Early Childhood: Physical and Cognitive Development Flashcards
Early Childhood
- Early childhood – preschool years (2-5)
- Changes in all domains of development rapid and clearly observable, in particular:
o Physical development: fine motor skills
o Cognitive development: acquisition of language
o Psychosocial development: increasing social interactions, importance of play
Motor Development in Early Childhood
- Physical activities that require more strength, balance and coordination emerge
- Shift from moving for the joy of it to using movement as means to an end
- Rapid development of fine motor skills
3 year old motor skill development
Runs forward easily Climbs without help Kicks a ball forwards Can jump about 30cms Stacks blocks and picks up marbles Can hold pencil to make marks
4 year old motor skill development
Stops, starts and turns while running Hops short distances Pedal and steers a bicycle Jumps about 60cm Climbs ladders Draws with a pencil Cuts paper with scissors Strings beads
5 year old motor skill development
Descends stairs without help Hops on one foot for up to 5 metres Walks on tiptoe Catches balls Rocks on a swing Rides bike well Copies simple shapes with a pencil Threads a needle Ties simple knots
Sensorimotor stage
Birth to 2 years age
The infant constructs an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with physical actions. An infant progresses from reflexive, instinctual action at birth to the beginning of symbolic thought toward the end of the stage.
Pre operational Stage
Preoperational Stage
The child begins to represent the world with words and images. These words and images reflect increased symbolic thinking and go beyond the connection of sensory information and physical action
symbol – something that stands for something else e.g. using a banana as a telephone, playing in general
- understand constancies as well as object permanence
- start to internalise functional relationships – if you walk faster, you’re going to get to your destination faster
Concrete operational stage
7 to 11 years of age
The child can now reason logically about concrete events and classify objects into different sets
Formal Operational Stage
11 years of age through adulthood
The adolescent reasons in more abstract, idealistic, and logical ways
Limits of preoperational thinking: Conservation
- conservation: understanding that essential property of things (e.g. quantity, number, volume) does not change despite superficial changes in appearance
o preoperational will focus on the most obvious changes aka superficial change
Centration
In psychology, centration is the tendency to focus on one salient aspect of a situation and neglect other, possibly relevant aspects. Introduced by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget through his cognitive-developmental stage theory,centration is a behaviour often demonstrated in the preoperational stage
- irreversibility of thought - one of the characteristics of behaviorist Jean Piaget’s preoperational stage of his theory of child development. It refers to the inability of the child at this stage to understand that actions, when done, can be undone to return to the original state
- static thought – child believes the world is unchanging
Further limitations of pre-operational thinking (4)
- number skills – questions concerning understanding of numerical concepts
- classification – limited to basic level categories and incapable of taxonomic categorisation (a child could group together a teddy and a bike and an apple because the teddy rode the bike to the park and ate an apple therefore they’re all similar) (we have four dogs and five cats, are there more cats or animals? Child would say cats)
- animism – tendency to apply attributes of living things to inanimate objects (the teddy is alive)
- magical thinking – attribute inexplicable events to magic or fantasy figures
Preoperational Thinking Examples
- six year old Thomas and his father were about to eat a pizza. Thomas asked to have the pizza cut into lots of pieces because he was really hungry. When there was just one piece of pizza left, Thomas and his father bargained over who would get it. The father suggested cutting the piece in half. The little boy exclaimed, “I want the biggest half!”. How does this situation illustrate failure to conserve. The kid believes that more pieces means more pizza
- Five-year-old Anna was running down a hallway in her home and tripped over a rug. She got back up, walked over to her mother, and claimed, “that dumb rug tripped me.” The girl believed that the rug was alive and that it had acted with intent. Why did Anna think the rug was alive? Animism
Beyond Piaget: Extensions and Alternatives
- Simplified tasks that are less demanding (e.g. memory and verbal skills) reveal that children develop sound understanding of the world earlier than Piaget thought
- Peer debate as an important trigger of disequilibrium – if you have someone else explaining why “if you count all the coins they are the same” they reach operational stage earlier
- Importance of socio-cultural context
o ‘apprenticeship in thinking’ (Rogoff, 1990)
The greatest discovery in life: word meaning
- “in the absence of words, humans would have to deal only with those things which they could perceive and manipulate directly. With the help of language, they can deal with things which they have not perceived even indirectly and with things which were part of the experience of earlier generations” – (Lura, 1981)
