Early and Middle Childhood

What are some elements of a high-quality toy?

• Simple: easy to understand

• Interactive: things children can do

• Open-ended: allows children to use their imagination

What are some skills that children learn and elaborate through play?

• Communication

• Imagination/creativity

• Self-concept

• Emotion regulation

Piaget Review

• Which stage is associated with infancy? sensorimotor stage

• How do children learn and think at this stage? through their senses and physical actions to explore their environments and develop an understanding of cause and effect

• In what ways is learning limited? it is based on physical interactions so they cannot grasp abstract concepts, lack object permanence, and mainly learn through trial and error, which restricts their understanding of the world to

• Which stage is associated with early childhood? preoperational stage

• How do children learn and think at this stage? through symbolic representation, using words, images, and pretend play to understand the world around them

• In what way is learning limited? children are unable to take on another’s perspective and can only focus on one particular aspect of a situation

How does Piaget think about maturation and development? maturation comes before development

What is an “operation”?

According to Piaget an “operation” is a mental action or process that allows a child to manipulate information logically, combining different schemas in a reasonable way to solve problems

• Knowing is doing

Concrete Operational Stage

• Typically around age 7 to 11

• Achieve mastery of operations

• “Concrete thinking” = centered on physical reality

• Abstract and hypotheticals are out of reach

• Movement between pre- and concrete operational stages is similar to other types of development

  • Vacillating at first, relying on dominant strategy when encountering novelty, eventually moves toward concrete operations all the time

Major advances

• Decentration

• Identity

• Conservation

• Classification

• Reversibility

• Seriation

• Inductive Reasoning

Decentration, Identity, and Conservation

• Less egocentric, can take multiple aspects of a situation into account (decentration)

• Schemes become more complex to account for potential changes/transformations/operations

• Characteristics of objects don’t change if the object is altered (identity), and changing one quality is accounted for by compensations in another (conservation)

Classification

• Understanding the use of hierarchies, classes, and subclasses

• Think: roses, daises, and peonies are all types of flowers

Reversibility

• Transformations on objects can be “undone”

• If ice melts into water when heated, then water can be frozen into ice when cooled

• Important for understanding elementary math operations

Seriation

The ability to organize objects by a certain characteristic like color, length, mass, etc.

Inductive Reasoning

• Multiple premises believed to be true are combined to reach a conclusion

• Sometimes called “bottom-up processing”

• Make broad generalizations out of a specific observations

  • I take a candy out of the bag…it’s chocolate. I take another candy out…it’s chocolate. Another candy…chocolate again! All the candies must be chocolate

  • First day at the new school, I met two kids who were nice. Everyone at this school must be nice

  • My dad yells a lot when he’s mad. So does my friends dad. All dads yell a lot when they’re mad

Lev Vygotsky

• Russian psychologist, writing around the same time as Piaget

• Never had any contact with Piaget (communism)

  • His work was suppressed, so we didn’t know a lot about his theories until the 1980s, when he became very popular in the US

• Thinking about the same problems from a completely different perspective

  • Conclusion are nearly all in opposition to Piaget’s fundamental thoughts

• Social constructivist theory: children actively construct their knowledge through social interactions with others, meaning learning is heavily influenced by the social environment and collaborative experiences with peers and adults

Sociocultural Learning: Mind in Society

• Learning can never be separated from cultural context

• Cognitive capacities are developed in and shaped by the places where children spend time (e.g., home, school, church, etc.)

• Knowledge is created and reinforced through interactions with relative experts and the use of cultural tools

• Language is a cultural tool

• Speech is Vygotsky’s most important cultural tool

  • Children lean from this speech around them, both socially and solitarily

  • Egocentric/private speech: verbal behavior directed at the self rather than others, with a purpose of enhancing concentration and performance

  • Eventually, speech is internalized

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

• Vygotsky’s term for the distance between a child’s ability to solve a problem alone and how much better they can do when guided by a more skilled social partner

• Scaffolding: the process by which more skilled social partners structure tasks to boost children’s performance

Conflicting Thoughts

PIAGET

• Development precedes learning

  • Children must have reached a certain level of maturity before they can learn certain things

• Cognitive constructivist

  • Children manipulate their own environment and thus acquire knowledge

  • Teachers inhibit learning by forcing children into a passive role

• Learning is individual and stage-like

• You think before you speak

VYGOTSYK

• Learning precedes development

  • Children cannot develop/reach the next level of mastery unless they first engage in social learning

• Social constructivist

  • Children are active in learning through interactions with social partners

  • Teachers enhance learning by scaffolding children and helping them reach the next level of mastery

• Learning is relational and incremental

• You speak before you think