Unfamiliar situations or objects often elicit fear responses in infants. One of the most common is the presence of an adult stranger, a fear that begins to appear at about seven months. The degree to which a child reacts with fear to new situations is dependent on a variety of factors.
One of the most significant is the response of its mother or caregiver. Caregivers supply infants with a secure base from which to explore their world, and accordingly an exploring infant will generally not move beyond eyesight of the caregiver.
Infants repeatedly check with their caregivers for emotional cues regarding safety and security of their explorations. If, for instance, they wander too close to something their caregiver perceives as dangerous, they will detect the alarm in the caregiver's facial expression, become alarmed themselves, and retreat from the potentially perilous situation. Infants look to caregivers for facial cues for the appropriate reaction to unfamiliar adults. If the stranger is a trusted friend of the caregiver, the infant is more likely to respond favorably, whereas if the stranger is unknown to the caregiver, the infant may respond with anxiety and distress.
Another factor is the infant's temperament. A second fear of this stage is called separation anxiety. Infants seven to twelve months old may cry in fear if the mother or caregiver leaves them in an unfamiliar place. Many studies have been conducted to assess the type and quality of emotional communication between caregivers and infants. Parents are one of the primary sources that socialize children to communicate emotional experience in culturally specific ways.
That is, through such processes as modeling , direct instruction, and imitation , parents teach their children which emotional expressions are appropriate to express within their specific sub-culture and the broader social context.
Socialization of emotion begins in infancy. Research indicates that when mothers interact with their infants they demonstrate emotional displays in an exaggerated slow motion, and that these types of display are highly interesting to infants. It is thought that this process is significant in the infant's acquisition of cultural and social codes for emotional display, teaching them how to express their emotions, and the degree of acceptability associated with different types of emotional behaviors.
Another process that emerges during this stage is social referencing. Infants begin to recognize the emotions of others, and use this information when reacting to novel situations and people.
As infants explore their world, they generally rely on the emotional expressions of their mothers or caregivers to determine the safety or appropriateness of a particular endeavor. Although this process has been established by several studies, there is some debate about the intentions of the infant; are infants simply imitating their mother's emotional responses, or do they actually experience a change in mood purely from the expressive visual cues of the mother? What is known, however, is that as infants explore their environment, their immediate emotional responses to what they encounter are based on cues portrayed by their mother or primary caregiver, to whom they repeatedly reference as they explore.
During the second year, infants express emotions of shame or embarrassment and pride. These emotions mature in all children and adults contribute to their development. However, the reason for the shame or pride is learned. Different cultures value different actions. One culture may teach its children to express pride upon winning a competitive event, whereas another may teach children to dampen their cheer, or even to feel shame at another person's loss.
During this stage of development, toddlers acquire language and are learning to verbally express their feelings. This ability , rudimentary as it is during early toddlerhood, is the first step in the development of emotional self-regulation skills.
Although there is debate concerning an acceptable definition of emotion regulation, it is generally thought to involve the ability to recognize and label emotions, and to control emotional expression in ways that are consistent with cultural expectations.
In infancy, children largely rely on adults to help them regulate their emotional states. If they are uncomfortable they may be able to communicate this state by crying, but have little hope of alleviating the discomfort on their own.
In toddler-hood, however, children begin to develop skills to regulate their emotions with the emergence of language providing an important tool to assist in this process. Being able to articulate an emotional state in itself has a regulatory effect in that it enables children to communicates their feelings to a person capable of helping them manage their emotional state.
Speech also enables children to self-regulate, using soothing language to talk themselves through difficult situations. Empathy , a complex emotional response to a situation, also appears in toddlerhood, usually by age two.
The development of empathy requires that children read others' emotional cues, understand that other people are entities distinct from themselves, and take the perspective of another person put themselves in the position of another. These cognitive advances typically are not evident before the first birthday.
The first sign of empathy in children occurs when they try to alleviate the distress of another using methods that they have observed or experienced themselves. Toddlers will use comforting language and initiate physical contact with their mothers if they are distressed, supposedly modeling their own early experiences when feeling upset.
Children's capacity to regulate their emotional behavior continues to advance during this stage of development. Parents help preschoolers acquire skills to cope with negative emotional states by teaching and modeling use of verbal reasoning and explanation.
For example, when preparing a child for a potentially emotionally evocative event, such as a trip to the doctor's office or weekend at their grandparents' house, parents will often offer comforting advice, such as "the doctor only wants to help" or "grandma and grandpa have all kinds of fun plans for the weekend.
