Early Childhood Flashcards
absence or deficiency of growth hormone produced by pituitary gland to stimulate the body to grow
o Growth Hormone Deficiency
the preference of using one hand over the other
o Handedness
Left-handedness run in families
normal weight but shorter than they should for their age and may have cognitive and physical deficiencies, visible in developing countries
o Stunted Children
Jean Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development
Preoperational Stage
o Lasting from ages 2 to 7, characterized by the expansion in the use of symbolic thought
o Children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings
o Dominated by egocentrism and magical beliefs
o Does not yet perform Operations (which are reversible mental actions that allow children to do mentally what before they could do only physically)
beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been established in behavior
o Preoperational Thought
- Divided into Symbolic Function and Intuitive Thought
– being able to think about something in the absence of sensory or motor cues
Symbolic Function
- Can use symbols, or mental representations such as words, numbers, or images to which a person has attached meaning
children imitate an action at some point after observing it
Deferred Imitation
– fantasy play, dramatic play, or imaginary play; children use an object to represent something else
Pretend Play
begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions
Intuitive Thought
- Occurs approx. 4-7 yrs of age
- Children also begin to able to understand the symbols that describe physical spaces
they mentally link two events, especially events close in time, whether or not here is logically a causal relationship
o Transduction
the concept that people and many things are basically the same even if they change in outward form, size, or appearance
o Identities
– tendency to attribute life to objects that are not alive
o Animism
the tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others
o Centration
– failure to understand that an action can go in two or more directions
Irreversibility
young children center so much on their own point of view that they cannot take in another’s
o Egocentrism
the fact that two things are equal remain so if their appearance is altered, as long as nothing is added or taken away
o Conservation
the awareness of the broad range of human mental states – beliefs, intents, desires, dreams, and so forth – and the understanding that others have their own
o Theory of Mind
- Allows us to understand and predict the behavior of others and makes the social world understandable
o Memory can be described as a filing system that has three steps:
Information-Processing Approach: Memory
putting information in the memory
Encoding
putting away in the filing cabinet where it is kept
Storage
searching for the information and take it out of the memory system
Retrieval
o Three types of Storage
Sensory Memory
Working Memory
Long-Term Memory
– temporary storage for incoming sensory information
Sensory Memory
short-term storehouse for information a person is actively working on, trying to understand, remember, or think about
Working Memory
storehouse of virtually unlimited capacity that holds information for long period of time
Long-Term Memory
o The central executive also retrieves information from LTM, assisted by:
aids in the processing of verbal information
Phonological Loop
maintains and manipulates visual information
Visuospatial Sketchpad
the conscious control of thoughts, emotions, and actions to accomplish goals or to solve problems
Executive Function
Enables children to plan and carry out goal-directed mental activity
– ability to identify something encountered before
o Recognition
ability to reproduce knowledge from memory
o Recall
begins at 2 years old, produces a script of a familiar, repeated event
o Generic Memory
refers to awareness of having experienced a particular event at a specific time and place (if repeated, it becomes generic memory)
o Episodic Memory
refers to memories of distinctive experiences that form a person’s life history
o Autobiographical memory
Generally emerges between ages 3 to 4
The more unique an event is, the more children remember it better
defined as the focusing of mental resources on select information
o Attention
involves action planning, allocating attention to goals, error detection and compensation, monitoring progress on tasks, etc.
Executive Attention
focused and extended engagement with an object, tasks, and dealing with novel or difficult circumstances
Sustained Attention
o Two most commonly used individual tests for preschoolers are:
Standford-Binet Intelligence Scales
Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence
used for ages 2 and up, taking 45 to 60 mins
Child is ask to define words, string beads, build blocks, etc.
Measure fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, etc.
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales
individual test taking 30 to 60 mins
Yields verbal, performance, and combined scores
Includes subtests designed to measure both verbal and nonverbal fluid reasoning, etc.
- Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence
the imaginary psychological space between what children can do or know by themselves and what they could do or know with help
o Zone of Proximal Development
Can be assessed by Dynamic Tests
– supportive assistance that a more sophisticated interaction partner provides, and ideally it should be aimed at ZPD
Scaffolding
Scaffolding
– supportive assistance that a more sophisticated interaction partner provides, and ideally it should be aimed at ZPD
– allows a child to pick up approximate meaning of a new word after hearing it only once or twice in conversation
o Fast Mapping
Nouns are easier to fast map than verbs