CHAPTER SEVEN PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN EARLY CHILDHOOD.

CHAPTER SEVEN

PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Copyright © 2009 Pearson Education Canada 7-2

I. PHYSICAL CHANGES

Subtle physical changes and a number of advances in cognitive and language development happen during early childhood


A. Growth and Motor Development

Physical changes occur more slowly New synapses are still being formed, and some

myelinization still continues in the nervous system

Changes in height and weight are far slower than in infancy

Each year from about age 2 to adolescence, children gain about 5-8 cm in height and about 2.7 kg in weight

(continued)


Growth and Motor Development (continued)

Children who exhibit higher motor activity levels demonstrate a significantly better ability to control or inhibit their behaviour allowing for successful task achievement

Children’s motor activity levels increase linearly with age and tend to peak between 7 and 9 years of age—later than previously thought

(continued)


Growth and Motor Development (continued)

The preschool child makes steady progress in motor development

The most impressive gains are in large muscle skills

Small-muscle, or “fine motor” abilities also improve


Milestones of Motor Development


Examples of Children’s Drawing


B. The Brain and Nervous System

Brain growth, synapse formation, and myelinization continue in early childhood, although at a pace slower than in infancy

Lateralization:– The Corpus callosum (connects the right and left

hemispheres) grows and matures most during this time

– Genes provide the mechanism for lateralization but experience shapes the pace

– Language is primarily centred in the left brain– Young children whose language skills are the

most advanced also show the strongest degree of lateralization, but is it cause or effect? (continued)


Lateralization of Brain Functions


The Brain and Nervous System (continued)

Myelinization of the reticular formation, the brain structure that regulates attention and concentration, is another important milestone of early childhood brain development

Hippocampus: a brain structure that is essential for the formation of memories

Maturation of the hippocampus probably accounts for improvements in memory function across the preschool years

Handedness: a strong preference for using one hand or the other that develops between 2 and 6 years of age. Right handedness is a dominant gene


C. Health Promotion and Wellness Health issues for children in early childhood

include:

– Continued periodic medical check-ups and immunizations

– Most children eat sufficient quantities of food, but they do not consume the majority of their daily calories at regular meals

• Food aversions often develop at this age• Poor eating habits formed now may lead to later

obesity

(continued)


Health Promotion and Wellness (continued)

About 5/1000 Canadian children (0.5%) under age five have an accident that requires hospitalization

90% of injuries are preventable and most happen at home

The only technique that lowers children’s risk taking behaviour is having someone within easy reach

Accidents are more common among boys than girlsBoys have a more optimistic view of their own

invulnerability


D. Child Maltreatment in Canada Patterns of Maltreatment:

– Child maltreatment: physical or psychological injury that results from an adult’s intentional exposure of a child to potentially harmful stimuli, sexual acts, or neglect

– Canadian research found a rate of 21.52 investigations of child maltreatment per 1,000 children (2%), of which almost half were substantiated

– Physical abuse: relates to inappropriate punishment (69%) and other forms: shaking, choking, and burning (31%)

(continued)


Child Maltreatment in Canada (continued)

Patterns of Maltreatment (continued)– Sexual abuse: includes touching and fondling of

genitals (68%) and attempted and completed sexual activity (35%)

– Neglect: a failure to supervise leading to physical harm (48%) and physical neglect (19%)

– Emotional maltreatment: exposure to family violence (58%) and emotional abuse (34%)

– Biological parents most frequently abuse– More mothers than fathers are abusive

(continued)



Causal Factors:– Sociocultural factors

• Abuse is more likely if parents feel there are few moral limits on what they can do to their children physically

• Personal or cultural values may support the view that physical abuse is morally acceptable

– Cultural traditions of children as property– Living in communities that support these beliefs

increases abuse

– Characteristics of the child• Physical or mental disabilities• Difficult temperaments

(continued)



Causal Factors (continued):– Characteristics of the abuser

• Depressed• Lacking in parenting skills and knowledge• History of abuse themselves• Substance abusers• Live-in male partner, when the children are not his

– Family Stressors:• Poverty• Unemployment• Inter-parental conflict

(continued)



