DEVPSYCH#2

• The average child grows 2½ inches in height

  and gains 5 to 10 pounds a year during early

  childhood. As the preschool child grows

  older, the percentage of increase in height

  and weight decreases with each additional

  year.
• Growth Hormone Deficiency - Absence or

  deficiency of growth hormone produced by

  the pituitary gland to stimulate the body to

  grow.
• The Brain- Although the brain continues to

  grow in early childhood, it does not grow as

  rapidly as it did in infancy.
• By the time

  children reach 3 years of age, the brain is

  three-quarters of its adult size.
• By age 6, the

  brain has reached about 95 percent of its adult

  size. Thus, the brain of a 5-year-old is nearly

  the size it will be when the child reaches

  adulthood, but as we will see in later chapters,

  the development that occurs inside the brain

  continues through the remaining years of

  childhood and adolescence.
• Brain Development- In middle and late

  childhood, cortical thickening occurs in the

  frontal lobes, which may be linked to

  improvements in language abilities such as

  reading.
• Myelination- The process by which the nerve

  cells are covered and insulated with a layer of

  fat cells, which increases the speed at which

  information travels through the nervous

  system.
• Experts recommend that young children get

  11 to 13 hours of sleep each night. A recent

  study of children 36 to 42 months old found

  that a consistent bedtime routine was

  associated with more nightly sleep and an

  increase in nightly sleep minutes across a 6-

  month period
• The preoperational stage, which lasts from

  approximately 2 to 7 years of age, is the second

  Piagetian stage. In this stage, children begin to

  represent the world with words, images, and drawings.
• Preoperational emphasizes that the child does not yet

  perform operations, which are reversible mental

  actions that allow children to do mentally what before

  they could do only physically.
• Preoperational thought is the beginning of the ability

  to reconstruct in thought what has been established in

  behavior. This developmental stage can be divided into

  two substages: the symbolic function substage and the

  intuitive thought substage
• Symbolic function substage is the first

  substage of preoperational thought,

  occurring roughly between the ages of 2 and During this substage, the young child gains

  the ability to mentally represent an object

  that is not present.
• Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish between

  one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective.
• Animism- another limitation of preoperational

  thought, is the belief that inanimate objects have

  lifelike qualities and are capable of action. Fails to

  distinguish the appropriate occasions for using human

  and nonhuman perspectives.
• Intuitive thought substage- Piaget’s second substage

  of preoperational thought, in which children begin to

  use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers

  to all sorts of questions (between 4 and 7 years of age).
• Centration- Focusing attention on one

  characteristic to the exclusion of all others.
• Conservation- In Piaget’s theory, awareness

  that altering an object’s or a substance’s

  appearance does not change its basic

  properties.
• zone of proximal development (ZPD) Vygotsky’s term

  for tasks that are too difficult for children to master

  alone but can be mastered with the assistance of adults

  or more-skilled children.
• Scaffolding- Closely linked to the idea of the ZPD is

  the concept of scaffolding. Scaffolding means

  changing the level of support.
• Language and Thought-The use of dialogue as a tool

  for scaffolding is only one example of the important

  role of language in a child’s development. According to

  Lev Vygotsky, children use speech not only to

  communicate socially but also to help them solve tasks.

  Vygotsky further believed that young children use

  language to plan, guide, and monitor their behavior.
• This use of language for self-regulation is called

  private speech. (For Piaget, private speech is egocentric

  and immature, but for Vygotsky it is an important tool of

  thought during the early childhood years.
• Social constructivist approach- An approach that

  emphasizes the social contexts of learning and asserts

  that knowledge is mutually built and constructed.

  Vygotsky’s theory reflects this approach
• Attention- is defined as the focusing of mental

  resources on select information. The child’s ability to

  pay attention improves significantly during the

  preschool years.
• Executive attention Involves action

  planning, allocating attention to goals, error

  detection and compensation, monitoring

  progress on tasks, and dealing with novel or

  difficult circumstances.
• Sustained attention Focused and extended

  engagement with an object, task, event, or

  other aspect of the environment.
• Two ways of deficient control of attention:

  ● Salient versus relevant dimensions

  ● Planfulness
• Memory—the retention of information over time and is a

  central process in children’s cognitive development.

  (Implicit and explicit)
• Short-term memory- The memory component in

  which individuals retain information for up to 30

  seconds, assuming there is no rehearsal of the

  information.
• Another aspect of long-term memory:

  Autobiographical memory- involves memory of

  significant events and experiences in one’s life
• Executive function- An umbrella-like concept that

  consists of a number of higher-level cognitive

  processes linked to the development of the brain’s

  prefrontal cortex. Involves managing one’s thoughts to

  engage in goal-directed behavior and to exercise self-

  control.
• Theory of mind- Awareness of one’s own mental

  processes and the mental processes of others.
• Perceptions- By 2 years of age, a child recognizes that

  another person will see what’s in front of her own eyes

  instead of what’s in front of the child’s eyes and by 3

  years of age, the child realizes that looking leads to

  knowing what’s inside a contain
• Emotions- The child can distinguish between positive

  (for example, happy) and negative (for example, sad)

  emotions.
• Desires-All humans have some sort of desires.

  Toddlers recognize that if people want something, they

  will try to get it.
• The average 2-year-old can speak about 200

  words.
• Fast mapping- A process that helps to explain how

  young children learn the connection between a word

  and its referent so quickly.
• Child-centered kindergarten- Education that involves

  the whole child by considering both the child’s

  physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development

  and the child’s needs, interests, and learning styles.
• Montessori approach- An educational philosophy in

  which children are given considerable freedom and

  spontaneity in choosing activities and are allowed to

  move from one activity to another as they desire.
• Developmentally appropriate practice (DAP)-

  Education that focuses on the typical developmental

  patterns of children (age appropriateness) and the

  uniqueness of each child (individual-appropriateness).
• Project Head Start- A government-funded program

  that is designed to provide children from low-income

  families with the opportunity to acquire the skills and

  experiences important for school success.