Chapter 7 Physical and Cognitive Development in Early

Chapter 7: Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

IN THIS CHAPTER • Physical Changes • Cognitive Changes • Changes in Language • Differences in Intelligence

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 7. 1 What are the major milestones of growth and motor development between 2 and 6? 7. 2 What important changes happen in the brain during these years? 7. 3 What are the nutritional and health-care needs of young children? 7. 4 What factors contribute to abuse and neglect, and how do these traumas affect children’s development? 7. 5 What are the characteristics of children’s thought during Piaget’s preoperational stage? 7. 6 How has recent research challenged Piaget’s view of this period? 7. 7 What is a theory of mind, and how does it develop? 7. 8 How do information-processing and sociocultural theorists explain changes in young children’s thinking?

LEARNING OBJECTIVES (con’t) 7. 9 How does fast-mapping help children learn new words? 7. 10 What happens during the grammar explosion? 7. 11 What is phonological awareness, and why is it important? 7. 12 What are the strengths and weaknesses of IQ tests? 7. 13 What kinds of evidence support the nature and nurture explanations for individual differences in IQ? 7. 14 What theories and evidence have been offered in support of genetic and cultural explanations of group differences in IQ scores?

PHYSICAL CHANGES Growth and Motor Development In Early Childhood • Changes in height and weight happen more slowly during early childhood than in infancy. • Impressive gains in major locomotor skills • Manipulative skills improve, but less so than major motor skills do.

PHYSICAL CHANGES Milestones of Motor Development from Age 2 to Age 6

PHYSICAL CHANGES Children’s Drawing • Early training can accelerate the rate at which children learn school-related fine-motor skills. • Older children benefit more from training than younger children do. • Learning to write letters aids in letter understanding.

STAGES IN CHILDREN’S DRAWING

THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM Lateralization: the left and right halves of the brain’s cerebral cortex execute different functional specializations. • Contributes to important neurological milestones in early childhood

THE BRAIN AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM • The basic outline of lateralization is genetically determined. • Genes dictate the functions to be lateralized. • Experience shapes the pace of lateralization. Figure 7. 2 Lateralization of Brain Function

THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM Myelinization: protective, fatty material that wraps around nerve cells in the peripheral and central nervous system • Reticular formation • Hippocampus

THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM Handedness Right or Left. . . Not Right or Wrong! • 83 percent of people are right-handed. • 14 percent are left-handed. • 3 percent are ambidextrous. • Appears very early in life • Research suggests a genetic link.

A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP FOR KIDS (AND PARENTS, TOO!) Pediatricians can recommend effective bedtime practices that can help children—and their often sleepy parents—sleep better at night. • Structured, predictable daytime schedule • Regular bedtime that is 8 to 10 hours before waking • Discontinue daytime naps • Establish a routine of settling activities • Provide a transitional object

Reflection 1. If you were Manny’s parent, what strategies would you use to try to prevent him from awakening at night and getting into your bed? 2. How might you explain the ways in which variable reinforcement contributes to the behavior of nighttime awakening in preschoolers to a parent by using gambling (i. e. , sometimes you win, sometime you lose) as an analogy?

HEALTH AND WELLNESS Eating patterns Preschoolers • Often eat less than when babies • May not consume the majority of their daily calories at mealtime Challenges • Food aversions may surface. • Eating behaviors can bring on family conflicts.

HEALTH AND WELLNESS Illnesses and Accidents Illness • Each year, four to six bouts of brief sickness are typical. • High levels of family stress are more likely to produce sick children.

HEALTH AND WELLNESS Illnesses and Accidents • 25 percent of U. S. children under 5 have 1 accident in any single year requiring medical attention. • Most occur in the home • Major cause of death in preschoolers • More common among boys

ABUSE AND NEGLECT Child Abuse What is child abuse? • Child abuse: physical or psychological injury resulting from an adult’s intentional exposure of child to potentially harmful stimuli, sexual acts, or neglect

ABUSE AND NEGLECT Child Abuse Prevalence • Responsible for about 10 percent of emergency room visits • Between 1 and 5 percent of children suffer physical abuse. • Two thousand infants and children die each year as result of child abuse.

