Physical and Cognitive
Development in Early
Childhood
CHAPTER 7
Copyright © 2015 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Bodily Growth and Change
Around age 3, children lose “baby
roundness”
Limbs lengthen, height increases
Cartilage turns to bone faster
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Learning Objectives
7.1 Identify physical changes in early childhood
7.2 Describe three views of the cognitive changes
that occur in early childhood.
7.3 Summarize how language develops in early
development
7.4 Evaluate different approaches to early
childhood education
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Physical Growth: Ages 3 to 6
Height in Inches Weight in Pounds
Age
Boys Girls Boys Girls
3 38.7 38.6 33.8 34.2
4 42.1 41.4 39.8 38.6
5 45.1 44 46.3 43.3
6 47.6 46.6 52.2 48.8
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Sleep Patterns
By age 5, most U.S. children
Average about 11 hours sleep a night
Give up naps
Bedtime varies among cultures:
Zuni: No regular bedtime, sleep when sleepy
Canadian Hare Indians: Bedtime after dinner, but no naps
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Typical Sleep Requirements
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Sleep Disturbances
Night Terrors
Abrupt awakening; extremely frightened
Nightmares
Common
Walking and talking
Fairly common
Accidental activation of brain’s motor control
Bed-wetting (enuresis)
About 10–15% of 5-year-olds
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Brain Development
At about 3 years of age, the brain is approx. 90% of adult
weight
By 6 years, brain is at 95% peak volume
Corpus callosum, linking left and right hemispheres,
improves functioning
Most rapid growth in areas that support thinking,
language, and spatial relations
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Motor Skills
Gross
Involves large muscle groups
Jumping and running
Fine
Using eye-hand and small-muscle coordination
Buttoning a shirt, drawing pictures
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Handedness
Usually evident by age 3
Heritability
Single-gene theory
Dominant allele for right-handedness
82% of population is right-handed
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Artistic Development
Universal progression
Internal process
Cross cultural variations
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Preventing Obesity
Approximately 14% of 2- to 5-year-olds
obese
Worldwide 22 million children under 5 are
obese
Overweight children tend to become
overweight adults
Key may be appropriate portions
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Undernutrition
Underlying cause in more than half of deaths before age 5
19% of U.S. children under 18 live in food-insecure
households
Malnutrition can harm long-term cognitive development
Early education and improved diet can moderate the
effects
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Research in Action:
Food Security
Food insecurity is experiences when:
The availability of future food is uncertain
The amount and kind of food required for a healthy lifestyle
is insufficient
Individual must resort to socially unacceptable ways to
acquire food
Food insecurity adversely affects children’s health,
cognitive abilities and socioemotional well being
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Food Allergies
Anabnormal immune system response to a
specific food
90% of allergies can be attributed to 8 foods:
mild, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, soy, wheat
& shellfish.
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Deaths and Accidental Injuries
73% of deaths of children under 5 occur in poor,
rural regions of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia
In U.S. most child deaths are caused by injury rather
than illness
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Window on the world:
Surviving the First Five Years of Life
98% of child deaths occur in poor rural regions of
developing countries where nutrition is inadequate, water
is unsafe, and sanitary facilities are lacking.
What’s your view? What might be done to produce more
rapid and more evenly distributed improvements in child
mortality throughout the world?
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Low SES and Health
Lower SES increases risk of injury, illness, and death
Poor children are more likely to:
Be of a minority
Have chronic health problems and/or lack health insurance
Suffer vision and hearing loss
10% of poor children are homeless—more likely to have
health problems and/or depression
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Exposure to Pollutants
Parental smoking: Increases child’s risk of
asthma and bronchitis
Air pollution: Increases risk of chronic
respiratory diseases
Pesticide poisonings: Most occur in young
children
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Exposure to Lead
Dangerous levels of lead in nearly 8% of
children
Mostly poor and on Medicaid
Lead gets in the bloodstream via:
Contaminated food or water
Contaminated dust of lead paint at home or school
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Cognitive Development: Piaget—The
Preoperational Child
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Cognitive Development:
Symbolic Function
The ability to use symbols that have meaning
Words
Numbers
Images
Examples
Deferred imitation
Pretend play
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Understanding Objects in Space
Why is it hard for children under age 3 to
understand scale models and maps?
Because they need to keep more than one mental
representation in the mind at one time
Advancing spatial thinking:
Using simple maps and models becomes easier after age
3
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Understanding of Causality
Transduction: Mentally linking phenomena,
whether logical or not
“My parents got a divorce because I was bad.”
Familiar settings help advance causality
“I am quiet so I won’t wake the baby.”
