PRELIM

CHAPTER 1: WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT CHILDREN

THE SCIENCE OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT

- The study of our how children grow and change it overtime, both physically and mentally.
- Focuses on the various stages of development that children go through, as well as the factors that
influence their development, such as genetics, environment, and social interactions.
Child Development Theories: A Brief Overview
- There are many different theories of child development. Theories vary in the emphasis given to
biological processes or the environment.
- Theories are important to teachers because they guide decisions about classroom practices and
because they guide research. In developmental science, research results are used to test and
improve theories.
Research Method
- Federal mandates require educators to use "scientifically based research" to guide decisions about
how to teach. To help, the federal Department of Education maintains a What Works Clearing.
house website.
THREE BASIC RESEARCH DESIGNS:
1. Experimental Designs – the process of carrying out research in an objective and controlled fashion
so that precision is maximized and specific conclusions can be drawn regarding a hypothesis
statement.
2. Nonexperimental Correlation Design – a type of non-experimental research in which the
researcher measures two variables (binary or continuous) and assesses the statistical relationship
(i.e., the correlation) between them with little or no effort to control extraneous variables.
3. Qualitative Design – involves interviews, observations of natural behavior, and other forms of data
that are usually reported in words rather than numbers. The researcher may spend anywhere from
hours to years observing and interacting with youth in order to accurately tell their story. Provide
rich insight into learners’ thoughts and behavior.
OTHER RESEARCH DESIGNS:
Studies of Change over time
 Longitudinal Research Design – study in which data are collected from the same individuals two or
more, separated by some period of time.
 Cross-sectional Research Design – a study in which data are collected at one point in time from two
or more age groups, to investigate age trends.
FOUR OTHER KEY ISSUES TO UNDERSTAND WHEN YOU READ RESEARCH FINDINGS:
 Causality – genetic connection of phenomena through which one thing (the cause) under certain
conditions gives rise to causes something else (the effect).
 Measurement – researchers measure development in many ways: observations of behaviors,
ratings by a teacher or a parent, self-report, and psychological markers such as level of hormones or
brain images.
 Validity – the extent to which a measurement assesses what it is supposed to measure for a
specific purpose.
 Reliability – refers to the accuracy of a test or measurement
  Generalizability – a measure of how useful the results of a study are for a broader group of people
or situations. Factors that limits generalizability. Cohort effect- an effect upon development whose
cause is specific to the particular time period in which the cohort grew up.
 Effect Size – a measure of the strength of the relationship between two variables, or how much
more effective one intervention is then another.
NATURE AND NURTURE
The Role of Genes in Individual Diversity
 Behavioral genetics – the study of how genes and the environment contribute to differences
among people. According to behavioral genetics, differences in any trait are due to three sources:
genes, shared environment, and nonshared environment.
Three Sources of Behavior Genetics
 Genes and Heritability – a statistical estimate of the amount of variation of a trait in a population
that is due to genes.
 Bioecological Model – presented a change in thinking from a “nature vs. nurture” tug-of-war to a
view that they interact over time to influence children’s development. Microsystem, mesosystem,
exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem.
 Shared Environment- refers to any factors that make siblings residing in the same family similar.
Effects are moderate for mental illness (10-30%) and personality traits. Effects are large for
delinquency, alcohol use, and college attendance (Burt, 2009; Pike,2002).
 Nonshared Environment – refers to factors that make siblings living in the same family different
from each other.
Is the family a shared or nonshared environment?
- Mostly a nonshared environment. Two reasons: family do not influence all children in the same
way, and families change.
Problems with Estimating Heritability
 SE, and NSE effects. They depend on a variation of trait in a population.
 In behavioral genetics is the assumption that genes and environment affect children separately.
 Intelligent children may seek out books or watch educational TV, which increases their intelligence.
 Parents may react to intelligent children by teaching them advanced concepts.
How can Genes Influence Behavior?
 Genotype – set of genes that is intended and transmitted to descendants.
 Phenotype – observable characteristics of a person.
Nurture: The Role of Cultural in Group Diversity
What is Culture?
- The pattern of values, beliefs, institutions, and behavior shared by a group of people, a pattern that
is different from other groups and is communicated from one generation to the next.
- Culture dictates physical contexts, social contexts, customs for child rearing, and beliefs about the
native of children.
- Influences how much time children spend with their mothers vs. father’s vs. peers.
Ethnicity – refers to a group that shares a cultural heritage and/ or a common ancestry.
Cultural Capital – knowledge and social relationships that allow people to reap benefits within their
culture.
Cultural Mismatch – a pattern of incompatibilities between home and school. Language and narrative
structure.
CLASSROOM IMPLICATIONS OF CULTURE
- Become aware of your students’ cultural capital and how it affects their achievement.
 - - Be careful as you think about cultural capital, because it can lead to a deficit view that highlights
what children lack.
- Become knowledgeable about and accept the language and dialect of your students, but at the
same time, teach standard English so they will experience success in school and careers.
- Become aware of your students’ narrative style.
- Build bridges between home and school.
- Do not try to be colorblind.
Reconciling the Role of Genes and Culture
- genes and culture, act together to predict child outcomes.

RISK AND RESILIENCE

Risk – in education, risk refers to students who have a high probability of flunking a class or dropping out of
their school.
Resilience – refers to the ability to adapt and flourish in the face of adversity and includes the ability to
recover from trauma.
Risk Factor – is an aspect of a child or environment that increases the probability of poor outcomes. Risk
factor can be biological such as, low birth weight, cognitive, such as intelligence; social and emotional, such
as aggression or depression; part of a family, such as an alcoholic parent; or part of the community; such as
neighborhood violence. In the bioecological model, risk factors in the microsystem have a strong impact
than risk factors in the macrosystem, but risk factors at any level can undermine children’s development.

Common Risk Factors for Children include the following:

 Little positive mother-child interaction
 Low maternal affection Abuse Low parental education
 Unstimulating home environment
 Low family income-receive welfare
 Unskilled head of household
 Parental anxiety of depression
 Antisocial parent
 Low birth weight
 Low intelligence
 Parental drug use
 Discrimination Mother works long hours
 Low parental monitoring
 Negative parental attitude toward child
 Physical or hostile discipline
 Single parent
 Change in parents marital status
 Conflict or separation between parents
 Parent has multiple sexual partners
 Parent has multiple sexual partners
 Long hours in child care
 Overcrowding or large family
 Frequent moves
 Foster care or living with another family
 Negative, stressful life events
 Changing schools
  Poor relationship with teachers
 Exposure to violence or conflict
Protective Factors – resilient children usually have one or more protective factors in their lives. Protective
factors decrease the likelihood of poor outcomes in children at risk and include the:
 High-quality parenting- especially a warm, nurturing mother
 High intelligence, reading ability, and achievement, special talents and participation in
extracurricular activities
 A strong relationship with a father figure or surrogate parent like a favorite teacher or relative
 Social competence, outgoing personality, and peer acceptance
 Religious involvement
Accumulation of Risk – risk factors tend to go together – they are correlated. When risk factors
accumulate, they have a stronger effect.

Three key points for Teachers:

1. When risk accumulates, there is a steep increase in the odds of poor outcome;
2. Learners may fare well if only one or two risk factors operate in their lives; and
3. A high-quality social environment can foster protective factors.

Stability in Development – does risk or resilience in early childhood have effects into adulthood? Overall,
there is stability in development because risk and protective factors tend to be stable in the environment.
Stability of Risk across Childhood – children’s risk status is quite stable. However, despite this general
stability of risk factors, some children’s life circumstances do change.
Canalization – protects children from early risk factors for a short time. Canalization refers to the tendency
of genes to restrict development to a limited range of outcomes despite quite different environments.
Canalization is stronger for physical development than for social, emotional, or cognitive development.
The Importance of Early Experience – early experiences are important because they influence later
opportunities and color interpretation of later experiences. In spite of the power of early experience to
influence later experience, children are flexible and adjust to the quality of their environment at any age.
Maternal Depression as a Risk Factor – research shows that maternal depression is associated with
children’s biological and cognitive problems, such as failure to thrive, behavior problems, poor sleep.
Limited play, poor language ability, rapid heart rate, and abnormal brain functioning Maternal depression
is also associated with children’s social and emotional problems, such as irritability, depression, wariness,
unresponsiveness to others, slow response to psychological interventions, ADHD, suicidal thoughts,
aggression, and social withdrawal.
- Are there protective factors? Children are less likely to develop problems despite a depressed
mother if they have:
 A positive mother-child relationship where the mother is warm and sensitive
despite her depression (Pargis, Brennan, Hammen, & Le Brocque, 2010)
 Affluence Depressed mothers who have comfortable income are more likely
to be sensitive to their children (NICHD ECCRN, 1999; Petterson & Albers,
2001)
 A mentally healthy, nondepressed father in the home (Field. Hossain, &M
1999, Radke-Yarrow, Cummings, Kuczynski, & Chapman, 1985)
 A high IQ (Pargas et al., 2010)
 A warm and positive classroom emotional environment (Yan, Zhou, &Ansari,
2015)
Poverty as a Risk Factor – poverty is another powerful and all-too-common risk factor for children. Almost
one in five children live in poverty, which is twice the rate of elderly people (Hernandez, Denton, &
Macartney, 2008). About 37%of children will experience poverty at some time during their childhood or
adolescence (Ratcliffe & McKernan, 2010). In 2015. The federal government defined poverty as an annual
income below $24,250 for a family of two parents and two related children.
- The term poverty is often used broadly to refer to very low socioeconomic status, rather than
strictly adhering to the federal definition.
- Socioeconomic status (SES) refers to a combination of parental education, occupation, and
income. Families are designated as low, middle, or high in SES.

