Abstracts chapters 7, Developmental psychology through the lifespan

Physical and cognitive development in early childhood

During early childhood, a lot of changes occur in the body and brain of kids. Talking about
physical changes, at this point, they stop gaining body weight but grow taller and become
thinner. Also, new epiphyses appear in their skeleton, and their teeth start changing during
pre-school years. Their brains still form new synapses and myelinate, so their cognitive
activities also increase. Also, with the rapid development of executive function and language
learning, their prefrontal-cortical and the left cerebral hemisphere are highly active. Also,
during this time, they strengthen their dominant cerebral hemisphere by developing the
executive functions of the preferred hand. The other brain parts, such as the cerebellum,
reticular formation, hippocampus, amygdala, and corpus callosum, are also active and
develop fast.
Of course, kids' development can be influenced by many factors, such as heredity,
exposure to new food and diet, immunization, injuries, etc. Talking about heredity, it mainly
controls the release of hormones such as growth hormone and thyroid-stimulating hormone.
Some dietary problems and malnutrition may cause developmental delays such as attention
and memory difficulties and other performance and behavior problems. Immunization has a
positive impact on the kid's health, but depending on the nations and different
misconceptions around it, many kids don't have access to it. Unintentive injury is one of the
common causes of death among children, which can be prevented by strengthening
children's safety, promoting to healthier environment and homes, improving public
education, and working on both children's and parents' behavior.
During pre-school, kids develop many new motor skills and improve old ones. For example,
their center of gravity shifts, and a massive amount of activities performed by kids contribute
to the improvement of coordination. Not only does coordination improves, but the other
motor skills as well. For example, they improve their drawing by being able to draw more
complex pictures, and also they practice their writing by printing alphabet letters. Also, the
development of motor skills can be affected by sex differences, bodybuilding, the opportunity
to develop and play, and genetics.
Regarding cognitive development, two theories are mainly involved in Piaget's and
Vygotsky's. First, early childhood is represented by the beginning of the preoperational
stage. During this stage, kids actively develop their dual representation by understanding
how maps, pictures, and words apply to real-world objects. But they are still ego-centered
and focus only on one aspect of a situation and a perceptual appearance; therefore, they fail
to comply with conservation and hierarchical classification tasks. But according to the follow-
up studies, kids at this age can be more mature than Piage stated when given tasks relevant
to their everyday lives. Also, it's proved that they can perform much more activities that
Piage stated, such as distinguishing animate from inanimate objects, recognizing other's
perspectives, dealing with hierarchical tasks, and so on. Of course, some modern scientists
disagree with that strict form of stages. Still, there are educational principles such as
promotion of discovery learning and acceptance of individual differences that should be
taken into account.
The other perspective is Vygotsky's. Opposite to Piaget's theory, Vygotsky emphasizes the
role of language in kids' development. He talks a lot about private speech, which kids master
by communicating with adults and more experienced kids to master the tasks. Also,
Vygotsky presents the idea of scaffolding that supports the gains in kids' thinking. His theory
is an actual implementation in education because it promotes assisted discovery in
classroom settings by not only verbal guidance by teachers but also by peer assistance and
usage of make-believe play.
Information processing also changes a lot during these years of development. At this age,
their executive function improves by gaining the ability to shift their focus of attention and
inhibition and increasing working memory capacity. All of this contributes to the development
of new social and cognitive skills and, in the later years, allows to gain an ability to plan. Still,
preschoolers don't have those strong memory strategies and can easily forget uninteresting
information. But their episodic memory develops quite well.
At this age, kids begin to construct a theory of mind by metacognition. During pre-school
years their false-belief understanding becomes stronger. Therefore, they can better reflect
on their thoughts and beliefs, but preschoolers perceive a mind as a container to store
information.
Taking about preschoolers' literacy, the idea of emergent literacy shows how they transform
their knowledge in writing. With phonological awareness, we can make predictions about
emergent literacy knowledge and spelling and read later on. Parents can contribute to such
development by implementing interactive story-readings. In addition, preschoolers develop
their mathematics skills by being able to perform cardinality and use counting to solve
arithmetic problems. Once again, parents can help kids to be better at this by giving them
chances to count, compare and talk about numbers concepts more often.
There are differences in the mental development of kids, which depend on different factors,
such as education and home environment. Such differences could be measured by the
intelligence tests that measure verbal and nonverbal skills and can predict future
development as well. Children's home environment can help kids to grow more mature and
intelligent if it is warm and stimulating. Also, child-centered programs and academic
programs in kindergarten and pre-school can contribute to children's development, but
emphasizing formal academic training can have a negative effect on their performance and
motivation. To better the academic performance of low-income students in the USA, has
created a program called Project Head which proved its efficiency. But not only do children
learn something at educational facilities, but they can also master their executive function,
vocabulary, and reading skills by watching slow-paced and easy-to-follow TV programs and
by using computer programs oriented toward the development of programming skills - they
improve their problem solving and metacognition. Nevertheless, children's usage of TV and
computer should be monitored and supervised.
And last aspect, but not the least - language development. During pre-school years, kids'
vocabulary expands rapidly by fast mapping. In the beginning, they mostly rely on perceptual
cues and, later on, on social and linguistic cues. Also, by increasing their grammatical skills,
they develop a new type of mistake, called overregularization, but by the end of their pre-
school years, they usually acquire complex grammatical forms. And also, they master
pragmatics by the age of 4 by being able to adapt their speech to the different ages, sexes,
and social statutes. Kids' speaking abilities could be enhanced by adults' help, such as
providing explicit feedback on the language clarity as well as indirect feedback through the
recast and expansions.