Possible outcomes of abuse– Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)– Poor school performance– Substance abuse in adolescence– Slower brain growth

Preventive Measures– Education about potential consequences to the

child and for the abuser– Parenting classes in high school– Identification of families at risk– Enforcement of existing laws– Reporting of abuse is MANDATORY in all

provinces and territories except the Yukon


II. COGNITIVE CHANGES

The changes in thinking that happen during the early childhood years are indeed staggering

At the beginning of the period, children are just beginning to learn how to accomplish goals, but by the end, they are manipulating symbols and can make accurate judgements about others’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviours


Children’s Play and Cognitive Development


A. Piaget’s Preoperational Stage Preoperational stage: children become proficient in

the use of symbols in thinking and communicating but still have difficulty thinking logically– Egocentrism: the young child’s belief that everyone

sees and experiences the world the way she does– Centration: the child thinks of the world in terms of

one variable at a time– Conservation: the understanding that matter can

change in appearance without changing in quantity (developed by age 5)


Egocentrism


Conservation Tasks Used by Piaget


B. Challenges to Piaget’s View Studies of conservation have generally confirmed

Piaget’s observations, but preschoolers are a great deal more cognitively sophisticated than Piaget thought

Egocentrism and Perspective Taking– Flavell’s stage 1 (2-3 years old) the child knows

that others experience things differently

– Flavell’s stage 2 (4-5 years old) the child develops rules to figure out what the other person experiences

– Children use emotion to elicit a response from others

(continued)


Challenges to Piaget’s View (continued)

Appearance and Reality– 4-5 year olds understand that the same object can

represent different things

– False belief principle: an understanding that enables a child to look at a situation from another person’s point of view and determine what kind of information will cause that person to have a false belief


C. Theories of Mind

Understanding thoughts, desires & beliefs– 18 months

• rudimentary beginnings

– Age 3 • some aspects of link between people’s thinking,

feelings, and behaviour

– Age 4 • basic principle that each person’s actions are based

on her or his representation of reality

(continued)


Theories of Mind (continued)

Understanding thoughts, desires & beliefs – 4 – 5 year olds

• Cannot understand that other people can think about them

• Do not understand that most knowledge can be derived from inference. This understanding develops by age 6

– 5 – 7 year olds• Understand the reciprocal nature of thought

(continued)


Theories of Mind (continued)

Influences on Development of a Theory of Mind:– Correlated with performance on Piaget’s tasks– Development of a theory of mind is enhanced by

pretend play, shared pretense with other children, and discussion of emotion-provoking events with parents

– Some level of language facility may be a necessary condition for the development of a theory of mind


D. Alternative Theories of Early Childhood Thinking

Information Processing Theories:– Short-term storage space (STSS): theorist

Robbie Case’s term for the working memory• There is a limit to how many ‘schemes’ can be

attended to– Operational efficiency: a neo-Piagetian term that

refers to the maximum number of schemes that can be processed in working memory at one time

• This improves as the child ages– Metamemory: knowledge about how memory works

and the ability to control and reflect on one’s own memory function

– Metacognition: knowledge about how the mind thinks and the ability to control and reflect on one’s own thought processes

(continued)


Piaget’s Matrix Classification


Alternative Theories of Early Childhood Thinking (continued)

Vygotsky’s Socio-Cultural Theory – Primitive stage

• Infant possesses mental processes similar to animals– Naïve psychology stage

• Learns to use language to communicate but does not understand symbols

– Private Speech stage• Uses language as a guide to solve problems.• Becomes internalized by 6-7

– Ingrowth stage• Logical thinking results from internalization of speech

acquired from children and adults in a social world


III. CHANGES IN LANGUAGE

By age 2½, most children have a vocabulary of about 600 words

By age 5 or 6, that number has risen to roughly 15,000 words

Most 3-year-olds have acquired all the basic tools needed to form sentences and make conversation


A. Fast-Mapping Vocabulary grows rapidly in this timeframe:

– Age 1 year = a dozen words– Age 2 ½ = 600 words– Age 5 or 6 = 15,000 words

Fast-mapping is the ability to categorically link new words to real-world referents