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Understanding of Identities and Categorization
World becomes more orderly and predictable
when preschool children understand identity
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Numbers:
Five Counting Principles
Ordinality: number knowledge
Cardinality
Counting
Number patterns
Abstraction
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Immature Aspects of Preoperational
Thought
Centration
Tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others
Egocentrism
Decentering
Thinking simultaneously about several aspects of a situation
Inability to decenter leads to illogical conclusions
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Egocentrism:
The Three Mountain Task
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Conservation
Something remains the same even if its
appearance is altered
Matter/mass
Liquid
Length
Number
Area
Volume
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Irreversibility
Failureto see that an action can
go two or more ways
A belief that pouring juice from
glass to glass changes the amount
of juice
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Theory of Mind
Children’s awareness of their own mental
processes and those of other people
Preschoolers generally believe that mental
activity starts and stops
By middle childhood, understand that activity
is continuous
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False Beliefs and Deception
What do you think is in the crayon box?
Crayons!
What is actually in the crayon box?
Candy!
What do you think Joe will say is in the
crayon box?
Candy!
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Appearance vs. Reality
Related to awareness of false beliefs
Requires child to simultaneously
refer to two conflicting mental
representations
Isa birthday candle wrapped in a crayon
wrapper a crayon or a candle?
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Fantasy vs. Reality
Distinguishing between real and imagined
events
Magical thinking … witches and dragons
Do you want to hold a box with an imaginary
bunny or an imaginary monster?!
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Influences on
Theory-of-Mind Development
Heredity and environmental effects
Child’s social skills
Talking with children about mental states
Cultural attitudes
Bilingual children do somewhat better
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Information-Processing Approach: Memory
Development
Encoding
Storage
Retrieval
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Types of Memory
Sensory
Working
• Executive function
• Central executive
Short-term
Long-term
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Recognition & Recall
Recognition
The ability to identify something encountered
before
Picking out a missing mitten from lost-and-
found
Recall
Reproduce information from memory
Describe the missing mitten
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Three Types of
Childhood Memories
Generic
Produces “scripts”—general outlines of repeated and familiar events
Episodic
Remembering a specific event at a specific time
Autobiographical
Memories that form a person’s life history
Specific and long-lasting
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Influences on Memory Retention
Uniqueness of event
Children collaborate with parents and adults
when constructing autobiographical
memories
• Low elaborative style
• High elaborative style
Culture affects what children remember
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Intelligence:
Psychometric and Vygotskian
Approaches
Tests include verbal items
Results are more reliable than nonverbal tests for
younger children
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale
WPPSI-III
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Influences on Measured Intelligence
Rise in standardized norms
Family environment
Correlation
between
socioeconomic status and IQ
Twin studies
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Intelligence:
Vygotsky’s Theory
Childrenuse “scaffolds” to learn—the
temporary support of adults
Assess potential with dynamic tests
Zone of proximal development (ZPD)
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Language Development: Vocabulary
Fast mapping
Child learns the meaning of a word after hearing
only once or twice
Theory-of-mind development plays a role
By age 3, average child knows 900–1,000
words
By age 6, knows about 2,600 and understands
more than 20,000
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Grammar and Syntax
Children start using plurals, possessives,
and past tense
Know the difference between I, you, and we
Most sentences are declarative
Errors with irregular verbs
Holded instead of held
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Pragmatics and Social Speech
Pragmatics
How we use language to communicate
Knowing how to ask for something
Social Speech
Speech intended to be understood by listener
Trying to explain something clearly
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Private Speech
Talking aloud with no intended listener
Normal and common in childhood
Piaget: A sign of cognitive immaturity
Vygotsky: Conversation with the self
More research supports this view
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Delayed
Language Development
About 3% of preschool-age children
May be problems in fast mapping
Manychildren catch up—especially if
comprehension is normal
Dialogic reading helps
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Preparation for Literacy
General linguistic skills
Vocabulary, syntax, etc.
Specific Skills
Phonemic awareness: Understanding that
words are composed of sounds
Socialinteraction
Reading to children
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Types of Preschools
Child-centered (U.S.)
Stress social and emotional growth
Children choose activities and interact individually
with the teacher
Academically focused (such as China)
Montessori method
Reggio Emilia Approach
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Compensatory Preschools:
Goals of Head Start
To improve:
Physical health
Cognitive skills
Self-confidence
Relationships with others
Social responsibility
Sense of dignity and self-worth for child and family
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Transitioning to Kindergarten
Today, kindergarten is more like first grade
More time with worksheets and pre-reading
Preschool-experienced children transition easier
Factors easing transition:
Prosocial child
Cognitive maturity
Supportive family background
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