TWO MAJOR MODELS HAVE BEEN PROPOSED TO EXPLAIN THE MANY EFFECTS OF POVERTY ON
CHILDREN
Family Investment Model – according to the family investment model, poverty is associated with less
access to cultural or financial capital that the family can "invest" in children, which leads to poorer health
and a low-quality learning environment in the home (Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 2000). Homelearning
environment refers to time spent reading, preschool experience, language stimulation, number of puzzles
and books, outings to museums or theaters, and family meal routines. The quality of the home-learning
environment, in turn, predicts achievement and behavior problems among Latino. African American, and
White children (Bradley, Corwyn, Burchinal, McAdoo, & Garcia Coll, 2001, Linver, Brooks-Gunn, & Kohen,
2002).
Family Stress Model – according to the family stress model, poverty is associated with conditions that
stress parents, such as lack of food, single parenthood, divorce, frequent moves, and job loss. This leads to
depression, marital conflict, and other problems These, in turn, lead to diminished quality of parenting
(Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). Home orjob stress tends to result in parents' emotional and physical withdrawal
from children (Repetti, Yang, & Saxbe, 2009). The family stress model has been supported for Latino,
African American, and White families (Lugo-Gil & Tamis-LeMonda, 2008; Raver, Gershoff, & Aber, 2007;
White, Liu, Nair, & Tein, 2015). Both of these models may be true-the family stress model may explain
behavior problems better, whereas the family investment model may explain academic problems better
(Gershoff, Aber, Raver, & Lennon, 2007).
TWO TYPES OF POVERTY AS A RISK FACTOR:
Ethnicity and Poverty
- In most countries, poverty and ethnicity go hand in hand. In the United States, children of color
are more likely to be poor than White children, though the majority of poor children are White.
For example, about 77% of African American children compared to 30% of White children will
experience poverty (Ratcliffe & McKernan, 2010). Families that are persistently poor are more
likely to be headed by an African American than are families that are able to increase their
income (Wagmiller, 2015).
Classroom Implications of Poverty – poor children are more likely than wealthier children to develop
problems that undermine their achievement in school. However, keep in mind that this isonly a probability,
not destiny. Many poor children will do well in school. Let's listento an adult who grew up poor.
The Classroom Implications: The case of School Readiness and Preschool
School Readiness – refers to skills that prepare children for formal instruction, such as being able to
follodirections; having self-control; and knowing the alphabet. basic numbers, and colors. Although only
10% of teachers say that children should know their alphabet and be able to count to 20 to be ready for
kindergarten, 60% say children need to have self-control, that is, be able to follow directions and not be
disrupt (Blair, 2002). Interestingly, several large studies across several countries show that math skills, like
knowing numbers, predict later academic success with an impressive effect size of 0.34 (Duncan et al.,
2007).
Measuring School Readiness – some states require tests of kindergarten readiness. Some readiness tests
measure beginning academic skills, like knowledge of letters, numbers, or shapes. Many readiness tests do
not meet standards for validity or reliability yet are still used by schools (La Paro & Pianta, 2000). Some
experts object to their use as gatekeepers to school because children with low scores have the greatest
need to be in school and because they encourage advantaged parents to hold back their children so they
will be at the top of their class.
Why Does the Research on Preschools for Children at Risk Say?
- One approach to helping poor children become ready for formal schooling is to provide publicly
funded preschool, like Head Start and prekindergarten
Head Start – the most famous preschool program is Head Start. Eligibility for Head Start is based on family
income. The largest single federal program exclusively for poor children, Head Start provides health,
education, and social services. Most programs are half-day and operate on a school year calendar. Most
children enrolled in Head Start are 3 or 4 years old
Prekindergarten – elementary schools serving large numbers of poor children often have compensatory
prekindergarten programs at the school site. Some are funded by Title I (also called Chapter 1), a federal
program for schools with high rates of poverty. They tend to have more highly educated teachers than
other preschools, including Head Start (Lee, Loeb, & Lubeck, 1998).

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY AND TODDLERHOOD

- Some pediatricians argue that the primary task of infancy is growth, and the primary task of
toddlerhood is becoming mobile. Yet, developmental scientists argue that laying the
groundwork for healthy brain development is also vital.

Neuroscience – is the study of how the brain is involved in perception, memory, and emotions. Among the
most important discoveries, of neuroscience is that the brain is constructed by experience.
Neuroscientist – a neuroscientist is a scientist who studies the structure, function, development, and
pathology of the nervous system, including the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves. Neuroscientists
use a variety of techniques and approaches from various disciplines, such as biology, psychology, physics,
and engineering, to understand how the nervous system works and how it influences behavior, cognition,
and other functions of the body

2-1a Structure and Function of the Brain

The Basic Unit of Brain is;
 Neuron or nerve cell
- Cell body (with a nucleus much like other cells in the body)
 Dendrites (receiving units that bring information form othe cells)
 Axons (sending units that carry information away to other neurons or to muscle cell)
Neurons communicate with each other through electrical signals. These signals are affected by myelin.
 Myelin is a fatty substance that forms an insulating coated called a myelin sheath, around axons
that allows them to function efficiently.
 Neurons also communicate with each other chemically at synapses.
 Synapses are a junction where neurons communicated with each other, or with other kinds of cells.
 More than 100 trillion synapses in the brain (Beatty, 2001)
Three Parts of Synapse:
  Sending end of one neuron
 Receiving end of another
 Space between them

When prompted by an electrical signal, neurons release a chemical called neurotransmitter, which is then
received by another neuron.
 Neurotransmitter is a chemical that allows neurons to communicate across synapses.
Some Neurotransmitter are:
 Dopamine
 Serotonin
 Noradrenaline
 Norepinephrine

The brain has two side or hemispheres, and several major structures such as the;
• Brain stem (midbrain and hindbrain)
- is a part of the lower brain, which is believed to be an evolutionarily and region that regulates
body function like sleep-wake cycle (Joseph,2000).
- It develops around 6 weeks after conception. The hypothalamus is located in the midbrain. It
regulates internal organs, hormones, body temperature, hunger, emotions and many other
activities.
• Limbic system
- is a collection of structure that sir like a donut on the brainstem. It is considered the reward
center of the brain because it involved attention, motivation and emotion.
The important structure of limbic system includes:
 Hippocampus
- Is essential to memory.
 Cingulate Gyrus
- Is involved in problem-solving.
 Amygdala
- Is involved in emotions.
 Cerebellum
- Is a latticework of neurons at the back of the brain. It is involved in movement, muscle tone,
concentration, and learning from errors. It works with the cortex in producing finely
coordinated movements, like speech.
 Cerebral cortex
- Is like a cap covering the other regions of the brain. It takes many years to develop fully.
Complex functions like language and abstract thinking are coordinated in the cortex. The
cerebral cortex has four lobes: frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital.
 Frontal lobe – is the largest part of the cortex. Largest lobes in humans as compared with
other species (Rubenstein, 2011). It is involved in organizing formation in your mind, as you
read text, resisting distraction, and inhibiting impulses. A portion of the frontal lobe is the
prefrontal cortex. Particularly important in working memory and emotions.
 Parietal lobe – is located in the upper back part of the brain, behind the frontal lobe. It is
involved in processing information from the senses, including touch, temperature, and pain.
The parietal lobe also plays a role in spatial awareness and orientation, and is important for
attention and memory.
  Temporal lobe – is located on the sides of the brain, near the temples. It is involved in
processing auditory information, such as sounds and language. The temporal lobe also plays
a role in visual perception, specifically in recognizing faces and objects.
 Occipital lobe – is located at the back of the brain, behind the parietal and temporal lobes.
It is primarily responsible for processing visual information from the eyes. The occipital lobe
helps to interpret.

2-1b Sequence of Development in the Brain

The brain develops in an orderly way. The first areas to mature are involved in motor skills and basic senses
like visions. Next come language areas. Last to mature is the prefrontal cortex. Areas mature by increasing
myelination, specializing, building connections and pruning synapses.

• Myelination
- is a development of myelin. It begins during last 3 months of pregnancy and is completed the
sensory and motor areas in the first few years after birth (Blakesmore and Choudhury, 2006).
• Myelination increases the connections between key areas of the brain. The brain also changes in
two other ways; 1.)It grows in volume across childhood (Giedd et al.,2009). 2.)It changes in rate of
glucose consumption, referred to as glucose rate which fuels the brain.
• Glucose rate
- the rate of consumption of glucose, an indicator of energy use in the brain.
• The prenatal period is critically important in brain development. Most of the neurons in the adult
brain are produced before birth. Neurons proliferate, migrate to different areas and develop
specialized functions, beginning just a few weeks after conception (Nowakowski and Hayes ,2002).
• Errors in this process can be caused by infection, malnutrition or mother’s alcohol use during
pregnancy. The brain is capable of learning even before birth, such as infant’s learning to recognize
the mother’s voice (Joseph, 2000). •Synaptogenesis -a spurt in synaptic connections of the brain
that occurs from the third trimester of gestation until about 2 years age.

2-1c Individual Diversity in Brain Development

What do Individual Differences in the Brain Predict?
- Brain differences explain intelligence. That is more intelligent people have faster neural
responses, and their brains do not have to consume as much glucose to solve a problem
(Sternberg and Kaufman, 1998). Brain differences explain social and emotional abilities. To help
us understand, let’s look at stress reactivity and behavioral inhibition, because they are the
basis of characteristics.

• Stress Reactivity
- when a child stress, the hypothalamus secretes a hormone that causes body to produce
cortisol.
• Cortisol
- a hormone that the body generates as a response to stress. Children differ in how easily this
stress response is activated, based on density of neurons and amount of chemicals in the brains.
These brain differences caused by adverse childhood experience (ACE).
• Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE)
- early toxic experience resulting in prolonged and intense stress , which leaves a mark on long
term brain architecture and well-being.
• Behavioral Inhibition
 - Overactive stress response may have behavioral inhibition or a tendency to avoid new people ,
events or objects. In behavioral inhibition is commonly called shyness.
- During mild stress, inhibited childrens heart’s speed up, their pupils dilate, their muscles tense,
and cortisol flows more than other childen’s do (Schmidt and Fox ,2002).
- Children with more right hemisphere activitiy tend to become inhibited toddlers who cry at a
separation from their mother,or shy older learners whose hearts pound when that have to
make class presentation ( Davidson, 2000or
- Children with more left activity tend to be outgoing. The left frontal lobe is involved in positive
emotions and approaching novel things.
- In summary, individual differences in brain function linked to intelligence, coping with stress
and greeting strangers, as well as many other outcomes.

Brain differences may come from:

 Genetics
- heritability presumably works through genetically caused brain differences.
 Experiences
- brain plasticity – the brains ability to change structure and functions as a result of experience.
What Predicts Individual Difference in Brain Development?
- Brain differences occur in Infancy and have a biological base. They may be caused by differences
in experience. The brain adapts to experience, so that experience becomes biology. Both nature
and nurture shape the brain development.

2-1d Classroom Implications of Brain Development

Some broad implications for your role as a teacher are:
• Provide optimal experiences for your learner’s because experiences alters the brain.
• Keep the brain well nourished.
• Reduce stress at school by creating nurturing and predictable environments.
• Give children repetitive practice by important skills in order to strengthen synaptic connections.

2-2 Growth and Motor Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood

Normal birth size range from 5-5 to 10 pounds. After birth, infants gain more than a pound a month. Birth
weight doubles by 5 months and height doubles by 3 or 4 years.

What do Individual Differences in Growth and Motor Skills or Predict?

