Play: a window into cognitive and social-emotional development.
Using flavell, miller, and miller’s discussion of representations and concepts.
Young children create mental representations of event knowledge as a tool to understand the world. When these are generalized and abstracted they become scripts. This is adaptive for them because it helps predict future occurrences, anticipate subsequent actions, and participate with others. It provides stability to their world. It is the foundation of shared social information necessary for successful social interactions, within a specific culture. Increases in complexity and ability to accommodate variations are marks of development. Narrative thinking and storytelling, also using sets of occurrences over time and space, use script representation to assimilate stories and infer implicit information.
Concepts are mental groupings of entities put into categories to make them more manageable. By about 4 years old, we are able to use category inferences over perception in thinking. Children's concepts are adult like for the most part, but with some limits. (name some limits?) All concepts have hierarchical levels of abstraction in their representation. Children will generalize new content to an equivalent level. Class inclusion knowledge increases over time, as children acquire more information. With fairly rapid growth, they amass a relatively significant amount of information and cognitive skills. Despite this, at times, children fail to use their knowledge in everyday thinking.
Although children’s thinking process is similar to adults, generally not yet knowing enough of a given area limits them. With advances in general cognition, in addition to content-spec...
... middle of paper ...
...otions, and cognition. Emily attended longer than Mia. Neither seemed to consider what they other was thinking and felt.
Mia was told it was time to leave and walked away, talking to her mother. Emily watched, but neither girl said anything to each other. Afterward, Emily appeared lonely and bored. She scanned the playground often looking for someone else to play with, and observing what others were doing. She played by herself a bit, but stopped often to look around. Eventually she sat under the equipment to watch and chew on some of hair. She started singing to herself. Her grandmother called her over, so she ran out. Alternated playing and moping about for a while. Then she found another little girl to play with. Shortly after was told it was time to go. She walked away without saying anything, and the other girl did not seem to even notice.
She states that she was the only child, out of the five she has total, that was beautiful from the very moment she was born. Emily was smart, “She blew bubbles of sound. She loved motion, loved light, loved color and music and textures. She would lie on the floor in the blue overalls patting the surface so hard in ecstasy her hands and feet would blur.”(Olsen 291). When Emily was eight months old, she needed to stay with a woman downstairs while the narrator looked for a job. Eventually, the narrator had to send Emily to live with her father and his family until she has raised enough money for her fare back. Emily’s father had left because he was scared of becoming poor so her mother was not to happy with this decision. When the narrator finally raised the money for Emily to come home, she had gotten the chicken pox and had to stay home. Once she was healed, she returned immediately. The narrator barely recognizes Emily when comes home. She says she is thin and looks like her father and was now two years old. This means she is old enough to go into nursery school; in order for the narrator to keep her job, she needed to take Emily there. Emily did not like it though, the narrator says “She always had a reason why we should stay home. Momma, you look sick. Momma, I feel sick. Momma, the teachers aren’t there today, they’re sick”.(Olsen
Cognition entails interaction between the individual child and his/her environment or events in the environment.
For years Miss Emily was rarely seen out of her house. She did not linger around town or participate in any communal activities. She was the definition of a home-body. Her father was a huge part of her life. She had never...
Social pressure to raise pleasant, good mannered children who become grounded and productive adults has been a driving influence for many generations. If our children do not fit into this mold then we’re considered failures are parents. Emily’s mother is tormented by the phone call which sets off a wave of maternal guilt. Emily’s mother was young and abandoned by her husband while Emily was still an infant so she had to rely on only herself and the advice of others while she raised her daughter. After Emily was born her mother, “with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, (I) did like the books said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed.” (Olsen 174). Then when Emily was two she went against her own instincts about sending Emily to a nursery school while she worked which she considered merely “parking places for children.” (Olsen 174). Emily’s mother was also persuaded against her motherly instincts to send her off to a hospital when she did not get well from the measles and her mother had a new baby to tend to. Her mother even felt guilt for her second child, Susan, being everything society deemed worthy of attention. Emily was “thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blond replica of Shirley Temple.” (Olsen, 177) she was also neither “glib or quick in a world where glibness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn.” (Olsen 177), which her sister Susan had in
Björklund, D. F. (2000). Children‘s thinking: Developmental function and individual differences (3rd. Ed.). Belmont: Wadsworth.
First, in the beginning of the story someone was on the phone that cared for Emily, told her mother “I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daught...
Cognition is the ability to gain knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. There are essentially four stages of cognitive development; sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. The sensorimotor stage is from birth to around 2 years old and during this stage you know the world only by movements and sensations. The next stage, preoperational, happens between 2 and 7 and is when you start to think symbolically and use words and pictures for objects. The third stage, concrete operational, is from 7 to 11, and you begin to think logically. The final stage, formal operational, happens at the ages 12+. This stage you begin to reasonably think about hypothetical problems. This is how cognition normally develops, but there are certain ways that cognitive development can be affected.
