Paper Requirement

Chapter 7: Physical and Cognitive Development In Early Childhood

Learning Goals

Learning Goal 1: Identify physical changes in early childhood.

A. Describe body growth and changes in early childhood.

B. Explain motor skill development in early childhood.

C. Discuss sleep needs and considerations.

D. Discuss nutritional needs and exercise in early childhood.

E. Summarize illness and death during childhood.

Learning Goal 2: Describe three views of the cognitive changes that occur in early

childhood.

A. Describe Piaget’s preoperational stage of cognitive development.

B. Discuss Vygotsky’s theory.

C. Describe developmental changes in information-processing theory during early childhood.

Learning Goal 3: Summarize how language develops in early childhood.

A. Describe young children’s understanding of phonology and morphology.

B. Describe young children’s use of syntax and semantics.

C. Describe young children’s advances in pragmatics.

D. Discuss young children’s literacy.

Learning Goal 4: Evaluate different approaches to early childhood education.

A. Describe variations in early childhood evaluation. B. Explain education for young children who are disadvantaged. C. Discuss some of the controversies in early childhood education.

Consider this:

The Reggio Emilia approach is an educational program for young children that was developed in the northern Italian city of Reggio Emilia. Children of single parents and children with disabilities have priority in admission; other children are admitted according to a scale of needs. Parents pay on a sliding scale based on income.

The children are encouraged to learn by investigating and exploring topics that interest them. A wide range of stimulating media and materials is available for children to use as they learn music, movement, drawing, painting, sculpting, collages, puppets and disguises, and photography, for example (Freeman, 2011). In this program, children often explore topics in a group, which fosters a sense of community, respect for diversity, and a collaborative approach to problem solving. Two co-teachers are present to serve as guides for children. The Reggio Emilia teachers consider a project as an adventure, which can start from an adult's suggestion, from a child's idea, or from an event, such as a snowfall or something else unexpected. The teachers allow children enough time to think and craft a project. At the core of the Reggio Emilia approach is the image of children who are competent and have rights, especially the right to outstanding care and education. Parent participation is considered essential, and cooperation is a major theme in the schools. Many early childhood education experts believe the Reggio Emilia approach provides a supportive, stimulating context in which children are motivated to explore their world in a competent and confident manner (Martin & Evaldsson, 2012) What are your impressions of a school environment such as this? I think it sounds amazing, personally. I would have loved to have had this type of learning environment. Would you consider putting your children into a school such as this? What are the pros and cons? How does this contrast with the learning we offer most kids in the US?

In this chapter, we are transitioning out of infancy and into early childhood (2-7 years of age).

First, let’s look at some of the basic changes they are experiencing.

Body Growth and Change

 Height and Weight:  Average growth is 2.5 inches and 5 to 7 pounds per year during early childhood

 Girls are only slightly smaller and lighter than boys  Trunks and legs lengthen; heads become more proportional. They start to look

less like babies and more like kids.

 Overall decline in body fat during preschool years

 Two most important contributors to height differences: ethnic origin and nutrition. Asian American kids may grow to be less tall than their White American counterparts, for example. But would a White American kid grow to live up to his tallest height potential if he were being malnourished? Doubtful. We will talk about the importance of proper nutrition in a bit.

 Brain growth slows during early childhood  Brain has reached 95% of adult volume by age 6. This doesn’t mean that it is basically

95% developed, however.

 Changes in child’s brain structure:  Myelination: nerve cells are covered and insulated with a layer of fat cells

 Increases the speed and efficiency of information. Think about a kid playing soccer at age 4… he would not have very good motor and cognitive skills for soccer yet. With practice, by age 7, he will be much better at it, in part, because of mylenation.

 Important in the development of many abilities. Thinking, walking, talking, all of these develop in part due to increasing myelination.

 Rapid, distinct spurts of growth and loss as brain continues to reorganize itself. The brain is continuing to grow and change, learning new things, taking in new information, it is growing it it’s connectivity and functioning.

 Most rapid growth takes place in frontal lobe areas  Planning, organizing new actions, maintaining attention. My mom teaches

Kindergarten kids, and she knew some of these kids prior to ages 5 and 6. She said that these kids are better at paying attention, planning, etc… than they were when they were younger. That is in part due to frontal lobe development.

Motor Development

 Gross motor skills:  Simple run-and-jump movements at age 3

 Child becomes more adventurous at age 4  Child is self-assured and often takes hair-raising risks at age 5. I had a 5 year old

relative jump off of deck onto the grass below. I thought he was going to break his neck, but he easily landed on his feet and laughed.

