Most obvious change is a large increase in REPRESENTATIONAL or SYMBOLIC ACTIVITY

Piaget disregarded the importance of language in cognitive development, rather he believed that sensorimotor activity leads to internal images of experiences, which children label with words

Play becomes less self-centered. Ex: move from the self towards playmates.

Play includes more complex combinations of schemes. Ex: Combines and coordinates several schemes of play together

Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it. Ex: children pretend with less realistic toys; use objects for things that they are not originally used for

SOCIODRAMATIC PLAY: when children combine schemes with those of peers, the make-believe with others that is underway by the end of the second year and that increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood. They can create and coordinate several roles in elaborate plots.

Social development: seen as more socially competent by their teachers. Increased ability to regular one's own emotions and behavior, and take another's perspective.

Cognitive development: Strengthens sustained attention, memory, logical reasoning, language, literacy, imagination, creativity, ability to reflect on one's thinking

Imaginary friends: kids that have them display more complex and imaginative pretend play, are advanced in understanding others' viewpoints and emotions, and are more sociable with peers.

Offer a variety of both realistic materials and materials without clear functions

Ensure that children have many rich, real-world experiences to inspire positive fantasy play

Explain the similarities between models and real-world spaces

Young children are not capable of OPERATIONS, or mental actions that obey logical rules

EGOCENTRISM, the inability to distinguish the symbolic viewpoints of others from one's own, is a limitation of preoperational thought

ANIMISTIC THINKING - the preoperational belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, such as thoughts, wishes, and intentions

Children are easily distracted by the PERCEPTUAL APPEARANCE of objects

Children treat the initial and final states of water as unrelated events, ignoring the dynamic transformation between them

Understanding is CENTERED - they focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting other important features

IRREVERSIBILITY - an inability to mentally go through a series of steps in a problem and then reverse direction, returning to the starting point; most important illogical feature

Demonstrated by the CLASS INCLUSION PROBLEM - kids shown 16 flowers, 4 blue and 12 red. Asked "are there more red flowers or flowers?" The limitation is demonstrated when kid answers "more red flowers," failing to understand that blue flowers count as flowers

Kids are capable of logical thought when given tasks that are simplified and relevant to their everyday lives

Children's questions: mostly information-seeking; they typically build on fact-oriented questions with follow-up questions that ask for causes and explanations. Older children get "mechanism" explanations compared to simpler "prior cause" explanations

SENSITIVITY TO CHILDREN'S READINESS TO LEARN. Willingness to meet children where they are at, on needs and prior knowledge.

ACCEPTANCE OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES. Plan for and evaluate children individually

DISCOVERY LEARNING: Children learn on their own via spontaneous interaction with the environment

Greatest challenge to educational applications of Piaget's theory - his insistence that young children learn primarily through acting on the environment

Piaget's view - "talk for self" allows expression of whatever the child wants, regardless of if the listener understands. Begins to decrease in favor of social speech when kids mature.

Vygotsky's view: Believe language ws the foundation for all cognition. They speak to themselves for guidance, and this eventually is internalized as silent, inner speech - internal verbal dialogues that carry on while thinking and acting. Supported by research.

Children use private speech when tasks are appropriately challenging (within their zone of proximal development) where things are neither too hard nor too easy.

Vygotsky said that all of children's learning takes place within their ZPD. This means that there a range of tasks too difficult for the child to do alone but are possible with the assistance of others.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY - the process by which two participants who begin a task with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding.

SCAFFOLDING - Adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child's current level of performance

GUIDED PARTICIPATION - refers to shared endeavors between more expert and less expert participants without specifying the precise features of communication. Scaffolding is specific to school, does not include the greater range of contexts learning can take place in.

PEER COLLABORATION - where children of varying abilities and skill levels work together

ASSISTED DISCOVERY - where teachers guide children's learning

PLAY is the ideal social context for fostering cognitive development because kids learn to follow internal ideas/social rules rather than own impulses; enhances a diverse array of cognitive and social skills

Helps us to understand wide cultural variation in children's cognitive skils

Verbal communication may not be the only means where thinking develops - culture specific

Says little about how basic motor/perceptual skills contribute to cognition

Middle SES parents - focus on preparing kids to do well in school. Building language, literacy, knowledge. Play based. More likely to display attention-getting behaviors.