Beginning at about age four, children acquire the ability to alter their emotional expressions, a skill of high value in cultures that require frequent disingenuous social displays. Psychologists call these skills emotion display rules, culture-specific rules regarding the appropriateness of expressing in certain situations. Fear is often associated with the presence of a stranger, known as stranger wariness, or the departure of significant others known as separation anxiety.
Both appear sometime between 6 and 15 months after object permanence has been acquired. Emotions are often divided into two general categories: Basic emotions , such as interest, happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness and disgust, which appear first, and self-conscious emotions , such as envy, pride, shame, guilt, doubt, and embarrassment.
Unlike primary emotions, secondary emotions appear as children start to develop a self-concept, and require social instruction on when to feel such emotions. The situations in which children learn self- conscious emotions varies from culture to culture.
Facial expressions of emotion are important regulators of social interaction. To date, the strongest demonstration of social referencing comes from work on the visual cliff. Mothers first smiled to the infants and placed a toy on top of the safety glass to attract them; infants invariably began crawling to their mothers.
When the infants were in the center of the table, however, the mother then posed an expression of fear, sadness, anger, interest, or joy. Other studies provide similar support for facial expressions as regulators of social interaction.
Experimenters posed facial expressions of neutral, anger, or disgust toward babies as they moved toward an object and measured the amount of inhibition the babies showed in touching the object Bradshaw, Rather, they are building explanatory systems—implicit theories—that organize their knowledge.
Such implicit theories contain causal principles and causal relations; these theories enable children to predict, explain, and reason about relevant phenomena and, in some cases, intervene to change them. As early as the first year of life, babies are developing incipient theories about how the world of people, other living things, objects, and numbers operates. This example is discussed in detail below. Some additional illustrative examples of the development of implicit theories are provided in Box Infants first have a relatively simple theory of mind.
They are aware of some basic characteristics: what people are looking at is a sign of what they are paying attention to; people act intentionally and are goal directed; people have positive and negative feelings in response to things around them; and people have different perceptions, goals, and feelings. Children add to this mental map as their awareness grows.
From infancy on, developing. Even babies hold some fundamental principles about how objects move about in space and time Baillargeon et al.
For example, babies are surprised as measured by their increased looking time if an object in one location pops up in another location when they did not see it traverse the space between. Even babies seem capable of intuitively understanding something that approximates addition and subtraction, and they are surprised when something counter to these principles occurs Wynn, a. For example, when babies witness one object that is then screened from view and they see that another object is placed behind the screen, they are surprised when the screen is lowered if there is still only one object there.
There has been a recent explosion of research on quantitative abilities of infants and toddlers. These very early developing capacities in these two numerical systems lay the foundation for later mathematical abilities that will be taught explicitly to children. Young children also understand some fundamental characteristics of living things. They distinguish between living and nonliving things; they know living things grow and inanimate objects do not; they know sick or injured people can heal while broken objects do not repair themselves; they attribute life, growth, and biological processes to some sort of vital force or energy, and they know that food is necessary to nourish this vital force Inagaki and Hatano, Infants also detect when an adult makes eye contact, speaks in an infant-directed.
In contrast, babies who see an inanimate rod move on the same trajectory toward an object are surprised if the rod changes its trajectory to pursue the object but not if it continues on the old trajectory toward a new object.
An example of building on intuitive understanding to develop a more elaborate understanding of biology comes from a study on teaching preschool through early elementary school children about nutrition. Children at this age have an understanding that people need food to survive, but their implicit theory provides no causal mechanism for how food accomplishes its vital functions.
The approach in this study was to move beyond very simplified, nonexplanatory teaching material and instead to teach children in age-appropriate ways that different foods contain different nutrients that are too small to see, which in turn have different functions that are required to support diverse biological processes. The core concepts and causal principles provided a coherent conceptual framework that explains why it is important to eat a variety of healthy foods.
Children became able to explain why it is not healthy to eat only broccoli; they could pick a healthier snack based on the variety of foods included; they understood why people need blood to carry nutrients to all parts of the body.
Moreover, when assessed at snack time, the children who received this intuitive theory-based training increased their vegetable consumption Gripshover and Markman, In another example of intentionally contributing to a more elaborate biological theory for children at the older end of the birth-to-8 age range, third- and fourth-grade students during the severe acute respiratory syndrome SARS epidemic in Hong Kong increased their hand-washing behaviors after receiving lessons that germs are living things that thrive under some circumstances and die in others, and that reproduce quickly under some conditions and very slowly or not at all in others.
It is well established that babies and young children imitate the actions of others. Children as young as 14 to 18 months are often imitating not the literal observed action but the action they thought the actor intended—the goal or the rationale behind the action Gergely et al.
