Chapter Six
I. Physical Development
A. Changes in the body
1. Grow almost 3 inches
2. Gain about 4 pounds 8 ounces
3. Ossification – when soft tissue or cartilage is transformed into bone
4. Body proportions
a. Head no longer takes up ¼ of body
b. Children lose balance due to higher proportion of weight in the upper body
B. Brain development
1. MYELINATION – the formation of the myelin sheath that surrounds and insulates neurons in the central nervous system pathways. This sheath increases the speed of transmission and the precision of the nervous system
2. LATERALIZATION – the process where specific skills and competencies become localized in either the left or right cerebral hemisphere
a. The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body and vice versa
b. Language is primarily controlled by the left hemisphere in right handed people
3. Handedness
a. Preference for one hand over the other
b. May have a genetic basis
c. 90% are right handed
d. In left handed people, language is shared by both sides of the brain
4. Brain development and early intervention
a. Since early development sets the stage for later maturation, intervention to remedy problems needs to occur as soon as possible
b. Quality interventions that occur after age 3 still help even though they are implemented after the critical period for brain development
c. Human development: an interactive and individual approach
1. Brain development and other aspects interact with each other
2. Malnutrition can directly produce brain damage
3. A single aspect of development can never be separated from the development of the whole child
II. Motor Skills Development
A. Gross motor skills
1. AUTOMATICITY – the ability to perform motor behaviors without consciously thinking about them
2. FUNCTIONAL SUBORDINATION – the integration of a number of separate simple actions or schemes into a more complex pattern of behavior
B. Fine motor skills
1. Require the coordinated and dexterous use of hand, fingers, and thumb
2. Age 2: children have refined grasping schemes
3. Age 3: children integrate and coordinate these skills with other behaviors
4. Age 4: children can carry on a conversation while manipulating something with their hands
5. They become increasingly competent in taking care of themselves and carrying out their daily activities
C. Learning and motor skills
1. Readiness – acquiring or developing the necessary prerequisite skills to perform an action
2. Practice – repeating a skill in order to perfect it
3. Attention - developing the ability to maintain focus on the skill at hand
4. Competence feedback – gathering information about how well a skill is being performed to refine the skill and ; internalizing pleasure when an action is completed successfully
5. EXTRINSICALLY MOTIVATED BEHAVIOR – behavior performed to obtain explicit rewards or to avoid explicit adverse events
6. INTRINSICALLY MOTIVATED BEHAVIOR – behavior performed for its own sake, with no particular goal or explicit reward
III. Cognitive Development
A. An overview of preoperational thinking
1. PREOPERATIONAL PERIOD – according to Piaget, the developmental stage associated with early childhood
2. Children explore their surroundings and comprehend new information based on their current level and ways of understanding
3. They can either accommodate or assimilate new information
B. Preoperational substages and thought
1. PRECONCEPTUAL PERIOD – for Piaget, the first part of the preoperational period, which is highlighted by the increasingly complex use of symbols and symbolic play
2. INTUITIVE PERIOD – for Piaget, the second part of the preoperational period, during which children begin to understand causation, as well as to undertake simple mental operations and form a more realistic view of their world
3. EGOCENTRISM – a self centered view of the world where children tend to see things in terms of their personal point of view and fail to take others’ perspectives
4. SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION – the use of actions, images, words, or other signs to represent past and present events, experiences, and concepts; marks the emergence of the preoperational period
C. Limitations of preoperational thinking
1. Despite development of symbolic representation, children have a long way to go before becoming logical thinkers
2. Limitations include concreteness, irreversibility, egocentrism, centration, and difficulties with concepts of time, space and sequence
D. CONSERVATION – the understanding that changing the shape or appearance of objects does not change their mass, volume, or number
1. Conservation of mass – a child cannot understand that changing the shape of something does not alter its mass
2. Conservation of number – child cannot recognize that number is associated with the actual amount of something and not the space the objects take up
3. Conservation of volume
a. Centration – the child attends to only one dimension, such as height or length
b. Irreversibility – the child cannot reverse steps to change an object back to its previous state
E. Evaluating Piaget’s theory
1. Children’s thinking is not as limited as he described
2. When problems are framed in contexts that are more familiar, they can solve problems using more advanced logic
3. He underemphasized the role of social aspects in learning
F. Beyond Piaget: social perspectives
1. Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development
2. ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT – Vygotsky’s concept that children’s cognitive growth develops through participation in activities slightly beyond their competence with the help of adults or older children
3. SCAFFOLDING – the progressive structuring of tasks by parents or others so that the level of task difficulty is appropriate
G. The role of memory
1. Memory processes
a. Information processing perspective conceptualizes human memory as operating much like a computer
b. Encoding occurs in the working memory
c. Information important enough to be stored is placed in the long term memory
2. Recognition and recall
a. RECOGNITION – the ability to correctly identify objects or situations previously experienced when they appear again
b. RECALL – the ability to retrieve long term information and memories with or without cues or prompts
3. Developing memory strategies
a. Assumed that young children’s difficulties with recall are attributable to poor strategies for encoding and retrieval
b. Children do not spontaneously organize or rehearse information like older children and adults do
c. Studies demonstrate that young children can learn strategies beyond their current repertoire
d. Children remember best when words and tasks are meaningful and embedded in the ongoing settings of activities
4. Memory for scripts
a. Children can repeat series of events in the same order they learned them
b. Only after becoming familiar with the event can they reorder the steps
IV. Language Development
A. Words and concepts
1. Most children can use 1000 words by age 3
2. By age 6 they know about 2600 words and can understand more than 20,000
3. Understanding of concepts is often incomplete
4. They may understand “more” but not understand “less”
B. Expanding grammar
1. It appears that children extract the rules of grammar through an active process of listening to the speech of others
2. Early on children imitate the sentence patterns they hear
3. OVERREGULARIZE – to incorrectly generalize language rules to cases that are exceptions; words typically done by preschool children who are rapidly expanding their vocabularies
C. Mastering the subtleties of speech
1. PRIVATE SPEECH – talking aloud to oneself
a. A means of practicing how words and things they represent are linked
b. Corresponds to the developing thought processes in a child’s mind
2. Public speech and pragmatics
a. COLLECTIVE MONOLOGUES – children’s conversations that include taking turns talking, but not necessarily about the same topic
b. PRAGMATICS – the social and cultural aspects of language use
3. Cross cultural perspective of the pragmatics of speech
a. Pragmatics of speech differ throughout the world
b. U.S. parents focus on satisfying their children’s desires and intentions
c. German mothers focus more on necessity
d. U.S. parents focus more on personal actions
e. U.K. parents focus more on complying with norms
D. The influence of parents’ language use
1. Language teaches children about categories and symbols, how to translate the complexities of the world into ideas and words, and how standards are interpreted and applied
2. These tools are a scaffold used in understanding the world
3. Language and gender
a. Assumptions about gender are embedded into thinking and therefore reflected in language
b. This causes people to talk differently to male and female children
E. Multicultural aspects of language development
1. Bilingualism – learning two languages
2. Children who are bilingual in their earliest years show little confusion between the 2 languages
3. Cognitive demand of learning 2 languages is manageable for most young children
4. Linguistically, culturally, and probably cognitively, it is an advantage to be bilingual
V. Play and Learning
A. Play is thought of as the child’s work
B. It is the unique way of experiencing the world by practicing and improving skills
C. Play and cognitive development
1. Exploring physical objects
a. Allows them to learn the properties and physical laws that govern objects
b. Greater knowledge gives them increasingly higher levels of understanding and competence
c. They learn to compare and classify events and objects
2. Play and egocentrism
a. PARALLEL PLAY – the play engaged in by 2 year olds, which is characterized by meaningful interactions among children, often including imitation, pretending, and role playing
b. By age 3 or 5 children become less egocentric & are better able to cooperate in play
c. Social maturity is relative; some children advance quicker than others
3. Dramatic play and social knowledge
a. DRAMATIC PLAY – play that develops at about age 3 or 4, that is characterized by meaningful interactions among children, often including imitation, pretending, and role playing
b. Children are better able to understand another’s perspective
c. They also have a clearer definition of self
d. Allows children to experiment with different roles
e. Promotes social and personality development
4. The role of peers
a. Mixed age peer groups offer older children the opportunity to teach and care for younger children
b. The younger children can imitate and practice role relations with older children
c. Can encourage development of new ways of thinking and problem solving for both the older and younger children
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