 Fine motor skills:  Can pick up tiniest objects at age 3, but still a little clumsy  Improved fine motor coordination at age 4.  Has better eye, hand, and body coordination by age 5. A 5 year old of a friend picked

up my beer bottle at dinner, carried it over to someone else, and set it in front of him! I guess he was cutting me off!

Nutrition

 Nutrition in children:  Percentage of overweight and obese children has increased dramatically in recent

decades

 Contributes to a number of health problems. Heart problems, diabetes, liver issues. I had a student in my class once tell us that her kid developed a fatty liver at age 5 from all of the fast food she was eating him. She couldn’t believe it and immediately revised his diet and got him to start being more active. In her case, she claimed ignorance. Is that an excuse?

 Physical Activity:  Most children do not get the recommended amount of physical activity per day  Boys are more likely than girls to engage in moderate or vigorous activity. Boys run

more, are more active. Girls tend to do less vigorous activity and more one-on-one play like games, etc…

 Younger children are more likely than older children to engage in physical activities  Differences between schools

 Trend toward reducing physical education and recess time. My mom’s kindergarten class only gets 1 hour a month of physical education!

Illness and Death

 Malnutrition:  Iron-deficiency anemia is a common nutritional problem

 Most common in young children from low-income families

 Programs such as WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) help to address this problem

 Illness and Death:  Leading causes of death in U.S. children are:

 Motor vehicle accidents  Cancer  Cardiovascular disease

 Safety is influenced by family and home, school and peers, and actions of the community:

 Exposure to parental smoking is another major danger to children. My dad used to

smoke in front of me all of the time! Granted, I was born in the 70’s, but something tells me that he was just being lazy and uninformed about the risks to children.

 State of the World’s Children (UNICEF):  Mortality rate of children under 5 is the result of a wide range of factors:

 Nutritional health and knowledge of mothers  Level of immunization  Dehydration  Availability of maternal and child health services  Income and food availability in the family  Availability of clean water and safe sanitation  Overall safety of child’s environment

Illness and Death

 The poor are the majority in nearly one of every five nations in the world

 Dramatic increase in number of young children worldwide who have died from HIV/AIDS  Typically transmitted from parents  Especially likely in countries with high poverty and low education Rates of HIV/AIDS among all people in sub-Saharan Africa is around 20. 1/5 of people have this

incurable, deadly disease and many new infections are from mom to baby.

Cognitive Changes

 Piaget’s Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 years):  Children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings  Children form stable concepts and begin to reason  Cognitions are dominated by egocentrism and magical beliefs  Preoperational: child does not yet perform operations, or reversible mental actions

 Children can only do mentally what they can do physically

 Symbolic Function Substage (2 to 4 years):  Child gains the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present. Grandma is

in Mexico, yet the child can talk about her.

 Egocentrism: the inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective: Inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective. (ie: Dad: Is mommy there? Mary: (silently nods); Dad: Can I speak to mommy?; Mary: Silently nods). The child fails to consider dad’s response before replying.

 Animism: the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action: “That sidewalk made me mad, it made me fall down”. I had a Cabbage Patch doll named Sue Ann that I was convinced was alive.

 Child’s drawings are fanciful, inventive, and symbolic

“Pelican”

“Nose”

“More eyes”

“Eyes”

“Seal

”

(b)

(a)

(a) 3½-year-old’s drawing of “a pelican kissing a seal” compared with (b) 11-year-old’s drawing which is more realistic and less inventive

Preoperational Stage: Lack of Conservation (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLj0IZFLKvg&list=PL8648B2E5C69EF71F

The girls in this video are probably about 4 years old and demonstrate an inability to mentally

conserve liquid, number, and matter.

 Intuitive Thought Substage (4 to 7 years):  Children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to

questions: 4 year old, who is starting to develop own ideas about the world he live in,. He has diff understanding events that he knows are taking place but which cannot see. His fantasized thoughts bear little resemblance to reality. He cannot answer the question, “what if?”. Ask a lot of why questions: “What makes you grow up. Why do leaves fall? Why does the sun shine?”.

 Centration: centering attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others  Conservation: altering a substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties

(see above)

 Children may be able to conserve in one area but not another  Conservation may appear earlier than Piaget originally thought

 Vygotsky’s Theory:  Children think and understand primarily through social interaction

 The mind is shaped by the cultural context

 Zone of proximal development (ZPD): range of tasks that are too difficult for the child alone but that can be learned with guidance

 Lower limit can be achieved by child working independently  Upper limit can be achieved by child with adult guidance

 Captures skills that are in the process of maturing

For example, a teacher may see Billy sorting toy foods into his toy grocery cart. She sees him

putting vegetables in the top part of the basket, and everything else into the bottom part. This

is the lower limit of his ZPD. So, the teacher tells him that she would like him to sort the things

that go in the refrigerator at the top of the cart and the things that go in the cabinet in the

bottom of the cart. He is confused, so she shows him an example. Beans go in the bottom as

they go in the cupboard, milk goes in the top as it needs to go in the fridge. He learns from this

example and then starts sorting on his own. The teacher has now also engaged in:

 Scaffolding: changing level of support during a teaching session  Vygotsky and Language:

Language is used for social communication, solving tasks, and monitoring one’s own behavior

 Private speech: use of language for self-regulation: Which pieces should I put together first? I’ll try those green ones first. Now I need some blue ones. Wait, the blue ones don’t fit there, I’ll try it over here”. My boss always chides me for engaging in a lot of private speech, (“Don’t forget to run off copies of Exam 4, Tiff!”)