Only when babies have evidence that the speaker intended to refer to a particular object with a label will they learn that word Baldwin, ; Baldwin and Moses, ; Baldwin and Tomasello, By the time they are 18 months old, shared intentionality enables toddlers to act helpfully in a variety of situations; for example, they pick up dropped objects for adults who indicate that they need assistance but not for adults who dropped the object intentionally Warneken and Tomasello, Bloom, ; Hamlin et al.
The research on the development of implicit theories in children has important implications for how adults work with and educate young children.
Failure to recognize the extent to which they are construing information in terms of their lay theories can result in educational strategies that oversimplify material for children. Designing effective materials in a given domain or subject matter requires knowing what implicit theories children hold, what core causal principles they use, and what misconceptions and gaps in knowledge they have, and then using empirically validated steps to help lead them to a more accurate, more advanced conceptual framework.
Statistical learning refers to the range of ways in which children, even babies, are implicitly sensitive to the statistical regularities in their environment, although they are not explicitly learning or applying statistics. Like the development of implicit theories, this concept of statistical learning counters the possible misconception of babies as passive learners and bears on the vital importance of their having opportunities to observe and interact with the environment.
Several examples of statistical learning are provided in Box Young children, although not explicitly or consciously experimenting with causality, can experience observations and learning that allow them to conclude that a particular variable X causes or prevents an effect Y.
Recent advances in the field have documented the ways young children can implicitly use the statistics of how events covary to infer causal relations, make predictions, generate explanations, guide their exploration, and enable them to intervene in the environment.
The understanding of causal inference also provides an example of how different cognitive abilities—such as a sensitivity to statistical regularities and the development of implicit theories based on observation and learning discussed in the two preceding sections and Box —interact with and can mutually support each other.
Several examples of young children developing the ability to understand causal inference are provided in Box Csibra and Gergely argue that humans are equipped with a capacity to realize when someone is communicating something for their benefit and that they construe that information differently than when they merely witness it.
As noted previously in the discussion of developing theory of mind, children as early as infancy devote special attention to social situations that are likely to represent learning opportunities because adults communicate that intention. Information learned in such communicative contexts is treated as more generalizable and robust than that learned in a noncommunicative context. Infants can use information about the statistics of syllables in the speech they hear to help them parse words.
How do we know from hearing prettybaby that baby is more likely to be a word than tyba? One way is that the conditional probability of by following ba is higher than that of ba following ty.
Babies can use such conditional probabilities of syllables following each other to detect word boundaries, that is, to distinguish between clusters of syllables that form a word and clusters that could be different words strung together. In a pioneering study to test this notion, Saffran and colleagues exposed 8-month-old babies to recordings of trios of syllables that followed each other more frequently and syllables that were at the junctions between these trios and followed each other less frequently.
The latter had a lower conditional probability, representing how words compared with nonwords have syllable combinations that occur more frequently. After a period of exposure to the recording, the time the babies spent looking toward a sound source varied depending on whether they heard a trio of syllables that had appeared together more frequently or one that had appeared together less frequently.
Babies and young children are sensitive to the statistical likelihood of events, which reveals that they both are attuned to regularities they observe in the world and use such regularities to draw inferences and make predictions based on their observations. In one set of studies, for example, month-old babies were shown a box full of many red balls and only a few white balls.
The babies were surprised when balls were poured out of the box and all of them happened to be white or when someone reached into the opaque box and happened to retrieve all white balls. Thus the babies were registering the low proportion of white balls and recognizing the improbability of these events Xu and Denison, In an important variation, however, if the experimenter looked into the box as she picked up the balls, the babies were not surprised if all white balls were selected.
Block A placed on the machine always made it go. Block B was associated with the machine turning on but only when Block A was also on the machine. They were also able to intervene correctly to make the machine stop by removing Block A and not Block B.
Schulz and Bonawitz demonstrated that children use exploratory play to help them recognize causal relationships. They presented children mean age 57 months with a toy with an ambiguous causal mechanism, being one of two possibilities, or a toy with an unambiguous causal mechanism.
In the ambiguous case, children and an adult played with a box that had two levers, one controlled by the child and one by the adult. On the count of three, both the child and the experimenter pressed their levers, and two toys popped out of the box.
The child and the experimenter simultaneously released the levers, and both toys disappeared into the box. The ambiguity lay in whether one or both of the levers caused the toys to emerge from the box.
After this interaction, a different toy was brought out, and children could play with either of the toys. Children who witnessed ambiguous evidence for the causal mechanism played with the familiar toy more than the novel toy, while children who had seen unambiguous evidence for the mechanism elected to play more with a novel toy.