• Motor , cognitive and social problems may occur together because they share ab underlying
neurological cause, such as the link between ADHD and motor skills.
• In addition, serious motor deltas can cause other delays because children learn about the world
through movement.
• Motor skills make it possible for children to connect with other people. Motor skills also make
possible other abilities
- like talking, reading and writing.
What Predicts Individual Differences in Growth and Motor Skills?
Factors that influence growth and motor development:
• Under nutrition
- Causes stunted growth and undermines brain development. Breast milk is the best nutrition for
infants and is related improved health and higher intelligence.
 - Infants may be born with low birth weight (LBW) for a variety of reasons, including mother’s
stress or drug use. LBW predicts developmental problems across childhood. These problems can
be reduced by high-quality parenting.
• Genes
- The biological process of transmission of physical characteristics from parents to children
through genes. It is strongly influences many aspects of the physical appearances of children
such as their height, weight, body structure, color of the eye, texture of the hair, and even the
intelligence and aptitude skills.
• Exercise
- Children are encouraged to participate in different physical activities as this will help them to
gain their muscular strength and put on bone mass.
- It has been observed that kids who engage in different physical activities, attain developmental
milestones on time or sooner.

2-2b Group Diversity in Growth and Motor Development

There are both gender and ethnic differences in growth and motor development.
• Gender
- Gender differences in growth begin before birth. At birth girl’s skeletons are 4 to 6 weeks
more mature than boys. Boys and girls then grow at similar rates until puberty, after which
dramatic differences in physical development occur and boys will grow more than girls.
- Scientist have discovered that as the brain re-organizes connections throughout our life, the
process begins earlier in girls which may explain why they mature faster during teenage
years.
• Ethnicity
- refers to the household members by blood and not by choice nor adoption/confirmation for
any ethnic group, primarily Indigenous peoples.
- -Brain development, growth and motor skills have a genetic component but are also
influenced by the quality of children’s experiences.
- -There are some ethnic differences have more advanced motor development up to 2 years
of age than White Children; thus, African Children walk earlier.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY AND TODDLERHOOD

Cognitive Development – means the orderly change across age in these mental process
Cognition – refers to mental processes like thinking, problem-solving, categorizing, and remembering.
Behaviorism – is the scientific study of overt, observable behavior. According to behaviorist, behavior is
learned. If the behavior does not change, the child has not learned.
Classical Conditioning – is often called Pavlovian conditioning after Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist who
won Noble Price in 1904. It starts with a stimulus that causes involuntary response without learning.
Explains some emotional response particularly fear and anxiety.
Operant Conditioning – refers to learning voluntary behavior through consequences, which are either
reinforcing or punishing. Operant Conditioning focuses on voluntary behavior like learning to walk or
learning to talk.

Reinforcement and Punishment

- Consequences that increase the probability of a behavior
Two types of Reinforcer
1. Positive Reinforcement – increases the possibility that a behavior will occur again by presenting a
consequence
For example: if the teens work hard on that project, they will receive good grades
2. Negative Reinforcement – means removing something. It also increases the probability that a
behavior will occur again by removing undesirable or aversive stimulus.
Example: When a toddler cries to get a cracker, a teacher may give it to them to escape crying.

Piaget believes that to understand children’s cognitive development, you must not only observe their
behavior but also consider why the child behaves that way.
Jean Piaget believes this Cognitive development happens in stages.
1. Sensorimotor (birth-2 years old) – it is the first phase of children’s cognitive development. During
this stage, children primarily learn about their environment through their sense and motor
activities.
2. Pre-operations (2-7 years old) – at the age of two, children enter the pre-operational stage, where
their ability to use mental representations, rather than the physical appearance of objects or
people, improves greatly.
3. Concrete Operation (7-11 years old) – during this stage, children are more capable of solving
problems because they can consider numerous outcomes and perspectives. All of their cognitive
abilities are better developed in this stage.
4. Formal Operations (11 years through adulthood) – during this stage, children are capable of
hypothetical-deductive reasoning, which allows them to hypotheses and draw conclusions from the
results.

INFORMATION PROCESSING IN INFANCY AND TODDLERHOOD

A. Components of the Information-Processing Model
Sensory Register – where initial stimuli from environment are briefly held
Long-term memory – permanent storage of information
Executive Memory – the brains control of an information processing
Working Memory – where items of information are temporarily held encoding or processing
Inhibitory Control – is the ability to keep from processing irrelevant information or to surprise a
response
B. Development of Information Processing
- Infants are born with rudimentary information
C. Individual Diversity in Information Processing
- Process that increases with age also vary from child to child
D. Memory
- Infants have some long-term memory
E. Reasoning and Problem-Solving
- Another cognitive skills infant begins to hone is reasoning. Reasoning is goal directed.
F. Habituation and Core Knowledge
- Habituation – a reduction in attention to repeatedly presented available stimulus. Which could
be a picture of a face.
- Dishabituation – when a different stimulus shown. The infant look longer when stimulus is
changed.
 - Core Knowledge – refers to innate ideas, or concept and principle that genetically program in
the human brain.

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY AND TODDLERHOOD

Language – is a collection of words or sign in systematic way to allow communicate with each other.
Nonverbal – does not involved word of speech, typically divided into receptive and expressive
 Receptive – refers to understanding others speech
 Expressive – refers to making one’s though know to others

A. Development of Language
- Children are born with preferences and capacities that help them develop language.
B. Language Learning is Remarkable
- To master language, young children must link word with object or events.
C. Individual Diversity in Language
- Some children have language delay, their developmental falls well outside of typical age trends
 Social Cognition – children use their social cognition to learn language
 Joint Cognition – is one of the types of social cognition in which child and caregiver look
together of an object and talk about it
 Theory of Mind – refers to the understanding that other people have mental state belief,
desires, knowledge and intention.
 Social Interaction – children with sensitive responsive nonintrusive parent acquired
language faster (Pungello, Iruka, 2009)
D. Group of Diversity
- There are group differences in nonverbal and verbal ability but they tend be smaller than
individual differences within groups
 Gender – girls generally have an advantage and language compared with boys (Morgan
et. al 2015)
 Socioeconomic status – low-SEC children tend to have a lower verbal ability than high-
SES children (Morgan et. al 2015)
E. Classroom Implications of Language
- Be responsible to children talk
- Read to children or encourage them to read to themselves

EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY AND TODDLERHOOD

Emotions – within seconds of birth, most babies will utter their first cry, letting us know they feel distress.
Their cry is beautiful music that tells parents and medical staff that the lungs are working.

What emotions do Infants and Toddlers have?

- Do Infants and Toddlers around the world experience the same emotions?

EARLY BASIC EMOTIONS

- More than a century ago, Charles Darwin noted that some emotion expressions are recognized
by people across the world. Carroll Izard (2007) took Darwin’s work a step farther and identified
six basic emotions that he claims are innate to the human’s species.
 Interest
 Joy/Happiness
 Sadness
  Anger
 Disgust
 Fear
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) – is among the most famous scientists in history. In 1872, 13 years after his
book The Origin of Species was published, he published a book about emotion expression. He took an
ethological perspective.
- In the 1960’s, Paul Ekman set out to prove that Darwin was wrong about universal emotional
expressions by studying an isolated people in Papa New Guinea (Ekman, 1973). To his surprise,
his work and that of later scientists largely confirmed Darwin’s views, though not entirely
(Barrett, 2006; Ekman, 2016; Hess & Thibault, 2009)
- Basic emotions occur rapidly and automatically; they may be built into the human species
because they promote the survival of infants. However, there is controversy over how many
different emotions actually exist. Some scientists would expand Izard’s list to include love, pride,
hope, gratitude, compassion, jealousy, and anxiety. Others would narrow the list to just a few
emotion dimensions, like positive versus negative, and high versus low activation (amount of
energy)

COMPLEX OF SOCIAL EMOTIONS

 Social Emotions – emerge during the toddler years. These include envy, embarrassment,
shame, guilt, and pride. Envy and embarrassment emerge between 15 and 24 months.
Shame, guilt, and pride emerge at about 30 to 36 months.
Four Cognitive Abilities in Children:
1. Awareness that they are a separate self from tehri attachment figures.
2. Awareness that rules exist.
3. Ability to evaluate their self against those rules.
4. Ability to judge whether they caused something.
Humor
- newborns sometimes grin, particularly in their sleep, but these grins do not have social
meaning. Their first truly social smile in which they convey warmth and happiness at interacting
with a person, occurs between 4 and 8 weeks of age. Laughter emerges at about 4 months of
age.
- Toddlers, who are beginning to use language, find word distortions amusing, like calling Daddy
“doodoo”.
What are the functions of emotions?
 They help to focus your attention, motivate you, and enable you to take action.
 Emotion help you communicate.
 The social emotions help you adhere to the norms of your social group.
Emotion Regulation in Infancy and Toddlerhood
 Infants cannot yet voluntarily control their emotions, but they do have a few basic
coping strategies for overwhelming situations.
 Children learn emotion regulation from caregivers during routine activities in infancy like
feeding, bathing, and playing.
 Toddlers have more control of their emotions than do Infants. This is due to brain
maturation that allows them to delay emotional responses and to shift between
emotions.
Understanding others’ emotions in Infancy and Toddlerhood
  Within the first months of life, Infants can distinguish different emotions like happiness
or sadness, from your face, tone of voice, and body movement (Zieber, Kangas, Hock,
and Bhatt, 2014).
Emotion Contagion – is present at birth. It occurs when the emotion of one person causes a similar
emotion in another person.
Mirror Neurons – one theory that some neurons respond the same whether you personally do something
or watch someone else do it – so scientist call them mirror neurons.
Social Referencing – refers to reading another person’s emotional expression to decide how you should
respond.

Classroom Implications of Emotions in Infancy and Toddlerhood

 Infants and Toddlers may need your help to regulate their emotions when they cry
intensely.
Attachment in Infancy and Toddlerhood
 Attachment – is a deep, enduring emotional bond between people (Ainsworth, 1973).
Typically, the most powerful attachments children have are with their parents. Parent-
child attachments forms the foundation for children’s personality and emotional well-
being.
What is the function of Attachment?
- Children go to them when upset, protest separation from them, and use them as a secure base
from which to explore the world.
Attachment serves two important functions:
1. It provides a safe haven from danger by keeping children close to an adult protector.
2. It provides a secure base for moving outward to explore the world.
Development of Attachment Behaviors in Infants and Toddlers
- Infants show attachments as they cling to caregivers when frightened or greet caregivers with
delight, like kicking excitedly when daddy smiles at them.
Individual Diversity in Attachment
- All typical children have attachment relationships; however, the quality of attachment varies.
Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) – using this, attachment can be classified as either secure or one
of three insecure types.

