Early and Middle Childhood

MIDTERM 2

What are some elements of a high-quality toy?

• Simple: easy to understand

• Interactive: things they can do

• Open-ended: allows them to use their imagination

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

Communication, imagination/creativity, self-concept, emotion regulation, and collaboration

The Self

• Self-concept → description of self

• Self-esteem → evaluation of self

• Self-concept develops before self-esteem

• Early self-descriptions are largely instrumental/behavioral/relational rather than self-evaluative

• By age 4, child self-descriptions begin to align with parent descriptions, but tend not to be evaluative

• Lack of social comparison supports positive/neutral evaluations of the self

• Self-esteem steadily declines beginning in middle childhood and across adolescence before resurging again in early adulthood

Emotion Regulation: Self-Control

• Inhibitory Control: The ability to inhibit the prepotent (AKA more exciting) response in favor of one that better suits contextual demands and goals

• Why might inhibitory control be important in early childhood (think age 3-6)? Because you don’t want them to act out around other people. This is around the age where children start preschool, so this can set them up for a bad reputation with their teachers

Delayed Gratification

• Walter Mischel, 1972 — Standford University

• Task: wait to eat a marshmallow for 15 minutes in order to earn a second marshmallow

• Results: 4 to 6-year-old kids who could delay gratification grew up to have better academic and occupational success

How important is delayed gratification?

• 2018 study: attempt to replicate the original study by Mischel

  • Watts, Duncan, & Quan, 2018

• Larger, more demographically sample

• Results

  • Smaller correlation (half the size) between ability to delay gratification during the task and achievement

  • Association decreased even further when controlling for family background and intelligence

Piaget Review

• Which stage is associated with infancy?

  • Sensorimotor Stage

• How do children learn and think at this stage?

  • They learn through their senses and actions and think by interacting with their environment

• In what ways is learning limited?

  • Since they rely on their senses and physical actions to understand the world they cannot reason beyond what they can directly see

• Which stage is associated with early childhood?

  • Preoperational Stage

• How do children learn and think at this age?

  • Children learn and think through symbolic representation, using words, pretend play, and images to understand the world around them

• In what ways is learning limited?

  • Children are unable to take on another’s perspective and only being able to focus on one particular aspect of a situation

• How does Piaget think about maturation and development?

  • Maturation develops before development

Concrete Operational Stage

• Typically around ages 7 to 11

• Achieve mastery of operations

• “Concrete thinking” = centered on physically 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

Decentration, Identity, and Conservation

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

• Schemas 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 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 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 friend’s 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 1980’s, when he became very popular in the US

• Thinking about the same problems from a completely different perspective

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

• Social constructivist theory

Sociocultural Learning: Mind in Society

• Learning can never be separated from cultural context: we lean in culture

• Cognitive capacities are developed in and shaped by the places where children sped 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! How does language shape development? It provides the tools to express thoughts, emotions, and ideas

• Speed is Vygotsky’s most important cultural tool

  • Children learn from the speech around them, both socially and solitarily

  • Egocentric/private speech: verbal behavior directed at the self rather than others, with the 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 performace

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

VYGOTSKY

• Learning preceds 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