The causal ambiguity of the familiar toy motivated children to continue their exploration. Schulz and Bonawitz , p. Babies also can use the statistical distribution of events to infer the reason for failed actions and then deploy strategies to solve the problem.
Suppose babies cannot get a toy to work. Is the failure because the toy is broken or because they do not know how to use it properly? In one series of studies Gweon and Schulz, , month-old babies witnessed two adults pressing a button on a toy that. In one condition, one of the adults succeeded twice in getting the toy to play, while the other adult failed twice. In the other condition, each adult failed once and succeeded once. Babies were then handed a similar toy to play with that failed to produce the music when they pressed the button.
Babies who earlier saw one adult succeed and the other fail turned to their mothers for help in getting the toy to work.
In contrast, babies who saw each adult succeed and fail once reached for a different toy. Thus, depending on the prior information babies observed, they inferred that there was either some lack of ability on their part or some problem with the toy. When they inferred that the problem was with their ability, they turned to their mother for help; when they inferred that the toy was broken, they reached for another one.
In one study, for example, 9-month-old babies saw an adult either reach for an object a noncommunicative act or point to an object a communicative act. The entire display was then screened from view, and after a brief delay, the curtains were opened, and babies saw either the same object in a new location or a new object in the same location. The short delay imposed a memory requirement, and for babies this young, encoding both the location and the identity of the object taxes their memory.
As predicted, babies appeared to encode different aspects of the event in the different conditions. When they had previously witnessed the adult reaching for the object, they were surprised when the object was in a new location but showed no renewed interest when there was a different object in the old location.
In contrast, when babies first saw an adult point to the object, they were surprised when a new object appeared in the old location but not when the old object had changed locations Yoon et al. Babies have the capacity to realize when someone is communicating something for their benefit and therefore to construe information differently than when they merely witness it.
The significance of eye contact and other communication cues also is evident in research on whether, how, and when young children learn from video and other forms of digital media. Experiments conducted with month-olds, for example, revealed that they can learn from a person on a video screen if that person is communicating with them through a webcam-like environment, but they showed no evidence of learning from a prerecorded video of that person.
The webcam environment included social cues, such as back-and-forth conversation and other forms of social contact that are not possible in prerecorded video. Other studies found that toddlers learned verbs better during Skype video chats than during prerecorded video chats that did not allow for authentic eye contact or back-and-forth interaction Roseberry et al.
See also Chapter 6 for more on technology and learning. The benefits of communicative pedagogical contexts for the conceptual development of preschool children also have been investigated. But when those objects were doctored to be nonfunctional, the children in the nonpedagogical condition quickly abandoned their attempts to elicit the property and played with the objects in some other way.
Children who saw the same evidence but with direct communication for their benefit persisted in trying to elicit the property from other objects Butler and Markman, a,b. Moreover the intentional but nonpedagogical condition versus the pedagogical condition produced strikingly different conceptions of the function Butler and Markman, Some objects were identical in appear-.
Half of the objects of each color or shape had the unforeseen property, and half did not. Children were told they could play with the objects for a while and then should put them away in their appropriate boxes when done. The goal was to see whether children would sort the objects by the salient perceptual property color or shape or by function. Children in the pedagogical condition viewed the function as definitive and classified the objects by systematically testing each to see whether it had the function, while children in the nonpedagogical condition sorted by the salient color or shape.
Thus, identical evidence is construed differently when children believe it has been produced for their benefit. Understanding the power of language is important for people who interact with children.
Simple labels can help children unify disparate-looking things into coherent categories; thus labeling is a powerful way to foster conceptual development. Labels also can reify categories or concepts in ways that may or may not be intended. Awareness of the benefits and pitfalls of the language used by adults is important for people who interact with children. The language used by adults affects cognitive growth and learning in children in many subtle ways. Labeling is a powerful way to foster conceptual development.
Simple labels can help children unify disparate things into coherent categories, but can also have the unintended consequence of reinforcing categories or concepts that are not desirable. Some kinds of categories—two round balls, for example—are fairly easy to form, such that even babies treat the objects as similar. But many objects that adults view as members of the same category are perceptually dissimilar, and children would not, on their own, categorize them together.
Some categories have very diverse members: consider a greyhound and a bichon frise as dogs, or a tie and a raincoat as clothing. Atypical members of categories—thinking of a penguin as a bird, for example—also are difficult for children to categorize on their own. Hearing perceptually diverse objects called by the same label enables children to treat them as members of the same category, which in turn affects the kinds of inductive inferences children draw about them cf.