TYPES OF ATTACHMENT
1. Secure Attachment – freely explore the toys while their parent is present.
2. Avoidant Attachment – explore the room while ignoring their parent.
3. Resistant Attachment – hover near their parent, exploring very little.
4. Disorganized Attachment – are strongly conflicted by a desire to be with their parents and to avoid
them at the same time.

What do Individual differences in Attachment

- Attachment predicts many other outcomes as well. Two are important for how your learners
will fare throughout their schooling – academic achievements and social competence.
 Academic Achievement – secure toddlers are likely to become students who are curious,
have good verbal ability, and academic skills, and earn high grades.
 Social Competence – children learn behavior and emotional skills in parent-child
attachment that are applied to friendships and alter romantic relationships.
 Besides social competence and academic achievement, attachment quality predicts other
outcomes:
 Emotion regulation
 Emotional openness
 Stress
 Growth
 Compliance
 Independence
 ADHD
 Psychopathology and delinquency
 Attachment in adult romantic relationships

Sensitive and Supportiveness – sensitive and supportive parents are more likely to have secure children.
Sensitive parents respond with reassurance when their child is distressed.
Other parent behaviors – although parent sensitivity and supportiveness are considered key to secure
attachment, other behaviors are also important.
Improving Attachment – interventions that improve parents’ sensitivity also improve children’s security,
suggesting that parents’ sensitivity causes child attachment.
Attachment to father – most research has been on mother-child rather than father-child attachment.
Nevertheless, fathers are typically an important part of children’s attachment hierarchy.
Group Diversity in Attachment – there are few gender differences in attachment. The same factors –
parents’ sensitivity, supportiveness, warmth, and open communication – predict secure attachment in both
girls and boys.

Classroom Implications of Attachment

- There are differences in the quality of relationships between children and teachers, just as their
are with parents.
To promote a secure relationship with your learners, follow these guidelines (adapted from Bergin &
Bergin, 2009):
1. Be sensitive and have frequent positive interactions
2. Be responsive to children’s agenda by providing choices whenever possible
3. Use noncoercive discipline
4. Study this textbook carefully

TEMPERAMENT AND PERSONALITY IN INFANCY AND TODDLERHOOD

Temperament – refers to individual difference children have in the intensity and pattern of their reaction
to their environment.
FOUR TRAITS IN TEMPERAMENT
1. Activity – which refers to how children move.
2. Effortful control – which refers to how children can control attention and behavior, such as
inhibiting impulse, concentrating, following instructions, and resisting distraction.
3. Negative emotionality – which refers to follow easily children become irritated, angry, or scared.
4. Behavior inhibition – inhibited children, react strongly to potential threats.
Personality – refers to enduring behavior and traits and can be thought of as a hierarchy.
PERSONALITY TRAITS THEY ARE KNOWN AS THE FIVE FACTOR MODER
1. Openness to experience – a personality trait that includes curiosity, exploration, imaginative,
dreaming, creativeness, good self-expression, and being smart.
2. Conscientiousness – a personality trait that contrasted which lack of direction. It includes getting
things done, not give up easily, being dependable, planning ahead, and orderliness.
3. Extraversion – a personality trait contrasted with social inhibition. It includes high energy,
talkativeness and being fast-paced, and full of life.
4. Agreeableness – a personality trait contrasted with antagonism. It includes thoughtfulness, warmth,
kindness, cooperation, and getting along with and pleasing others.
5. Neuroticism – a personality trait contrasted with emotional stability. It includes nervousness, worry,
falling apart under stress, insecurity, and needing reassurance.
PERSONALITY TYPES
- The most commonly identified in children are resilient, over-controlled, and under-controlled
types.
1. Resilient – a personality type characterized by very high levels of openness and conscientiousness,
above average levels of extraversion and agreeableness, and very low level of neuroticism.
2. Over-controlled – a non-resilient personality type characterized by high agreeableness and
neuroticism, and particularly low extraversion.
3. Under-controlled – a non-resilient personality type characterized by particularly low agreeableness
and conscientiousness, and also low-average neuroticism and openness.

Development of Temperament and Personality

Personality types by personality traits
Personality type Resilient Over-controlled Under-controlled

Percentage of children 50-70% 10-30% 20-30%

Big Five Traits High openness Low extraversion High extraversion
High conscientiousness High agreeableness Low agreeableness
Low neuroticism High neuroticism Low conscientiousness

Other traits Confident, competent, Helpful, obedient, well Energetic, restless,

verbally fluent, focused, liked, quiet, inhibited, antisocial, impulsive,
reasonable, compliant, compliant, and active, cheerful,
and helpful. Not fearful indecisive. Not indecisive, assertive,
or anxious aggressive, assertive, or and unable to
competitive. concentrate.

Individual Diversity in Temperament and Personality

- Thomas and Chess believed that temperament has a large effect on children long term
adjustment
How stable are Individual Difference in Temperament and Personality?
- Individual difference in temperament and personality in infancy and toddlerhood are generally
quiet stable overtime.
How stable is Personality across situations?
- Would you be surprised to find that a timid child in your classroom is bossy at home with
siblings? An individual personality can be change from situation to situation.
What do Temperament and Personality predict?
- Temperament can predict a child’s natural reactions to different situations, such as how active
they are, how easily they get frustrated, and how intense their emotions are. Personality, on the
other hand, can predict a child’s overall behavior, including their social skills, communication
style, decision-making abilities, and leadership style.
Academic Achievement – effortful control the foundation of consciousness predicts literacy and math skills
as early as 3 to 6 years old.

Gender Diversity in Temperament and Personality

- Have you heard others claiming that there are group differences in personality, like boys are
more active than girls.

Classroom Implications of Temperament and Personality

- The personality of your learners can have large effect on their success in your classroom.
Three other Approaches you can take:
1. Change how you view the learners – two adults can view the same child very differently. Research
on parents indicates that perception of their child’s temperament reflects their own working
models.
2. Try to make your classroom a better fit for the learners – personality can change across situations.
A learners can be open, agreeable, and conscientiousness in one teacher’s room, but not in another
teacher’s room. Different teachers may evoke different personality traits in the same learners
because one teacher has good fit and one does not.
Good fit for shy learners:
1. Avoid confusing shyness with low ability or low self-esteem
2. Avoid confusing shyness with poor social and emotional skills
3. Reduce shy learners stress by giving them repeated exposure to a new task and situation
3. Change the learner’s personality – some personalities are not well suited to school setting and are
linked to low achievement

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY AND TODDLERHOOD

5-3 Group Diversity in Family Structure
- There are gender differences in how children respond to family structure. There are also SES 
and ethnic differences in the prevalence of each family structure. 
Gender – both boys and girls have higher achievements and fewer externalizing  or internalizing problems
in nuclear families than in single-parent, divorced, and stepfamilies (Sun & Li, 2001) 
Socioeconomic status – SES in the linked to family structure. College-educated married couples are less
likely to divorce than less- educated couples (Aughinbaugh, Robles, & Sun, 2013, Martin, 2006) 
Ethnicity – family structure varies by ethnic group. Asian American children are the most likely to live in a
nuclear family (Vespa et al., 2013) 
- About 16% Asian/Pacific Islander children born to unmarried mothers 
- 36% of white 
- 53% of Hispanic children (Hamilton, Martin, Osterman Curtin, 7 Matthews, 2015) 

5-3 Classroom Implications of Family Structure and Parent Involvement

- Family structure is linked to later success in school. Learners in nuclear families and to have
greater academics and social success compared to learners in other family structure. 
 - Helps learners develop strong pre-academic skills like a good vocabulary so that they will later
experience success in the classroom.
- Teach children how to regulate their negative emotions. 

5-4 Maternal Employment and Child Care

- women at all income level work-full or part- time or stay home their children. 
 

5-4a Maternal Employment

- research on maternal employment shows that child outcomes, such as good language depends
on the situation 
5-4b Child Care-  what are the facts of Child care? 
- Like maternal employment, it depends to understand the research you need to see how child
care varies by type, amount and quality. 
Individual Differences in Child Care 
- Type, amount, and quality of child care by age, as do outcomes linked to child care. 
 
Language and Cognitive Development 
- Type of care is linked to language and cognitive development children tend to have better
language and cognitive skills in center-based care than in home-based care, but only if the
program has well-educated staff (Belsky, Bakermans, Kranenburg, & et al.) 
 
Attachments – Children in all societies are cared by multiple attachments figures. Typically, attachments
figures are stable and readibly available.  
Stress – Bowiby believed that infants separated from their mother would feel stress no matter how well
they were cared for. 
Social Competence – Centered-based care become more socially competent because they have
opportunity to play with peers. 
Play – type and quality of care are linked to play. Children in high- quality care are more likely to play in
advanced ways than children in low- quality care (Kaspa, Mc William, & Maher- Ridley, 2001). 
Gender – most studies find that maternal employment predicts similar outcomes for boys and girls, but
when gender differences are found, they favor girls ( Goldberg et al., 2008) 
 
5-4c Classroom Implications of Maternal Employment and Child Care 
- The quality of relationship you have with children may be more important than the quality of
instructional you use. 

MIDTERM
PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT AND HEALTH IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
Brain Development in Early Childhood
- Meeting the needs of one part of the body, the brain – is especially important because the brain
regulates the brain learning, behavior and other physical functions.
2 Important Development in the Brain during Early Childhood
1. Glucose Consumption – at birth, the brain’s glucose consumption is relatively low (Chugani, 1998)
2. Prefrontal Cortex – become more interconnected, linked to young children’s increasing ability to
follow rules, sit still and raise their hands during group time (Bunge)
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Theorist: Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
- He developed the Hierarchy of Needs basic to all humans, according to him each level needs to
be met before the next one can be attained.
- Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is usually portrayed like a pyramid.
Level 1: Physiological Needs – these factors affect the way young humans grow, develop and learn.
Level 2: Safety and Security Needs – children must be safe and secure before they are ready to engage in
activities in the classroom.
Level 3: Belongingness and Love Needs – the need for emotional security is almost as critical for survival as
food and shelter.
Level 4: Self-esteem Needs – a unique aspect of humans is the need for approval and recognition
Level 5: Need to Know and Understand – involve comprehending the concepts, ideas, or processes
involved and being able to use this knowledge effectively.
Level 6: Aesthetic Needs – when all the all-other levels are met, human seek beauty, truth, and justice.
Level 7: Self-actualization – toward which all humans, are striving, but few such as exemplary individuals
like, Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Individual Diversity and Brain Plasticity

Plasticity – means that something is easily changed or molded. It begins to be lost at about 10 years of age.
- The plasticity of children’s brain may help them learn subjects like Algebra or second language
more differently that adults (Luna, 2004)
Premotor cortex – a crucial part of the brain which is believed to have direct control over the movement of
voluntary muscles.
 Premotor cortex Dorsal – plays a role reaching and action selection
 Premotor cortex Ventral – grasping and object manipulation
Motor cortex – generate signals to direct the movement of the body
Frontal cortex – voluntary movements, expressive language and for managing higher level of executive
function.
BIOLOGICAL FACTORS THAT SHAPE THE BRAIN SOCIAL FACTORS THAT SHAPE THE BRAIN
Exercise Family
Nutrition Environment
Sleep
Drug Abuse

Classroom Implications of Brain Development

- Early Childhood Education has rightfully benefited from media attention on early brain
development and the push to provide quality programs for young children.
Sensitive period – a biologically determined time period, typically early life in which a child reading
develops specific abilities.
Preschoolers – are capable of learning skills in language, mathematics, music, and art when taught in
Developmentally Appropriate ways.

