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