Jean Piaget was a Swiss phycologist who became especially interested in the development of children. His research lead to many great discoveries about children’s thought process, how they learn, when they learn, what things they learn quickly, how they adapt to different environments, and how they are self-accommodating in the way that they constantly revise their own knowledge. Piaget breaks down the ages in a slightly different way than Erikson. Piaget’s theory is broken down into 4 stages as opposed to Erikson’s eight stages of development. Piaget’s goes like this: First, the Sensorimotor Period (birth to 2 years), Second, Preoperational Thought (2 to 7 years), third, Concrete Operations (6 to 12 years), and last, Formal Operations (11 years to adult). During the Sensorimotor Period children learn that their actions make things happen, and that even things that cannot be seen still exist. During the Preoperational Thought stage children are learning how to interpret words and make something out of the pictures they look at. However, in her article, A Summary of Piaget’s Stages, Kendra Cherry states that “while they are getting better with language and thinking, they still tend to think about things in very concrete terms.” (Cherry, 2016). This means that they may still need to be told the same thing multiple times or be reassured when they are doing the right thing. Next, the Concrete Operational stage, the time in which children’s characteristics drastically change and they begin to use logic and reason. The last stage which continues all the way to adulthood, starts as adolescents who are beginning to have abstract thought process, they become concerned with philosophical, ethical, moral, and political issues which is carried with them to adulthood. Like Erikson’s theory of developmental stages, Piaget’s also can be equated with classroom behavior. Like Erikson’s theory of developmental stages,
When children reach a certain age in their life, their mental thought process shifts into a more logical or adult form. "Beginning with the adolescent period, however, children become increasingly less dependent upon the availability of concrete-empirical experience in meaningfully relating complex abstract propositions to cognitive structure." (Ausebel, 1966) The way in which they learn is shifted also.
Jean Piaget theorizes that children go through four different stages in cognitive development; sensorimotor stage, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. He states that by age 7, a child belongs to the concrete operational stage. At this time they begin to think logically like adults do, moving away from abstract thoughts to concrete thoughts. Additionally, children acquire the skill of reversibility. For example, adding 6 and 3 gives you 9. A child in the concrete operational stage would know that since 6 and gives you 9, then subtracted from 9 would give you 6 or 6 subtracted from 9 would give you 3. Therefore, they are able to show flexibility. Children are also aware of persons having different perspectives. Whereas, children are less self-centered and are open to other viewpoints. Here they are able to focus on more than one aspect of given object or situation (decentration). With Piaget’s conservation tasks, children are able to recognize that objects remain the same no matter how they are
Before that, children were thought to have less intellectual abilities than adults. This theory models the steps children move through in thought and logical thinking, how their learning differs from adult learning, and the importance of mastering one stage before moving on to the next. The way that children grow and develop their viewpoint of life depends on their ability to form a baseline of knowledge, then question and cognitively think through how an experience differs.
According to Piaget, schemas are the basic building blocks of such cognitive models, and enable us to form a mental representation of the world. Piaget (1952, p. 7) defined a schema as: "a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning." Schemas basically represented the building block of one’s intelligent behavior and a way to organizing knowledge. When a child's existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can distinguish around it, it is said to be in a state of equilibrium, a state of cognitive and mental balance. As stated in his book “The Psychology of the child”, Piaget highlighted the importance of schemas in cognitive development and described how they were developed or taught. A schema can be defined as a set of related mental representations of the world, which we use to understand and to respond to situations. The assumption is that we store these mental representations and apply them when needed. There was a really good example used in this text that stated when a person having a schema about buying a meal in a restaurant. The schema is
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development describes his belief that children try to actively make sense of the world rather than simply absorbing knowledge as previously thought. Piaget’s theory claims that as children grow and develop they experience four different cognitive stages of life. As a child grows through each stage they not only learn new information but the way he or she thinks also changes. “In other words, each new stage represents a fundamental shift in how the child thinks and understands the world” (Hockenbury, page 368).The first stage of Piaget’s theory, known as the sensorimotor stage, begins at birth and continues on until about age 2. As the name suggest, this stage is when children begin to discover
It involves language, mental imagery, thinking, reasoning, problem solving, and memory development. Jean Piaget stages of cognitive development are the sensorimotor period (birth to 2 years). Children at the sensorimotor stage becomes more goal-directed oriented with goal moving from concrete to abstract (Driscoll et al., 2005). Children at the preoperational period (2-7), engage in symbolic play and games, but has a difficult time seeing another person’s point of view (Driscoll et al., 2005). For example, teaching a preoperational child can provide opportunities to play with clay, water, or sand. Children at the concrete operational period (7-11), solves concrete problems in a logical fashion (Driscoll et al., 2005). For example, providing materials such as mind twisters, brain teasers, and riddles. The formal operational period (11-adulthood) is when student’s solve abstract problems and develop concerns for social issues (Driscoll et al., 2005). For example, making sure that tests that’s given has essay questions and asks a student to come up with other ways to answer the
Growing up Emily’s father, Mr. Gierson, made her stay in the house and not socialize with others. He taught her that he was only trying to protect her from the outside world. Mr.Gierson was a rude man who felt that things should go his way; therefore, his daughter hopelessly fell for him because she did not know any oth...