ABUSE AND NEGLECT Risk Factors Overview: Sociocultural Factors • Personal or cultural values that regard physical abuse as morally acceptable • Cultural traditions that view children as property • Communities that support these beliefs

TRUE OR FALSE? Episodes of abuse are typically precipitated by everyday interactions between parent and child.

ABUSE AND NEGLECT Risk Factors: Child Characteristics of Child • Physical or mental disabilities • Difficult temperaments • Age

ABUSE AND NEGLECT Risk Factors: Abuser Characteristics of Abuser • Depressed • Lacking in parenting skills and knowledge • History of abuse themselves • Substance abusers • Live-in male partners

ABUSE AND NEGLECT Risk Factors: Family Stress • Poverty • Unemployment • Inter-parental conflicts The presence of several factors in combination increases the likelihood of abuse.

ABUSE AND NEGLECT Consequences of Abuse Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) • Delays in all developmental domains • Children removed from the abusive situation typically appear to catch up within one year.

ABUSE AND NEGLECT Prevention Preventing abuse begins with education! • Inform parents about the consequences of child abuse. • Parenting classes • Identify families at risk. • Protect children from further injury.

CHILDREN’S PLAY AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT Children’s play changes in very obvious ways during the years from ages one to six, following a sequence that closely matches Piaget’s stages. • Constructive play • First pretend play • Substitute pretend play • Sociodramatic play • Rule-governed play

Critical Analysis 1. Which of the research methods discussed in Chapter 1 is best suited to the study of agerelated changes in children’s play activities? 2. Many children have imaginary friends (a phenomenon that child psychologists consider to be entirely normal). In which of the stages of play would you expect to first see children inventing imaginary playmates?

COGNITIVE CHANGES Piaget’s Preoperational Stage: Overview Preoperational Stage Semiotic (symbolic) functioning acquired Beginning of pretend play Increased proficiency in thinking and communicating but difficulty in logical thinking

COGNITIVE CHANGES Piaget’s Preoperational Stage: Centration: the tendency to think of the world one variable at a time • Use of animism, the belief that inanimate objects are alive

COGNITIVE CHANGES Piaget’s Preoperational Stage: Egocentrism: the child’s tendency to view things from his or her own perspective • Guided by object appearance • May create frustration in communication

PIAGET’S THREE MOUNTAIN TASK

COGNITIVE CHANGES Piaget’s Preoperational Stage: Conservation: understanding that change in appearance can occur without change in quantity • Successful conservation based on three characteristics of appearance-only matter transformation including identity, compensation, and reversibility • Unsuccessful conservation involves centration and irreversibility (usually occurs from ages four to five)

PIAGET’S CONSERVATION TASKS

CHALLENGES TO PIAGET’S VIEWS Flavell’s Perspective-Taking Ability Levels • Level One: the child knows that other people experience things differently; begins at two to three years of age. • Level Two: the child develops a series of complex rules to figure out precisely what the other person sees or experiences; begins at four to five years of age.

THEORIES OF MIND Theory of mind: understanding the thoughts, desires, and beliefs of others 18 months: rudimentary beginnings Age 3: some aspects of link between people’s thinking, feelings, and behavior Age 4: recognizes each person’s actions as based on his or her own representation of reality

THEORIES OF MIND 4 - and 5 -year-olds 5 - to 7 -year-olds • Can’t understand that others can think about them • Don’t understand that most knowledge can be derived from inference (this understanding develops by age 6) • Understand the reciprocal nature of thought

THEORIES OF MIND False belief principle: children see a problem from another’s point of view and discern what information causes that person to believe something that isn’t true. 4– 5 years: • Understand that other people think; don’t understand that their thinking can be about them 5– 7 years: • Understanding of the reciprocal nature of thought 6+ years: • The realization that knowledge can be derived through inference

THEORIES OF MIND Influences on the Development of a Theory of Mind Correlated with: • Performance on Piaget’s tasks • Pretend play • Shared pretense with other children • Discussion of emotion-provoking events with parents • Language skills and working memory • Cross-cultural influences

ALTERNATIVE THEORIES OF EARLY CHILDHOOD THINKING Neo-Piagetian Theories: Robbie Case • Short-term storage space (STSS) • Operational efficiency • Matrix classification task Let’s take a closer look at this task.