 Child uses language to communicate with others before she/he can focus on inward thoughts

 Transition to use of internal speech occurs between ages 3 and 7 and is followed by action without speaking aloud

 Children who use private speech more are typically more socially competent. So, for example, if Susie is 5 and sees her friend fall down, her first inclination may be to laugh. But if she stops for a second, says to herself, “Ouch, that must have hurt.”, she would then be more likely to go over to try to help her friend.

 Research finds private speech is used more during difficult tasks; users are more attentive and perform better

 Memory:  Short-term: individuals can retain information up to 30 seconds with no rehearsal

 Short-term memory generally increases during early childhood but varies between individuals

 Speed and efficiency of memory processes improve with age and experience  Memory becomes more accurate with age

 Young children can remember a great amount of information when given the right cues and prompts. “Lucas, do you remember the first ride we went on last month at Disneyland? No? Remember, it was based on that movie we saw? Yes,

Pirates of the Caribbean!”

 How accurate are young children’s long-term memories?  There are age differences in children’s susceptibility to suggestion

 Preschoolers are more suggestible than older children

 There are individual differences in susceptibility  Low self-concept, low support from parents, and mothers’ insecure attachment

in romantic relationships leads to increased suggestibility

 Interviewing techniques can produce substantial distortions in children’s reports about highly salient events. This is why they don’t tend to use kids for eyewitness testimony.

 Theory of Mind: awareness of one’s own mental process and the mental processes of others. Young kids shown a band aid box. The box actually contained pencils. When asked what a child who had never seen the box would think was inside, 3 you said “pencils”, 5 yes said band aids

 Age 18 months – 3 years: children begin to understand three mental states — perceptions, desires, and emotions

 Age 3 to 5: children understand false beliefs, and that people can be mistaken  Children demonstrate an inability to “think about thinking”

They will test theory of mind with tasks like this one:

Cognitive changes

 Only beyond preschool years (5 to 7 years of age) do children have a deepening appreciation of the mind itself

 In middle and late childhood, children understand beliefs are interpretive and that the mind is an active constructor of knowledge

 In early adolescence, children begin to understand that people can have ambivalent feelings or experience conflicting feelings at the same time

Language Development

 During preschool years, children:  Become more sensitive to the sound of spoken words  Make all the sounds of their language  Demonstrate a knowledge of morphology rules  Learn and apply syntax rules  Rapidly learn new words  Talk about things that are not present  Use different styles of speech to suit the situation

Early Childhood Education

 Variations in Early Childhood Education:  Child-centered kindergarten: emphasizes the education of the whole child and

concern for his or her physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development

 Montessori approach: teacher is a facilitator; child is given freedom and spontaneity. Here’s one in our neighborhood. http://www.mehermontessori.org/

 Young children learn best through active, hands-on teaching methods  Educational practices should be developmentally appropriate, taking into

consideration the uniqueness of the child

 Education for Disadvantaged Children:  Project Head Start:

 Federally funded, created in 1965  Not all programs in the U.S. are of equal quality  Seeks to intervene where there is a lack of enriched early childhood educational

experiences Were you in a Head Start? If so, what were your experiences like? Most people report that they

learned a lot about socialization, play, art, etc… Head Start was less about ABCs and 123s as it was

preparing them for being students.

 Evaluations support the positive influence of quality early childhood programs for disadvantaged young children

 Controversies in Early Childhood Education:  What should the curriculum be?  Should preschool education be universal in the United States?

Here are some suggested websites that correspond to the issues discussed in this chapter:

Child Nutrition

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/childnutrition.html

Children Now

http://www.childrennow.org/index.php/

Early Childhood and Sleep

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=14294&cn=462

Language Development

http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/development/language_development.shtml

Lead Exposure during Early Childhood

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11815762

Relation of Mild-to-Moderate Malnutrition to Human Development

http://www.unu.edu/unupress/food2/uid04e/uid04e0b.htm

UC Davis Mind Institute

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/mindinstitute/

United Nations Children’s Fund

http://www.unicef.org/