Growth and Motor Development in Early Childhood

 - The rate of growth changes with age. The U.S Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
publishes growth charts indicating average height and weight at each age.
Growth – refers to changes in height, weight, and body composition.
 Motor Development – refers to changes in control and proficiency in movement.
 Fine motor skills – involve small muscle movement, like picking a bean.
 Gross motor skills – involve large muscle movements, like walking or throwing.
FUN FACT: Most children double their birth height by ages 3 to 4. That is, a tall 4-year-old will likely
become tall adults. However, the most dramatic motor development may be in the quality of walking.

Individual Diversity in Growth and Motor Skills

Parent-child-relationship – also affects physical development.
Johns Hopkins – a physician that studies the parent-child factors on child’s development.
- Most of the children’s parents have an abused in alcohol, were promiscuous, and quarreled.
Sample Basis on Parent-child relationship factor in Growth and Motor Skills:
 Delayed speech
 Delayed walking
 Protruding stomachs
 Height huge deficit
Low quality parenting is a key cause of nonorganic failure to thrive. Children who have this condition may
bcatch up to peers mentally once they begin school, but usually remain physically small (Boddy, Skuse, and
Andrews 2000)

Classroom Implications of Growth and Motor Development

Several ways to help students be physically healthy:
 One is to prevent the school climate from becoming stressful to children
 Promote good nutrition
 Encourage physical activity at school
In-School Nutrition
- Since 1946, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has provided cash subsidies to school and
childcare centers to feed low-income children. In 2012, the National School lunch program
provided free or low-income cost breakfast to 12 million and low-cost lunch to 31 million
children.
- This is because research suggests that school nutrition affects learning for low-income children,
as such increasing their test scores (Weaver-Heightower, 2011)

Physical Activity at School

- In preschoolers, children tend to be sedentary even outdoors they may be vigorously active only
a small percentage of the time (Brown et. al 2009). Thus, many preschoolers are remarkably
sedentary at school.

Ways To Help Students/Children Get Active:

 Give children balls and plenty of space for vigorous physical activity.
 Let the children initiate their own play.
 If they are not active, you may need to initiate games for them that involve running,
jumping, and climbing
 Motor Skills in the Classroom
- Movement can support learning
- Good motor skills help learners to be more successful in school
Furthermore, most classroom learning is measured with motor outputs, such as writing, playing and
instrument, making an art project, or using a keyboard.

Negative Effect of Having Poor Motor Skills

 Clumsy
 Disorganized
 Poor writings
 Slow learners
 Language problem
 Social problem
Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (PL 101-476), children with physical difficulties are to
be educated in the least restrictive environment.

PIAGET’S COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT THEORY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

The Preoperational Stage (Ages 2 through 7)
 Operations – according to Piaget, mental actions or manipulations that follow rules.
 Animism – the attribution of lifelike qualities, like intention, to non-living, inanimate
objects.
 Hierarchical Classification – the ability to classify or place objects into superordinate and
subordinate categories.
 Egocentrism – the tendency to see the world from your own point of view while failing
to see other people’s point of view.
 Collective Monologues – children appear to be conversing with one another but are
really not addressing thought or adapting speech to their conversation partners.
 Center or centration – the child focuses on one aspect of a task to the exclusion of other
aspects.
 Decenter – the ability to think about multiple aspects of a task simultaneously.
 Reverse Operation – the ability to mentally reverse or negate an operation.

Advances in Knowledge since Piaget

 Underestimation of Abilities – underestimating the cognitive abilities of young children.
 Primacy of Language – children begin to learn a language. Often learn words through
clues from the context.
Classroom Implications of Cognitive Development Theory
 School Readiness – Piaget believed that little can be done to accelerate development
because each child has a biologically based rate of transition from one stage to the next.
 Developmentally Appropriate Practice – another concept that was influenced by
Piaget’s theory is developmentally appropriate practice (DAP), which is an approach to
educating children from birth to age 8 that emphasizes the child as an active participant
in learning, not just a passive receiver of knowledge.

VYGOTSKY’S SOCIO-CULTURAL THEORY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

The Role of Social Interaction
- According to Vygotsky, children grow into the intellectual life of those around them. Vygotsky
wrote “Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level
and later, on the individual level; first between people (Interpsychological) and then inside the
child (Intrapsychological).
Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
- Is the level of competence between what a learner can do alone and what he/she can do with
assistance.
- Example: Darius’s learning to count objects occurred in his zone of proximal development.
Without Ms. Kelly’s assistance, he experienced failure. Yet, with a little help he was successful.
Scaffolding – refers to a method where the teachers offer a particular kind of support to students as they
learn and develop a new concept or skill.
Language – one of the most important tools of any culture because it provides an extremely efficient
means of learning.
Private Speech – refers to talking to oneself out loud, partially out loud like mouthing words, whispering,
or silently in one’s mind.

Diversity in Socio-Cultural Theory

- According to Vygotsky, what a child learns is determined by the culture in which the lives. That
is, children, learn what is valued in their culture. Such as how to grow crops, compute algebra or
recite poems.
- The tools children have available for thinking are determined by their culture.
Cultural Tools – these are concrete objects and symbolic tools that allow members of a culture to
think, record, problem-solving, and communicate.
- Example of concrete objects: Ruler, books, or computer.

Classroom Implications of Information Processing

- There are 4 general implications of Vygotsky’s perspective on cognitive development for your
role as a teacher.
1. Use language as a tool to help learners organize their thoughts to consolidate memories. Private
speech should be tolerated and encouraged, particularly for young children or during difficult
problem solving in older students.
2. Teach learners in their zone of proximal development, using appropriate scaffolding. It is not easy
to determine each learner’s ZPD, and it is a moving target, always changing. It takes attention and
insights on the part of teacher to continually adjust to each learner’s abilities.
3. Help learners actively observe and participate in activities with adults and peers through
apprenticeship and guided participation. In an apprenticeship, novice develop competence through
interaction with more expert person who guides or scaffold participation in developing activity.
4. Work together as a community of learners in which everyone contributes to the learning process.

Information Processing in Early Childhood

 Executive Functions – it includes working memory and inhibitory control. Two additional
executive functions are cognitive flexibility and meta cognition.
 Cognitive Flexibility – also called (attentive shifting). Is the ability to change how you
think about something, switch perspectives, and adjust to changing demands.
Cognitive flexibility supports creativity and problem-solving.
  Metacognition – refers to knowledge of your own learning process and how to
regulate them.
2 Types of Metacognition
 Metacomprehension – refers to judging when you have understood
something.
 Metamemory – refers to what you know about your own memory and how
to retrieve information from it.

Development of Information Processing

- An approach to cognitive development studies that aims to explain how’s information is
encoded to memory.
Individuals Diversity in Information Processing
- Some learners process information faster and have better executive functions than some age
peers.
- The individual differences of information processing apparent in infancy and that the age gap
information processing gets wider from preschool through adolescence.
Memory – is a replica of an object, event, or experience. Also, the process of taking in information from
the world around us, processing it, storing it and late recalling that information sometimes many years
later.
2 Types of Memories:
 Verbatim traces – detailed accurate memories
 Fuzzy traces – which are general, vague memories or the gist of experience

There are 3 reasons learners forget things:

1. Decay – the memory decay over time and loses strength if it is not used.
2. Retrieval Failure – learners may know something but then go blank when asked. They cannot
retrieve the information when they need it.
3. Interference – new knowledge can make retrieval of old knowledge difficult and vice versa.

Reasoning and Problem-Solving

2 Types of Reasoning:
 Inductive Reasoning – refers to making generalizations from observed examples, than they were at
earlier ages.
 Deductive Reasoning – deduction is a form of reasoning in which conclusion follows logically from a
set of premises.
Problem Solving – problem solving and critical thinking are among the most crucial skills a child can learn.
They provide children with the foundation for decision making, logical reasoning, categorizing, analytical
thinking, negotiation and creativity.

Classroom Implications of Information Processing

- Information processing ability affects learner’s success in your classroom. Academic task such as
learning to connect squiggles on a page with words that have meanings require strong
information processing. Children tend to have a low achievement, is outlined that is poverty
may reduce quality of parenting due to stress and limited resources, which compromise
executive functions in children, which interferes with academic achievement.
Reduce Working Memory and Executive Load
 1. Limit your talking – if you keep talking after presenting important information, it will be forgotten.
Present information at a speed that allows learners to fully process it.
2. Help learners practice using their executive functions through mundane – daily activities like
requiring them to sit up straight or persist in activities even when they want to stop.
3. Help young children improve their verbal abilities, which are linked to executive functions. Using
self talk helps children regulated their thoughts and attention.
4. Ask learners to think about their thinking or practice metacognition, with questions such as, “How
did you know? Have you improved your thinking about math or science? What did you learn from
doing this work?
LANGUAGE AND LITERACY DEVELOPMENT
5 Components of Verbal Language
1. Phonemes – a basic unit of language distinguishing one word from another
 Phonological Awareness – the ability to identify phonemes or the sound structure of
language.
2. Morphemes – the smallest unit of language that contains meaning. It includes word roots, suffixes,
and prefixes.
3. Semantics – the study of meaning in language.
4. Syntax – the way words are organized into phrases and sentences in a language.
5. Pragmatics – the study of how language is used in social context.