NEO-PIAGETIAN MATRIX TASK

ALTERNATIVE THEORIES OF EARLY CHILDHOOD THINKING Information-Processing Theories Metamemory: knowledge about and control of memory processes Metacognition: knowledge about and control of thought processes Scripts: cognitive structures underlie behavior and emerge during middle childhood

ALTERNATIVE THEORIES OF EARLY CHILDHOOD THINKING Vygotsky’s Socio-Cultural Theory Overview • Emphasis on the role of social factors in cognitive development • Problem solutions are socially generated and learned. • Key principles: the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and scaffolding

ALTERNATIVE THEORIES OF EARLY CHILDHOOD THINKING Vygotsky’s Socio-Cultural Theory Stages of Cognitive Development Primitive stage Naïve psychology stage Private speech stage Ingrowth stage

ALTERNATIVE THEORIES OF EARLY CHILDHOOD THINKING Vygotsky’s Socio-Cultural Theory How are Vygotsky’s stages related to the eventual development of adult thinking? • Each stage represents a step toward the child’s internalization of ways of thinking used by the adults around him or her.

CHANGES IN LANGUAGE Fast-mapping: the ability to categorically link new words to real word referents § Occurs at about age three § Rapid formation of a hypothesis about a new word’s meaning Remember: Word learning drives the process of language development.

CHANGES IN LANGUAGE Grammar Explosion Grammar explosion: the period in which the grammatical features of child speech become more adult-like. • Inflections • Questions and negatives • Overregularizations • Complex sentences

CHANGES IN LANGUAGE Phonological Awareness Phonological awareness: a child’s sensitivity to sound patterns that are specific to a language • Awareness of sounds represented by letters • Learned in school through formal instruction • Primarily developed through word play • Related to invented spelling

INVENTED SPELLING

DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE Measuring Intelligence • Alfred Binet • Lewis Terman: Intelligence Quotient (IQ) • Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children

THE NORMAL CURVE IQ scores form a normal distribution – the famous “bell curve” with which you may be familiar. Can you explain what this bell curve tells us about IQ?

DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE Stability and Predictive Value of IQ Scores • Correlation between IQ score and future grades is between. 50 and. 60. • Consistent relationship are found within social classes and racial groups. • IQ scores are quite stable, but do not measure underlying competence.

STOP AND THINK! A high level of predictability masks an interesting fact about children being tested. Do you know what this is?

ORIGINS OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE Evidence of Heredity and Family Influences Heredity • Twin and adoption studies findings Family Influences • Adoption studies findings • Family demographics and learning environments

ORIGINS OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE Evidence for Preschool Influences Short- and Long-Term Outcomes from Formal Education Programs § Head Start outcomes Let’s look at the relationship between some early education programs and IQ scores.

ORIGINS OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE Combining the Information Studies around the world consistently yield estimates that roughly 40 percent of the variation in IQ within a given population of children is due to heredity. • The remaining variation is clearly due to environment or to interactions between environment and heredity. • Reaction range

EARLY EDUCATION AND IQ SCORES

GROUP DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE TEST SCORES Can you hypothesize why these findings occur? Higher Scores than White Children § Chinese and Japanese children Lower Scores than White Children § African-American children Higher Scores in All Groups over Two Centuries § Flynn effect

GROUP DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE TEST SCORES Group differences in IQ- or achievement-test performance may be explained by the concept of reaction range and attributed to cultural beliefs. • Same amount of variation in IQ scores in all groups

TO TEST OR NOT TO TEST? IQ tests are useful. . . • For the identification of children who have special education needs • For the development of individualized educational plans for children with disabilities However, labeling young children on the basis of IQ scores should be avoided.

You Decide which of these two statements you most agree with and think about how you would defend your position: 1. School children should not be given IQ tests unless there is some reason to suspect that they have a disability. 2. Using IQ tests to screen all school children for potential learning problems is a good practice.