be chronological?

Answer 21

No - he thought you could go back to enactive and iconic stages even when you have reached the symbolic stage - especially when learning something new

Question 22

Outline Bruner’s spiral curriculum

Answer 22

1) child revisits a topic, theme or subject
2) complexity of topic or theme increases with each visit
3) new learning has a relationship with old learning and is put in context with the old information

Question 23

What did Craik and Lockhart argue?

Answer 23

The depth of mental processing affected memory function
Memories that were deeply processed led to longer lasting memories while shallow processing led to memories that decayed easily

Question 24

What do mnemonics rely on?

Answer 24

familiar information that we can easily recall to make new concepts easier