Chapter 7: Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Academically Centered Preschool Programs

An approach to early childhood education that emphasizes providing children with structured learning environments in which teachers deliver direct instruction on letters, numbers, shapes, and academic skills.

Animism

The belief that inanimate objects are alive and have feelings and intentions; a characteristic of preoperational reasoning.

Appearance-Reality Distinction

The ability to distinguish between what something appears to be from what it really is.

Autobiographical Memory

The recollection of a personally meaningful event that took place at a specific time and place in one’s past.

Centration

The tendency to focus on one part of a stimulus, situation, or idea and exclude all others; a characteristic of preoperational reasoning.

Child-Centered Preschool Programs

A constructivist approach to early childhood education that encourages children to actively build their own understanding of the world through observing, interacting with objects and people, and engaging in a variety of activities that allow them to manipulate materials and interact with teachers and peers.

Conservation

The principle that a physical quantity, such as number, mass, or volume, remains the same even when its appearance changes.

Developmentally Appropriate Practice

An educational approach that tailors instruction to the age of the child, recognizing individual differences and the need for hands-on active teaching methods.

Egocentrism

Piaget’s term for children’s inability to take another person’s point of view or perspective and to assume that others share the same feelings, knowledge, and physical view of the world.

Episodic Memory

Memory for everyday experiences.

False-Belief Tasks

A task that requires children to understand that someone does not share their knowledge.

Guided Participation

Also known as apprenticeship in thinking; the process by which people learn from others who guide them, providing a scaffold to help them accomplish more than the child could do alone.

Irreversibility

A characteristic of preoperational reasoning in which a child does not understand that an action can be reversed and a thing restored to its original state.

Lateralization

The process by which the two hemispheres of the brain become specialized to carry out different functions.

Logical Extension

A strategy children use to increase their vocabulary in which they extend a new word to other objects in the same category.

Memory Strategies

Deliberate cognitive activities that make an individual more likely to remember information.

Metacogntition

The ability to think about thinking; knowledge of how the mind works.

Montessori Schools

A child-centered educational approach, first created in the early 1900s by the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori (1870–1952), in which children are viewed as active constructors of their own development and are given freedom in choosing their activities.

Mutual Exclusivity Assumption

When learning new words, young children assume that objects have only one label or name.

Nightmares

An anxiety-provoking dream.

Ossification

The process of cartilage being converted into bone.

Overregularization Errors

Grammatical mistakes that children make because they apply grammatical rules too stringently to words that are exceptions.

Plasticity

A characteristic of development refers to malleability or openness to change in response to experience.

Preoperational Reasoning

Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development, between about ages 2 and 6, characterized by advances in symbolic thought, but thought is not yet logical.

Private Speech

Self-directed speech that children use to guide their behavior.

Project Head Start

Early childhood intervention program funded by the U.S. federal government that provides low-income children with nutritional, health, and educational services, as well as helps parents become involved in their children’s development.

Recall Memory

The ability to generate a memory of a stimulus encountered before without seeing it again.

Recognition Memory

The ability to identify a previously encountered stimulus.

Scaffolding

Temporary support that permits a child to bridge the gap between his or her current competence level and the task at hand.

Scripts

Description of what occurs in a certain situation and used as guide to understand and organize daily experiences.

Selective Attention

The ability to focus on relevant stimuli and ignore others.

Sleep Terrors

An episode of screaming, flailing, and fear while asleep.

Sustained Attention

The ability to remain focused on a stimulus for an extended period of time.

Theory of Mind

Children’s awareness of their own and other people’s mental processes and realization that other people do not share their thoughts.

Three-Mountain Task

A classic Piagetian task used to illustrate preoperational children’s egocentrism.

Zone of Proximal Development

Vygotsky’s term for the tasks that children cannot do alone but can exercise with the aid of more skilled partners.