The child rapidly forms a hypothesis about a new word’s meaning, then uses the word often, getting feedback to help them judge the accuracy of their hypothesis


B. The Grammar ExplosionInflections

– Additions that change meaning– Earliest inflection in English is the addition of –ing:

“Where going?”Questions and Negatives

– A set of rules is used, that doesn’t match adult speech

Overregularization (overgeneralization)– Using rules when they don’t apply

Complex sentences– Using conjunctions to combine two ideas or using

embedded clauses


C. Phonological Awareness Children’s understanding of the sound patterns of

the language they are acquiringKnowledge of the language’s system for

representing sounds with lettersCan be learned in school through instructionThe greater a child’s phonological awareness, the

faster he/she learns to readPrimarily develops through word play

– Nursery rhymes– Games involving repetitive words

Invented spelling: a strategy young children with good phonological awareness skills use when they write


Invented Spelling


D. Individual and Cross-Linguistic VariationsThere is a wide variety of patterns of when children

develop language skills, similar across culturesLanguage skills and cognition are lower for children:

– of teenaged mothers– of lower socioeconomic status– whose mothers vocalized for shorter durations– who were exposed to fewer linguistic and social toys

Most children who talk late catch up later onThe exception is those few late talkers who also have

poor receptive language—they appear to remain behind in language development and perhaps in cognitive development

Variations are likely due to both nature and nurtureThe prelinguistic phase seems to be identical in all

language communities


IV. DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE

Beginning in early childhood, psychologists can construct intelligence tests that are correlated both with later test scores and important variables such as school performance


A. Measuring IntelligenceThe first modern intelligence test was published in 1905

by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon Intelligence quotient (IQ): the ratio of mental age to

chronological age; also, a general term for any kind of score derived from an intelligence test

Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children, called the WISC-IV (2003)– Verbal comprehension index– Perceptual reasoning index– Working memory index– Processing speed index

IQ tests do a fairly good job of predicting success in school, but don’t measure other variables of success

IQ scores are quite stable across time IQ tests have several important limitations


Normal Distribution of IQ Scores


B. Origins of Individual Differences in Intelligence Evidence for Heredity

– Both twin studies and studies of adopted children show strong heredity influences on IQ

Evidence for Environment– Adoption studies provide support for an environmental

influence on IQ scores– Specific family interactions foster higher scores

• More interesting, complex environment• Parental reaction and feedback• Parents use rich and accurate language in the “zone of

proximal development”• Opportunity to explore and make mistakes• Ask questions rather than give demands

(continued)


Origins of Individual Differences in Intelligence (continued)

Evidence for Preschool Influences– Formal education programs like “Head Start” do

make a difference

– Enrichment programs that start at infancy have a more profound effect than those that start at age 3 (refer to Figure 7.9)

– Long term impact on children• Less likely to be placed in special education, repeat

a grade• Higher scores in reading and math at age 12

(continued)



Readiness to Learn at School– Thomas identified 5 domains of readiness:

1. Language and communication skill

2. Academic skill

3. Self-regulation of learning

4. Self-control of behaviour

5. Social competence and independence

(continued)



Home activities linked with higher readiness (despite socioeconomic status):1.Daily reading

2.High positive parent-child interaction

3.Participation in organized sports

4.Lessons in physical activities

5.Lessons in the arts

(continued)



Thomas’ study found that…

(continued)

Girls enter school with better:

•Communication skills•Abilities in coping and symbol use•Attention •Self control of impulsive behaviour•Independence in dressing

Boys enter school with better:

•curiosity


Origins of Individual Differences in Intelligence (continued)Programs that target high risk children (such

as Aboriginal Head Start and High/Scope Programs) result in:– Better school readiness– Less time spent in special education – Superior high school graduation rates– Higher employment income– Lower rates of criminal arrests

Combining the Information:– Heredity and environment seem equally

responsible for intelligence– While initial intelligence is highly heritable, the

absolute IQ is determined by environment

CHAPTER SEVEN PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN EARLY CHILDHOOD.

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