Early Child development 2

Jean Piaget, was interested in the wrong answers that children gave.These ‘errors’ seemed to be systematic rather than random, suggesting some underlying consistencies in the children’s developing mental abilities.Piaget based his observations on his 2 childrenFrom such observations, Piaget reached the conclusion that infants lack an Object understanding of object permanence. 　 　 　 　

Piaget 1-2 stages of development:Sensori-motor stageChildren are born with innate behavioural patterns (reflexes), which are their first means of making sense of their world. Children can take in new knowledge and experiences as far as they are consistent with their existing behaviours. Eventually they begin to generate new behaviours in response to their environment (schemas).Pre-operational stageChildren begin to use combinations or sequences of actions that can be carried out symbolically. For example, putting two objects together can be represented symbolically as an abstract mathematical principle (addition). (3 Mountains study) 　 　 　 　   　 　 　 　  

Piaget 3-4 stages of developmentConcrete operations -Conservations - the understanding that a quantity will be the same, even if its manner of presentation changes. For example, a quantity of water remains the same whether it is presented in a tall, thin glass or a short, wide glass Formal operations -   　 　   　 　     　 　

Bandura’s work shows that learning can occur without the sorts of reinforcement that behaviourists see as essential, and that children are active in their learning. It implies that children extract general principles from what they observe. However, it does not tell us about the nature of the children’s thinking or give us an insight into the processes of cognitive change occurring within the child. And that learning is attributed to external factors as the key factors of experiences and behaviours derives from people around them    

Summary:Social learning theory proposes that it is possible for children to learn by observing other people. Bandura found that pre-school children would copy aggressive behaviour modelled by another person, and that this was most likely if the model was similar to them in some way and not seem to be punished. Social learning research has informed the ongoing debate about television being either a positive or negative influence on young children.Social learning theory does not attempt to explain children’s cognitive development.　 　 　 　 　 　 　 　

Summary:Piaget proposed that all children pass through an ordered sequence of stages of cognitive development. This development arises through the processes of intrinsic motivation, assimilation and accommodation and equilibration.Children’s actions on the environment are the basic building blocks of developmentPiaget argued that children reason differently to adults, as their mental representations of the world are initially centred on their own perceptions and experiences of it. Cognitive development occurs as children become able to act on their environment in increasingly sophisticated ways. Children are therefore seen as active in constructing their understanding of the world from an initial set of innate behaviours. A pedagogical approach known as ‘discovery learning’ was developed as a result of Piaget’s ideas about cognitive development. This positions the teacher as the provider of a developmentally appropriate learning environment, rather than as an active tutor. Piaget has been criticized for failing to recognize the importance of the social context of children’s cognitive activity.　 　 　 　 　 　 　 　 . 　 　

PiagetStages of learning - individual - abstract problemVygotsy- Jerome BrunnerSocial Constructivism, group learning, scaffolding for the student to discuss in their group, teaching working in the Zone of Proximty developmentSocial interaction providing support for learning.  Scaffolding, providing the support for the students to learn by adapting the content for the level of the student and then lessen the support when the students are able and confident to continue on their own

ZDP - Zone Proximal Development - the distance between the development level and is determined by  the capacity  of resolving a problem independently with the help of teacher or peer more advanced in knowledge 

ZPD is applied to children deaf/blind educationApplication by simple basic teaching eg  child feeding itself with support of an adult and stimulating aspects of the environment.2nd - task is to develop language with hand gestures eg mimicking eating with other finger movements so that there is distinction between food to eating outdoors.  This then moves the child to a symbolic form of communication.  Finally the child is taught to the associations of the words to the  equivalent spoken words  by touching the face and throat of their teacher while she speaks, and eventually trying to produce the same movements and sounds themselves

Summary: 　Vygotsky saw learning as a cultural and interpersonal process that involves the acquisition of ‘cultural tools’ from others. . Language is, according to Vygotsky, initially used solely for interpersonal communication. When it becomes internalized for the purposes of thought, the social environment is reflected in children’s reasoning. . Vygotsky argued that adult tuition was important as it is through contact with more able others that children are able to achieve what would otherwise be beyond them. Such experiences lead them into new levels of reasoning. . Sensitive teaching creates a ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) which can foster cognitive development. . Vygotsky’s ideas have been used to teach children with special educational needs, including teaching deaf-blind children how to communicate with others. . Vygotskian-inspired approaches to tuition have been criticized for being too formal and teacher-orientated.

Piaget & Sensori motor stage　 Inspired by Piaget’s work, several investigators have sought to identify what infants know about the existence of objects. For example, Bower et al. (1971) devised a number of tasks to investigate object permanence without making demands on infants’ physical co-ordination. They reasoned that while infants might have some difficulty in co-ordinating their reaching and grasping behaviour, they had good control over their visual system so an experiment was devised that made use of that fact.

Habituation technique,:relies on the fact that children, like adults, lose interest if they look at the same object or event over and over again.　 violation of expectations’ technique:- similar to the habituation technique but relies on the principle that people spend longer looking at events that they believe to be impossible. One of the variants involves a possible event that is different from the original event, and the other variant is an impossible event, which is the same as the original event but made ‘impossible’ by some new feature - Baillargeon (1986) experiment the rolling car 　 　   　 　 　 　

Preservation error: the A& B cloth errorWhen a person repeats an action which they have previously performed even when that action then becomes inappropriate in the current context. 　 　

Conclusion: The early part of this chapter focused on two key issues: the development of the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are not accessible to the senses, and the development of the ability to imitate. Selected studies were used to trace the history of psychological investigation in these areas. Underlying the concern with the conduct of the various investigations and the surface meaning of the evidence was the idea that a review of this kind might shed some light on the more profound debate concerning the nature of human infants. Representations are critical to cognitive development and significant changes occur very early in a child’s life, perhaps with some skills being present from birth (nativism). However, other skills involving the understanding of representations develop later (Piaget’s constructivism), such as the understanding of models. Understanding how much children know about the world is difficult for two reasons. First, it is not possible simply to ask young children about their reasoning skills. Second, often children’s difficulties in experiments may be due not to the limitations of their cognitive ability, for example, their ability to understand the relationship between a model and the space it represents. Instead, the difficulties may be due to problems in co-ordinating their knowledge with their behaviour (i.e. overcoming perseverative errors in the A-not-B task). The current level of our understanding has only been possible through the ingenuity of psychologists, who have developed techniques which have allowed us to infer the content of a child’s knowledge through his or her actions.

Piaget - Constructivism

Bandura - Social Learning

Piaget & Vvgostsy

Piaget & Object Permenance