Eager to Learn Educating Our Preschoolers (2001) / Chapter Skim
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What Does the Science of earning Contribute to Early Childhood Pedagogy?
What Does the Science of earning Contribute to Early Childhood Pedagogy?
Pages 37-58
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From page 37... ...
Careful observation reveals that infants indicate attentiveness through gestures such as shifting their gaze, turning their head slightly, actively kicking their legs or waving their arms, and engaging in nonnutritive sucking. These indicators of selective attention have allowed researchers to study the capacity of babies to participate actively in learning about the world around them.
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From page 38... ...
Similar research has indicated attentiveness in the form of shifting gaze in infants as young as 5 months in response to changes in number (Canfield and Smith, 1996~. And bodily actions such as kicking and arm waving have, in controlled experiments, indicated the object recognition capacity of infants (Rovee-Collier, 1989~.
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From page 39... ...
THEORIES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT Philosophers such as Renee Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Marx have heavily influenced developmental psychology (for a history of these influences, see Cairns, 1983~. The powerful influences of these different philosophical traditions, combined with the complex nature of human development, help explain the diversity of theories germane to early childhood pedagogy.
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From page 40... ...
However, it was developmentally inappropriate to include learning opportunities about abstract categories, measurement, and advanced arithmetic, for doing so was asking children to deal with tasks for which they lacked the conceptual capabilities. This assumption continues to be prevalent in the world of practice, especially as regards some interpretations of the notions of "readiness" and what is "developmentally appropriate." However, the very definitions of these terms are being redefined as new research on the abilities and potential competencies of young children emerges.
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From page 41... ...
The tension between the view of cognitive development as taking place systemically in response to endogenous, often biological change, and the view that it occurs in specific domains in response to exogenous influences has fueled much research that is still ongoing. Researchers from different theoretical perspectives frame their questions differently, and their inquiry often uses different research techniques (Case, 1991~.
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From page 42... ...
The late 1980s witnessed an explosion of work on the social and cultural contexts of cognitive development (e.g., Bronfenbrenner and Ceci, 1994; Rogoff, 1990; Sternberg, 1985; Fischer and Knight, 1990~. For example, drawing on a train metaphor, Bronfenbrenner and Ceci proposed that "the basic psychological and biological processes are the 'engines' that drive intellectual development and context provides the fuel and steering wheel to determine how far and in what direction it goes" (1994:404~.
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From page 43... ...
Another critical concept in the Vygotskyan perspective is that of mental tools. For a child to acquire these tools en route to higher-order mental function like abstract reasoning, the child has to be helped by knowing individuals, teachers, or parents.
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From page 44... ...
The more they understand what the learning process requires that it is not simply a matter of knowing or not knowing, of performing well or of failing to perform the more directed they will be toward the learning goal (Dweck, 1989; Dweck and Elliott, 1983; Dweck and Leggett,1988~. Researchers have documented cases of preschool children using strategies to remember (Weliman et al., 1975; DeLoache et al., 1985)
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From page 45... ...
A consistent, substantial difference in performance was found between the "functional level" in the low support context, and the "optimal level" in the high support context. In one such study conducted with 7-year-olds, the children were asked to produce stories about mean and nice, and their spontaneous responses were scored at or below stage 3 on the developmental scale, whereas their independently executed response after modeling was at or below stage 6, suggesting a potentially powerful influence of context (Fischer et al., 1993~.
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From page 46... ...
demonstrated the role of functional familiarity in a memory task. When the chess pieces were arrayed in meaningful chess patterns, i.e., in terms of the game's structure, expert chess players well outperformed the novices in their ability to remember where the pieces were on the board when it was no longer in view.
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From page 47... ...
Therefore behavioral issues, and the social and emotional environment of preschool classrooms that affect behavior, are crucial to effective learning. SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL CONTEXT: THE IMPORTANCE OF RELATIONSHIPS As is the case with cognitive development, the social and emotional development and behavior of children has been the subject of a plethora of theories in the past century.
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From page 48... ...
A relatively consistent position can be seen across most contemporary approaches and models in accepting the bidirectionality (mutuality) of influences between a child and parents, teachers, siblings, or peers, and for an expanded understanding of the role of the environment.
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From page 49... ...
Research that examines behavior in contexts outside the home has produced a large body of evidence on the validity of assessing relationships between children and teachers, identifying and examining antecedents of different qualities of the relationships, and examining the concurrent and long-term correlates of relationship qualities and children's social competence. The findings of these studies suggest that the quality of a child-teacher attachment can be reliably and validly assessed, that similar processes are implicated in the formation of attachments of different qualities with alternative caregivers and with the child's mother, and that attachment security with the alternative caregiver predicts social competence in the long and the short term.
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From page 50... ...
The classroom social-emotional climate is defined as consisting of the level of aggression and other behavior problems in the group of children, the nature of the child-teacher relationships, and the frequency and complexity of play with peers. Using this notion of classroom climate, cIassrooms can be described on a continuum from positive, prosocial environments characterized by close adult-child relationships, intricate pretend play scenarios, and little disruptive behavior to angry, hostile environments characterized by conflictual childteacher-relationships, angry disruptive children, and little constructive peer play or collaborative learning.
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From page 51... ...
Instead, because the child is eager to cooperate with the adult, socialization strategies do not need to be harsh or restrictive. The existence of a mutually reciprocal relationship means that children's socialization can extend beyond task compliance toward building a foundation for rules of conduct and morality.
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From page 52... ...
Another major variable influencing peer relations is a child's social competence, that is, the child's ability to elicit positive responses from others (Dodge, 1985~. One of the most compelling findings related to peer relations is that positive peer relations have a significant role in supporting
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From page 53... ...
DEVELOPMENT OF THE B - IN The proliferation of research on the brain that has accompanied advances in brain imaging technology has provided a physiological description of the mind's organ that in some respects complements the understanding that is emerging from research in developmental and cognitive psychology. The brain undergoes enormous changes as a child grows and acquires skill in dealing with the environment.
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From page 54... ...
Two basic biological principles dominate current understanding of how nervous systems are put together. The first, neuronal specificity, posits that neuronal connections are specified with great precision during their development (Sperry et al., 2000~.
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From page 55... ...
A major achievement of brain imaging studies has been consistent localization of brain areas that perform particular functions or mental operations, including precise localization of the processing of motion, color, shape, and other object features in the human visual cortex. For high-level cognitive tasks, the almost universal finding has been the activation of networks of small numbers of often widely separated brain areas.
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From page 56... ...
The findings of the most relevant research are highlighted below. · Attention allows rapid amplification of blood flow in local brain areas performing computations in high-level skills (Corbetta et al., 1993~.
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From page 57... ...
that changes the pathway so that new stimuli that share some or all of that pathway will be processed more efficiently. Apparently this is done by the prime tuning neurons involved in the processing of the sensory, phonological, and semantic codes of the word, so that fewer neurons are required by the subsequent target (UngerIeider et al., 1998~.
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From page 58... ...
The window into the developing brain allows us to see that stimulation from the environment changes the very physiology of the brain, with implications for cognitive, social, and emotional growth. The ability of the environment to substantially alter developmental outcomes in the early years suggests the potential for preschoo]
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