Standard English (SE) – the form of English used in classroom instruction and textbooks sometimes called
School English.
African American English (AAE) – a dialect of English spoken predominantly by African Americans
sometimes called Ebonics of Black English.
Code Switching – using different language varieties for different situations, such as Standard English at
school and African American English at home.
Bilingual – the ability to speak two languages fluently.
English Language Learners (ELL) – a student whose first language is not English and who is less than
proficient in English.
Bilingual Education – instruction that is provided in more than one language.
Additive Bilingualism – acquiring a second language while still maintain and valuing the heritage language.
Subtractive Bilingualism – acquiring a second, majority language in a way that undermines ability in the
heritage language.
Expository Talk – formal, precise talk that is used to display information, in contrast to conversational talk.

Putting the Theories to Work: The Case of Mathematics

Informal Math
- Preschoolers understand that adding to a set produces more and taking away produces less.
- They also can tell which quantities are larger.
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development and Math
- Children construct knowledge.
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory and Math
- Social interaction is an important source of knowledge.

EMOTIONS IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Development in Emotion Regulation
• Preschoolers compared to toddlers, are increasingly able to regulate their own emotions without
adult help. As a result, negativity levels off or decreases from age 2 to age 5 (Lipscomb et al.,2011).
However, preschoolers occasionally have breakdowns in emotion regulation, particularly if they are
tired, stressed, or hungry.
• Roughly 80% of preschoolers may have tantrums in any given month, but daily tantrums are not
typical (Wakschlag et al.,2012). Tantrums continue to abate and then disappear between ages 3 to 5.
• Preschoolers compared to toddlers, have more emerging coping strategies. As young as age 3 or 4,
children understand that coping strategies help them regulate emotions.
• Preschoolers also become better at emotional dissemblance, but their ability is still limited.
• They may choose to cry after an injury if a caregiver is watching, but not if they are alone.
• Preschoolers can “fake a smile”.

Development in Understanding Other’s Emotions

• By age 3, most children talk about consequences and causes of emotions.
• By age 4, children know what emotions are typical of common situations such as feeling happy if you
get a treat (Bamford & Lagattuta, 2012).
• By age 5, but seldom younger, children understand that victims forgive others more if transgressors
expresses guilt, indicating children understand the social function of guilt (Vaish,
Carpenter,&Tomasello, 2011).
• Preschoolers are not always accurate in their judgement about guilt.
• This inability to judge guilt may lead preschoolers to feel guilty for events that are not their fault such
as their parents’ divorce, making them vulnerable to unrealistic expectations or misplaced blame.
• Preschoolers growing ability to understand emotions allows them to use social referencing frequently.
• Social referencing refers to reading another persons’ emotional expression to decide how you should
respond.

What can you do to promote emotional competence among young learners?

A powerful approach is to create a positive classroom climate where teachers and children had good
relationships, enjoyed being together, and seldom were negative with each other. Two key ingredients of a
positive climate are humor and teacher- child attachment.
8-1c Development in Humor
What is Humor?
• Humor is a kind of social- cognitive play that produces the emotion of amusement, accompanied by
smiling or laughing.
• Humor can be intentional or accidental. It can be verbal like a joke, pun , or witticism, or non verbal
like a funny face.
• Not all smiles or laughs are caused by humor. In fact, most laughter occurs during day-to-day social
interaction.
• Only about 15% of laughter occurs in response to humor or joke. Thus, laughter helps create positive
feelings between people, in addition to being a response to humor.

Causes and Functions of Humor

• One causes of humor is processing information with one interpretation, encountering incongruent
information, and then rapidly reinterpreting it.
• Playful teasing is a type of humor that is pervasive in social interactions and promotes happiness and
social bonding.

What Do Preschoolers Find Funny?

• Children produce and appreciate humor that is neither too easy nor too difficult for them to
understand. When they have just mastered a concept, they enjoy jokes about it.
• From 3 to 5 years, children find incongruities in appearances and distortion of the physical world
humorous, like a cow brushing its teeth or rabbit ears on a child. Preschoolers are more likely to laugh
at their own spontaneous distortions than others’ distortions (Bariaud, 2013).
• By age 4, children may begin to intentionally draw funny pictures. Like toddlers, they find word
distortions funny as they are mastering language.
• Unfortunately for teachers and parents, “poop”- oriented jokes emerge, and preschoolers find games
involving “tricking” delightfully fun as their burgeoning people - reading skills.

What Predicts Individual Differences in Humor?

Two factors might lead some learners to have a better sense of humor:
• Information- processing ability
- People reading ability is required for jokes involving others’ mental states. Knowledge of one’s culture is
required for puns, jokes with hidden meanings.
(Humor is often delayed in learners with delayed cognitive abilities. In contrast, cognitively advanced
learners tend to have advanced humor.)
• Creativity
- Humor is linked to creativity because humor is triggered by incongruity, like seeing an idea or object out
of its normal place or seeing something familiar with new eyes. Generating this incongruity is a creative
activity, a type of mental gymnastics.

Box 8.1 Theories & Theorists

Sigmund Freud( 1856-1939)
• Famous theorist in history among Darwin and Skinner
• He was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a Jewish family.
• In 1938, he fled to London, where he died as World War II was beginning. He was an obsessive smoker
who suffered from mouth cancer, which was linked to his death.
• Freud emphasized the power of unconsciousness feelings and that dreams have meaning.
• He developed a form of therapy, psychoanalysis, which is widely used today.
• Freud devised a model of the psyche with three components: the ID, EGO, and SUPER-EGO.
ID- is present at birth and consists of drivers that seek pleasure, which attempts for immediate satisfaction
of desires and needs.
EGO- a component of personality in charge of dealing with reality and seeks to control the id.
SUPER-EGO- is the conscience (doing what is right) that castigates the ego for failing to control the id.
• He believed jokes, like dreams, have hidden meaning and allow people to express forbidden feelings.
• He believed emotions and attachment are the basis of morality.

8-2 Attachment and Sense of Self in Early Childhood

• The Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) can be used to identify four types of attachment in
preschoolers (secure, avoidant, resistant, and disorganized). Secure teacher- child relationships
predict child outcomes more than other aspects of the preschool classroom.
8-2a Self- Assessment
• Young children tend to be overly optimistic in their self- assessment, particularly about their abilities
(Davis-Kean, Jager,& Collins, 2009). Every preschoolers may think that he or she is the best player on a
soccer team or she is the smartest in a classroom.
• Preschoolers’ self assessment is optimistic due to poor social comparison skills.
8-2b Gender Identity
• Preschoolers learn to label gender and develop gender constancy.
• Gender is a fundamental part of someone’s identity and is constant across time and situations for
most people.
• Children become gender detectives, seeking out same- gender activities and friends.
• Gender stereotypes begin in the toddler years, as early as an 18 months, children judge which toys are
for boys and which are for girls.
• However, preschoolers hold stronger gender stereotypes than toddlers. They describe girls as nice,
wearing frilly things, and liking dolls, whereas they describe boys as having short hair, playing active
games, and being rough.
• In kindergarten, children tend to be quite rigid about their stereotypes, such as saying, only girls can
play with dolls, and they become biased toward seeing their own sex as best.

8-2c Ethnic Identity

• Children’s developing ethnic identity parallels development in gender identity.
• Children age 2 and 4 years share toys equally with same-race and other-race peers and show no
preference when choosing a playmate.
• However, children age 4 to 5 years, they show a clear preference for their own ethnic or racial group,
just as they prefer their own gender at this age.
• Preschoolers as young age as 3 categorize people into in- and out- groups, and attach stereotypes to
the groups. Children’s racial prejudice begins between ages 3 and 6, peaks about ages 5 to 7, and then
declines slightly.

SELF-CONTROL IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Self-control
- The ability to control one’s own behavior and emotions inhibited inappropriate action, and
focus attention.
- Children with self-control are also able to regulate their emotions and behave in socially
acceptable way whether they are provoked.
Delay of gratification
- An aspect of self-control in which children delay what they desire right now in order to get
something more desirable later.
 Individual Diversity in Self-Control
Stability across time
- Ability to pay attention and resist impulses is a relatively stable trait.
Stability across situations
- Self-control varies depending on the situation
- It is easier for learners to inhibit their impulses if their attention is diverted from temptation.

Academic achievement
- Learners of all ages who have self-control tend to have higher academic achievement, probably
because they have less trouble paying attention, staying on task, and ignoring distractions.
Social competence
- Learners with high self-control may also have higher achievement because they tend to be less
aggressive and less prone to behavior problems at school than learners with low self-control.
Cognitive abilities – intelligence and inhibitory control
- Children with high IQs are more likely to wait for larger, delayed rewards to choose smaller,
immediate rewards.
Attachment
- Children who have a secure attachment and who have mothers who are sensitive and positive
are more likely to develop high self-control compared with secure children.
- Difficult infants who are quick to become angry grow into toddlers with poor self-control if their
mothers are relatively insensitive, but if their mothers are sensitively responsive toddlers grow
into exceptionally good with self-control.
Practice and Failure
- Every child’s self-control has limits, just as yours does.

Group Diversity in Self-Control

- There are both gender and differences in self-control. As early as pre-school, girls tend to have
more self-control than boys. (Duckworth & Seligman, 2006)
- There are also cultural differences in one aspect of self-control, which is conformity to
authority, rules, and peer pressure.
- Asian cultures value more conformity than U.S culture does.
- Children who emigrate from Asian countries or children with a cultural heritage that values
conformity report greater respect for parental authority and less expectation for making their
own decisions than European American youth.

Classroom Implications of Self-Control

1. Teach children to look directly at you during whole-group activities.
2. Reduce distractions and interruptions.
3. Exercise learners’ self-control, like a muscle, but without fatiguing it

Effective Discipline – refers to attempts to correct misbehavior; it is a subject of classroom management.

The Goal of Discipline
 Internalization – the child adopts the adult’s values and rules as his or her own guide for
behavior.
- The child complies or behaves appropriately without being monitored
  Committed compliance – children accept the authority figure’s agenda as their own.
 Situational compliance – children comply with demands, but lack sincere commitment
and require sustained control by the authority figure.

Responses to Discipline
1. Compliance
2. Direct defiance or refusal
3. Passive noncompliance
4. Negotiation

Types of Discipline
 Introduction – a form of discipline in which the adult gives the child a reason for why
behavior must change or a rule must be complied with.
 Psychological control – a coercive form discipline in which the adult attempts to control
the child’s behavior by including guilt or fear of loss of love and affirmation.
 Power Assertion – a coercive form of discipline in which the adult controls the child’s
behavior by virtue of greater power or resources. It often includes an “or else” clause.
Costs of Power Assertion
• Children become less compliant.
• Children do not internalize values.
• Children resent the disciplinarian.
• Children need more and more coercion.
• Children imitate the aggression of power-assertive adult models
 Corporal Punishment – power-assertive discipline that involves bodily harm to the child,
ranging in severity from light spanking to abuse.