When adults and older children are working, young children make decisions for themselves and become highly competent at self care. Play is limited.

2. Realize that other people differ from each other and from themselves, at about 2 years

3. Understand that thinking takes place inside their heads, about 3 years

1. Able to view people as intentional beings who can share and influence one another's mental states; happens at 1 year

4. Realize that both beliefs and desires determine behavior; understand concept of false beliefs, about 4 years

They often say that they have always known information that they have just learned

Language is delayed and stereotyped. Often use words to echo and get things that they want rather than exchange ideas.

Limited ability to engage in nonverbal behavior for successful social interaction. Ex: eye gaze, facial expressions

Rarely use mental state words (ex: believe, think, know, feel, pretend)

Impairments in executive functioning - kids with ASD are deficient in skills involved in flexible, goal-oriented thinking - difficulty with shifting attention, inhibiting responses, using working memory successfully and generating plans

EMERGENT LITERACY: young child's active effort to construct literacy knowledge through informal experiences

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS: refers to the ability to reflect on and manipulate the sound structure of spoken language

Low SES is associated with decreased literacy and language learning opportunities. Typically get 25 hours of reading before preschool (compared 1000). Gap increases over time.

Point out letter-sound correspondences, play rhyming and other language-sound games, and read rhyming poems and stores

Support children's efforts at writing, especially narrative products

14-16 months: children display a beginning grasp of ordinality

4-5 years: children can use counting to solve simple arithmetic problems

Basic arithmetic knowledge emerges in a universal sequence around the world

Minorities and low-SES kids react with anxiety at times when asked questions by unfamiliar adults; may not realize that the results of testing "count"...this can me fixed by spending time playing before testing and using verbal encouragement while the test is in progress

Warm and affectionate parents who simulate language and academic knowledge and who arrange interesting outings

Parents resolve conflicts with reason instead of physical force and punishment

ACADEMIC PRESCHOOLS - literacy and mathematical skills are taught using drill and repetition; do NOT result in higher levels of mastery

Teaching materials designed to encourage exploration and discovery

Long periods for individual and small group learning in child-chose activities

Increased performance in literacy, math, cognitive flexibility, false-belief understanding

Increased concern with fairness in solving conflicts with peers and cooperative play with agemates

Benefits of watching educational programs: gains in early literacy,, math skills and academic progress in elementary school. Higher grades, reading more books, placing more value on high school achievement

Too much TV viewing means that there is decreased time reading and interacting with others and therefore the poorer their academic skills

Benefits of educational computer programs: increased general knowledge, diversity of language and emergent literacy skills. Increased elaboration and production of written text.

FAST MAPPING: Ability to connect new words with their underlying concepts after only a brief encounter...Asian kids learn verbs first...most other cultures learn nouns first

PRINCIPLE OF MUTUAL EXCLUSIVITY BIAS: refers to an assumption made by children in the early stages of vocabulary growth that words refer to entirely separate (nonoverlapping) categories

SYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING: occurs when children figure out the meaning of a word by observing how it is used in the structure of a sentence

Provide rich social information that adults frequently provide when they introduce new words

Inform children directly about word meanings and highlight the meaning of adjectives by using the new label with several objects

Kids are innately biased to induce word meanings using certain principles (ex: mutual exclusivity and syntactic bootstrapping)

Governed by the same cognitive strategies that children apply to nonlinguistic info - they use a bunch of cues (perceptual, social and linguistic) which shift in importance with age

English speakers use simple sentences that follow a subject verb object word order, gain most of the grammatical constructions they need

OVERREGULARIZATION: occurs when children overextend grammatical rules to words that are exceptions. Ex: "I runned fast"

Children rely on semantics or word meanings to figure out grammatical rules - an approach called SEMANTIC BOOTSTRAPPING

Children have a special language making capacity - a set of procedures for analyzing the language they hear, which supports the discovery of grammatical regularities.