Group Diversity in Discipline

Socio-economic status – research consistency shows that low-SES children are more likely than high-SES
children to experience and approve of power assertive or harsh discipline at home, including corporal
punishment.
Ethnicity – rules about how children should behave during discipline encounters may vary by ethnicity.

Classroom Implications of Discipline

Behavior Modification – operant conditioning used to change human behaviour, frequently applied in
special education classrooms. Token economies may be used for reinforcement.
Applied Behavior Analysis – controlled application of behaviorist principles to experimentally alter
behavior. Overlaps with behavior modification.
Classroom Management – all aspects of managing the classroom, including, but not limited to, discipline.
- Skillful classroom management can reduce the need for discipline by preventing misbehavior
before it happens.

8- TEACHING SELF-CONTROL: WHAT PARENTING STYLES TELLS US

8-5a FOUR STYLES OF PARENTING
Parenting style is defined primarily by two dimensions: (1) the degree to which parents are warm,
accepting and responsive toward their children; and (2) the degree to which parents are controlling and
demand mature behavior of their children ( Maccoby and Martin, 1983). "Controlling" is mistakenly think
as always negative, such as when parents are intrusive or domineering. However, it also refers to positive
control such as guidance, firmness, and structure (Grolnick & Pomerant2, 2009). Four parenting styles have
been identified based on whether parents are high or low on the two dimensions.

1. Indifferent Style
- Indifferent parents are low on both control and acceptance. They do not set rules for their
children, nor do they show much affection, support, or responsiveness. They are self-rather
than child-centered. Also called as neglectful or uninvolved. Children of indifferent parents tend
to have the lowest self-control and poorest academic performance of the four groups. They are
more likely to be obese (Kak-inami, Barnett, Séguin, & Paradis, 2015). As teens they are the
most likely to engage in delinquent behavior.

2. Indulgent Style
- Indulgent, or permissive, parents are high on acceptance and responsiveness, but low on
control of their children. They have few rules governing their children's schedules, like regular
mealtimes or bedtime. They seldom discipline and avoid asserting authority or imposing
restrictions on their child. Children of indulgent parents have relatively low self-control and
poor academic performance (Clark et al., 2015; Durbin, Darling, Steinberg, & Brown, 1993;
Steinberg & Silk, 2002). They are also likely to be delinquent and peer-oriented.

3. Authoritarian Style
- Authoritarian parents are high on control of their children, but low on acceptance and
responsiveness to the child's agenda. In authoritarian households, rules are not discussed or
negotiated; in fact, negotiation with children is often viewed as a threat to the parent's
authority. Authoritarian parents do not welcome input from their children or give reasons why
something should be done. They use phrases like "Because I say so." Authoritarian parents tend
to be more punitive than other parents and use power-assertive discipline (Maccoby & Martin,
1983). Children of authoritarian parents are somewhat obedient and often conform to rules set
for them. They have been pressured into obedience but may misbehave when the pressure is
absent or they get older. They perform adequately in school and also are more likely to be
obese (Kakinami et al., 2015).

4. Authoritative Style
- Authoritative parents are high on both acceptance and control of their children. A key attribute
of authoritative parents is that they support autonomy in their children (Steinberg & Silk, 2002).
They do so by having clear standards and high expectations for mature, polite behavior, but
without taking away choice (Grolnick, 2003). They firmly enforce rules, using commands and
sanctions when necessary, but give reasons for their decisions. However, there is also open
communication between parents and children. with encouragement of verbal give and take.
Authoritative parents are interested in what their children have to say. Although children are
required to be responsive to parental demands, parents are as responsive as possible to their
children's reasonable demands and points of view (Maccoby & Martin, 1983). Children of
authoritative parents tend to have the highest self-control of the four groups. They tend to be
 securely attached (Karavasilis, Doyle, & Markiewick, 2003). They also tend to be highest in self-
esteem, social competence, and academic achievement (Fletcher et al., 2008; Padilla-Walker,
Carlo, Christensen, & Yorgason, 2012; Spera, 2005; Steinberg et al., 2006.)

There are four possible reasons for positive child outcomes of authoritative parenting:
• Authoritative parents tend to use inductive discipline, which promotes self-control. Furthermore,
parents who use induction typically remain in control of themselves when disciplining their
children, which serves as a model for the child.
• Authoritative parents' warmth and respect for their children's views makes the children more
willing to adopt their parents' views.
• Authoritative parents are very clear about rules or standards for behavior, so children know how to
behave in a variety of situations.
• Authoritative parents permit negotiation and compromise, when appropriate, which fosters their
children's development of these important social skills, even in very young children (Kuezynski &
Kochanska, 1990).

8-5b GROUP DIVERSITY IN PARENTING STYLE

Parenting style is associated with:
• Religion
• socioeconomic status
• family structure
• ethnicity

Authoritative parents are also more likely to be middle class than working class or impoverished and more
likely to be middle class than working class or impoverished and more likely to be part of an intact family
than of a single-parent family or stepfamily (Carlson, Uppal, & Prosser, 2000; Deater-Deckard, 2000).
Parents who lack a stable relationship, adequate income, and social support may find it more difficult to be
authoritative.

8-5c CLASSROOM IMPLICATIONS OF PARENTING STYLE

Discipline depends on whether it takes place within the context of a warm adult-child relationship. It also
applies to teaching as well. As a teacher, we promote or undermine learners' self-control through the way
you discipline them and through your interaction style. Induction and authoritative teaching style promote
self-control.

THEORY OF MIND
Theory of Mind – refers to the understanding that other people have mental state desires, knowledge, and
intentions that are different from our own and to the ability to infer or figure our others mental state.
• Simple definition of theory of mind is” people reading”. It is a “ theory” because it helps children
explain and predict others behavior.
• Theory of mind makes it possible to learn from others, which is essential according to Vygotsky’s
sociocultural theory.
Autism – is a condition characterized by abnormal social cognitive. There is a wide spectrum of functioning
among children with autism, so it is referred to as autism spectrum disorder ( ASD).
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) – conditions characterized by a continuum of markedly abnormal social
interaction, poor language ability, and restricted, repetitive behavior patterns. It commonly occurs with
low cognitive ability.
Autism and theory of mind – children with autism, regardless of cognitive ability. Children are not
motivated to communicate with others, which could explain why children with autism have language
delays.
THEORY OF MIND
 Preschoolers develop better language skills, which helps them converse about others
mental states.
 Preschoolers also develop dramatically better executive functions as the prefrontal
cortex of the brain matures, so that they are better able to think about the false- belief
test.

INDIVIDUAL DIVERSITY IN THEORY OF MIND

What Predicts Individual Differences in Theory of Mind?
 Genes may play a small role in ToM ability, probably through their influence on
information processing and verbal ability.
Information processing – children who have better executive functions especially inhibitory control and
greater working memory capacity, have better ToM.
 Greater working memory capacity helps children keep all this relevant information in
mind at once.
Verbal ability – is strongly related to whether children pass false belief tests. The relationship. This means
that good verbal ability predicts children’s ToM ability, and that ToM ability predicts children’s verbal
ability.
Parents mind – mindedness and attachment- may foster ToM because it helps them perceive their
children’s experience, respond sensitively, and form a secure attachment.
• Attachment predicts theory of mind. ToM requires an understanding of emotional states in other,
which grows from the attachment relationship.
Peers and siblings – siblings and peers provide children with the opportunity to talk about others during
humor, conflict, and play.
• The beneficial effect of siblings occurs mostly in families with positive siblings relationship and in
middle class home ( Lewes & Carpendale, 2002, Recchid & Howe, 2009).

CLASSROOM IMPLICATIONS OF THEORY OF MIND

• Learners in your classroom who have better ToM are more likely to get along well with peers and
teachers.
1. Help learners develop good verbal ability.
2. Provide learners with the opportunity to interact with peers who might have different
perspective.
3. Establish secure teacher-child relationship.

MORAL JUDGEMENT IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Different Views of Moral Judgement
 Moral Judgement – refers to how children reason about moral issues and laws. Notice that this is
not the same as moral behavior because it focuses on thinking, not behaving.
Piaget’s View
- Piaget believed that children do not simply copy moral standards of their culture, but rather
than conflict during interaction with peers leads children to construct their own nations of right
and wrong
Heteronymous morality – rules are view as fixed and unaltered, and should be rigidly followed.
- Heteronymous children behave well in order to avoid punishment and because of the pressure
of external authority.
Autonomous morality – based on moral respect, and cooperation, rather than external pressure.

CLASSROOM IMPLICATIONS OF MORAL JUDGEMENT

Moral Education (constructing morality)
- To promote moral development, you should encourage classroom discussion about moral
issues.
Character Education (handing down morality)
- The proponents of character education believe that character is a collection of virtues like
honesty, kindness, courage, politeness, and obedience.

1. Identify the virtues that you hope learners will learn, and make them an explicit goal for learners
and teachers.
2. Provide opportunities for learners to practice virtues. Learners need to practice and develop well
worn scripts for moral behavior.
3. Praise learners who believe in accord with virtues.
4. Highlight virtues role models. Use literature with moral heroes and virtues deeds.

PROSOCIAL AND ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

Prosocial Behavior
- Develops when children see other people thoughts, feelings and experiences as important. It
starts with small actions that show consideration of others. For example, a toddler might see
else upset, feel upset to and want to fix the problem.
- Preschoolers may become even more selective in their prosocial behavior, directing it primarily
towards friends and family. They also are discriminating; 3 year old do not show concern for
others who distressed is not justified, such as crying over a minor inconvenience rather than
real hurt.
- Interestingly, preschoolers who are highly aggressive as well they are very sociable children,
they have a lots of both positive and negative interaction with others.
- Conflict – is the behavior of one person interferes with the goals of another person who resists
or protests the behavior, it is not the same as aggression.
Oppositional defiant disorder
- A clinical diagnosis given to children who are excessively defiant and hostile for at least 6
months.
Conduct disorder
- A clinical diagnosis given to youth who are excessively delinquent or aggressive for at least 6
months.
Aggression
- Behavior that harms others or is intended to dominate others. It is a subset of antisocial
behavior.
  Physical Aggression – behavior that harms others through physical means such as hitting,
pushing, or kicking.
 Verbal Aggression – behavior that harms through verbal means such as threatening pr
name-calling.
 Social Aggression – behavior that harms others through manipulating the relationship or
peer groups status such as spreading humors.
 Reactive Aggression – aggression that is aimed at retaliation for a provocation, usually
involving anger or frustration.
 Proactive Aggression – aggression that is directed at achieving personal objective but that
was not clerk provoked.
Instrumental Aggression
- A type of proactive aggression in which the primary aims is to obtain object, territory, or
privilege but not to hurt the victim.

FRIENDSHIP AND PLAY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD AND TV AND MEDIA USE IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Friendship and Play in Early Childhood

- In early childhood, the key ingredients for forming friendship are opportunity and similarity.
Development of Friendship
- The transition from strangers to acquaintances to friends.

6 Developmental of Play
1. Solitary Play – the child plays alone with toys that are different from those chosen by other children
in the area. In short, solitary play is independent.
2. Parallel Play – children play side by side with similar toys, but there is a lack of group involvement.
3. Associative Play – involves a group of children who have similar goals.
4. Cooperative Play – the play is organized by group goals.
5. Onlooker play – when the child watches others playing.
6. Unoccupied Play – in this ag e baby is just making a lot of movement with their arms, legs, feet,
hands and so on.

Individual Diversity in Play

- Learners who frequently play in age-appropriate ways have better cognitive abilities and
academic achievement.
Group Diversity
- A diverse group contains people from different backgrounds and different ages and sexes,
and/or with a wide variety of interest.

Classroom Implications of Play

- They are learning valuable skills that support social, physical and cognitive development. It also
helps them build a sense of self by discovering what they are and aren’t interested in.

TV and Media Use in Early Childhood

 The issue of time – children spend a great deal of time using media. The more time 1-12
years old spend watching TV or playing video games, less time they spend sleeping,
playing, reading, or studying.
  The issue of content – outcomes linked to media use can be positive or negative,
depending on content and amount of the time using the media.

10-1 BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

 The brain continues to grow in volume in middle childhood, but the glucose rate does not continue
to grow (Giedd et al., 2009). The glucose rate (an indication of energy use) tends to plateau at twice
the rate of adults until 9 to 10 years of age.
 There is second wave of synaptogenesis in prefrontal cortex at the start of puberty, and then it
plateaus until after puberty (Blakemore & Choudhury,2006).
 Some neuroscientists believe that the first 10 years maybe a sensitive period in brain development
because of this intense activity.
 Sensitive period means the effect of experience is strongest during relatively brief period in the
lifespan. This may explain why as you learned in chapter 6, brain plasticity begins to be lost at about
10 years of age.

10-2 GROWTH AND MOTOR DEVELOPEMNT

 Growth in middle childhood continues to be steady. Both boys and girls grow an average of 2 to 3
inches in height and 5 to 6 pounds in weight per year until puberty (Rogol et al., 2002). The rate of
growth slows just before puberty.
 Quality of fine motor skills increases dramatically in middle childhood. This is why the writing of a
1st- grader is clearly distinguishable from that of older children.
 There is also improvement ,although less dramatic, in speed, agility, and control of gross motor
skills like jumping, throwing, balancing and hanging ( Malina, Bouchard, & Bar-Or, 2004).
 One of amusing and endearing aspects of teaching 1st - grades is how often they fall out of their
seats. They have trouble raising their hand while maintaining balance in their rating movement with
perception so they can maintain balance, catch a ball, and write their name (Thelen, 1995).

Many people believe preschoolers are the most active of any age. Motion recorders (Actometers) strapped
to arms and legs have been used to record round-the-clock movement in people from toddler age to young
adults.

10-2a INDIVIDUAL DIVERSITY IN GROWTH AND MOTOR DEVELOPMENT

Exercise Builds Better Brains
 Exercise – it it promotes brain functioning and growth. Studies find that active, physically fit
children control their attention better memory, and have higher test scores than nonfit
children,beyond the effects of IQ and SES (Castelli et al., 2014, Hillman & Drobes, 2012). Most of
the studies are correlational, but ramdomized experiments with adults and children show that
exercise causes better brain functioning.
Nutrition
 Undernutrition affects growth. It delays puberty, whereas obesity accelerates it. (Overweight youth
develop secondary sex characteristics earlier than other youth). Undernutrition is also associated
with low intelligence, poor academic achievement, irritability and apathy (Wachs, 2000).

10-2b GROUP DIVERSITY IN GROWTH AND MOTOR DEVELOPMENT GENDER

Boys exercise and participate in team sports more than girls, although the rate of girls participating in
highschool sports has increased since the 1970's and is now about 35% compared to about 50% for boys
(Basset, John, Conger, Fitzhugh,& Coc, 2015).

Socioeconomic Status
 There is no relationship between motor development and SES in school-aged children in the United
States (Malina et al., 2004). However there is a relationship between nutrition and SES. Low SES
children eat more high-fat, high-sugar foods.
What happens when children lack food security?
 They are more likely to be anxious, aggressive, friendless, suspended from school and quarrelsome
than well-fed, low-income children.
Ethnicity
 There are few ethnic differences in motor development. African Amerikan school age children,
especially boys, tend to run faster and jump farther than white children but there are no
differences in other motor skills like throwing, balance or sit-ups.

10-2c CLASSROOM IMPLICACTIONS OF GROWTH AND MOTOR DEVELOPMENT

Physical Activity at school
A study of hundreds of 3rd-graders across the country found that they averaged only two PE classes per
week. When schools double or triple PE time, test scores do not go down, and they often rise
( Basch,2011a; CDC,2010). Pysically active children have higher test scores, better attendance and fewer
discipline problems.
What can you do to help children get active?
1. Provide school time for unstructured physical activity such as jumping rope or running around the
play yard.
2. Advocate for daily physical eductaion. Make sure that during PE classes each child is active for
most of the class period.
3. Discouraged withholding of physical activity as a punishment.
4. Provide diverse extracurricular activities appropriate for different abilities that involved physical
activity.
5. Where appropriate, suggest walking and biking instead of busing students to school.
In-school Nutrition
 Children consume a surprising amount of their daily calories at school, about 40% (AAP Committee
on Nutrition, 2015). Doing the following may help your learners have a higher quality diet:
1. help them reduce calorie intake and get more exercise.
2. Teach them about appropriate quantities and types of food.
3. Advocate for longer lunch periods in a socially pleasant environment where learners are presented
with choices among healthy foods.
4. Focus attention on becoming healthy, not on dieting or losing weight.
Three Federal Agencies
 (USDA, CDC, and Department of Health and Human Services [DHHS]) have combined to identify
success stories from schools that have become healthier.
 Promoting your students physical well-being is particularly important today because children are
experiencing an epidemic or inadequate exercise and poor quality diet that converge to create the
health challenge.
 CONTEMPORARY HEALTH CHALLENGE – OBESITY
 Development of Obesity
 Individual Diversity in Obesity
 Group Diversity in Obesity
Contemporary Health Challenge – Obesity
The Donovan family has four children. Both parents are obese. Their refrigerator is stocked with soda pop
and hot dogs. The oldest child, Jacob, is tall and fit. He is on the football and basketball teams in high
school. His dream is a Division 1 college athletic scholarship, which he attains. His 8th- and 5th-grade
siblings are both obese and not involved in sports. His Ist-grade brother is very thin—nicknamed "skinny
boy. " If the children are good all week, they are rewarded on Friday night with a trip to a fast-food
restaurant and a double-feature video at home. The real motive Jor the reward is that the parents are too
tired to cook after they get home from work.
The World Health Organization has declared obesity one of the top health problems in developed nations.
In the United States, the number of overweight children has quadrupled since 1970. Roughly 8% of infants
and toddlers are obese. Among 2- to 19-year-olds 20% are obese and 33% are overweight (Ogden, Carroll,
Kit, & Flegal, 2014).
 Development of Obesity
Fat level, or adiposity, naturally changes across the lifespan. There is an increase in adiposity from birth to
about 1 year of age, then a decrease. A rebound in adiposity sets in between 4 and 8 years of age, then
decreases again. The body peaks in leanness around age 25; after that age, adiposity increases again.
Although obesity can develop at any age, the primary grades are a risk period because Of the adiposity
rebound.
 Individual Diversity in Obesity
What Does Obesity Predict
Obesity can cause serious health problems in both children and adults. In children, being overweight may
cause type 2 (non—insulin-dependent) diabetes. There has been a dramatic increase in diabetes, which
puts children at risk for hardening of the arteries, kidney problems eye disease, and death
 Obesity is linked to achievement problems in school. It is linked to poor working memory and lower
reading, math, and intelligence scores. Obese learners may score a full grade lower on achievement
tests than fit children.
 Obesity can also cause social and emotional problems. Obese children are more lonely, depressed,
and anxious and have less self-control in the classroom (Gable, Krull, & Chang, 2009; Harrist et al.,
2016).
What predicts obesity?
Many factors are linked to obesity
Exercise – BMI is a direct function of calorie intake (diet) relative to calorie output (exercise)—known as
the energy equation. It only takes a small imbalance in the equation to become overweight. You learned
earlier that many children today do not get enough exercise.
Diet – many families, like the Donovans, eat out often and eat too much. In the United States, portion sizes
have increased, particularly for soft drinks and salty snacks like crackers and chips (Nielsen & Popkin,
2003). Portion sizes are especially large at fast-food restaurants.
Sleep deprivation – children who sleep fewer hours and go to bed later tend to have higher BMI than
other children (Snell et al., 2007). Less than 10 hours of sleep per night is linked to obesity in children in
countries around the world, such as the United States, China, Tunisia, and Brazil (Cappuccio et al., 2008).
Sleep deprivation begins early and can have lasting effects.
Television viewing – television viewing reduces activity level and promotes calorie intake, Many children
watch TV during meals; this habit is linked to eating fewer fruits and vegetables and eating more pizza,
salty snacks, and soda pop (Coon, Goldberg, Rogers, & Tucker, 2001).
Parent behavior – parents influence their children's obesity in many ways, such as being obese
themselves, skipping family mealtime, being negative during mealtime, or being highly controlling about
eating (e.g., "No soda at any time") so that their children overeat the wrong foods when the controls are
lifted (Harrison et al., 2011).
 Group Diversity in Obesity
Obesity rates vary by ethnicity and SES in the United States, although ethnic differences in excessive BMI
are small. Asian children have the lowest rate and Latino and African American children have the highest
rates (Ogden et al., 2014). In most countries, higher-SES children are taller and heavier than low-SES
children.
It may seem ironic that low-SES children who are more likely to have food insecurity would be obese, but
in the United States, high-calorie food is plentiful and cheap. For example, a box of cookies provides more
calories per dollar than fresh fruit. Children living in poverty are more likely than high-SES children to eat
cookies rather than fruit, although most nonpoor children do not have stellar diets either (DHHS, 2015).
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