Gelman, Even very young children will base their inductive inferences on the category to which objects belong rather than their perceptual features when the objects are labeled. Providing a common label for perceptually disparate objects also is a way of transmitting cultural knowledge to children.
This effect of labeling objects speaks to one of the ways in which ordinary interaction with babies enriches their cognitive development and early learning Graham et al. While categorization has many benefits for developing inductive reasoning, it can also ultimately be associated with inferences that exaggerate differences between categories and similarities within categories. This may be linked to some undesirable consequences, such as stereotyping or prejudice based on these inferences Master et al.
It is impossible for any individual to experience first-hand all of the exemplars of a category. The use of generics is thus an indispensable way of learning about the category as a whole. Generics are a powerful way of conveying general facts, properties, or information about a category, and those generalizations often can stand even in the face of counterexamples Gelman, Therefore, not only.
This stability has many advantages, but as with categorization, it also can be problematic—for example, generic statements about social categories can reify the categories and beliefs about them. When an individual encounters members of a social category that do not share the relevant trait or behavior, those people may then be seen as exceptions but the generalization will still stand. Properties conveyed by generics also are construed as central or essential to the category Cimpian and Markman, Four- and 5-year-old children given the same information conveyed using generic versus nongeneric phrases interpret the information quite differently.
Subtle differences in generic versus nongeneric language used to convey information to children can shape the kinds of generalizations they make, the strength of those generalizations, and the extent to which properties are considered central or defining of the category.
Here, too, generics can sometimes play an unwanted role Cimpian and Markman, Dweck and colleagues have shown that children who believe an ability is inherent and fixed are more likely to give up when faced with failure and to lose motivation for and interest in a task, while children who view an ability as malleable are more likely to take on the challenge and work to improve their skill. Many of the foundations of sophisticated forms of learning, including those important to academic success, are established in the earliest years of life.
Development and early learning can be supported continuously as a child develops, and early knowledge and skills inform and influence future learning.
Many of these concepts describe cognitive processes that are implicit. By contrast with the explicit knowledge that older children and adults can put into words, implicit knowledge is tacit or nonconscious understanding that cannot readily be consciously described see, e.
Examples of implicit knowledge in very young children include many of the early achievements discussed above, such as their implicit theories of living things and of the human mind and their nonconscious awareness of the statistical frequency of the associations among speech sounds in the language they are hearing.
Not all early learning is implicit, of course. Very young children are taking significant strides in their explicit knowledge of language, the functioning of objects, and the characteristics of people and animals in the world around them. Thus early learning occurs on two levels: the growth of knowledge that is visible and apparent, and the growth of implicit understanding that is sometimes more difficult to observe. This distinction between implicit and explicit learning can be confusing to early childhood practitioners and parents , who often do not observe or recognize evidence for the sophisticated implicit learning—or even the explicit learning—taking place in the young children in their care.
Instead, toddlers and young children seem highly distractable, emotional, and not very capable of managing their impulses. All of these observations about young children are true, but at the same time, their astonishing growth in language skills, their very different. This point is especially important because the cognitive abilities of young children are so easily underestimated. In the past, for example, the prevalent belief that infants lack conceptual knowledge meant that parents and practitioners missed opportunities to explore with them cause and effect, number, or symbolic play.
In light of these observations, how do early educators contribute to the cognitive growth of children in their first 3 years? One way is by providing appropriate support for the learning that is occurring in these very young children see, e. Using an abundance of child-directed language during social interaction, playing counting games e.
The implications for instructional practices and curricula for educators working with infants and toddlers are discussed further in Chapter 6. Another way that educators contribute to the cognitive growth of infants and toddlers is through the emotional support they provide Jamison et al. Emotional support of this kind is important not only as a positive. Moreover, the secure attachments that young children develop with educators contribute to an expectation of adult support that enables young children to approach learning opportunities more positively and confidently.
Emotional support and socioemotional development are discussed further later in this chapter. Consider, for example, a parent or other caregiver interacting with a 1-year-old over a shape-sorting toy. The adult may also be using number words to count the blocks as they are deposited. In this interaction, moreover, the baby is developing both expectations for what this adult is like—safe, positive, responsive—and skills for social interaction such as turn taking.
As children further develop cognitively as preschoolers, their growth calls for both similar and different behavior by the adults who work with them. First, they are more consciously aware of their knowledge—much more of their understanding is now explicit. This means they are more capable of deliberately enlisting what they know into new learning situations, although they are not yet as competent or strategic in doing so as they will be in the primary grades. When faced with a problem or asked a question, they are more capable of offering an answer based on what they know, even when their knowledge is limited.
Second, preschoolers are more competent in learning from their deliberate efforts to do so, such as trial-and-error or informal experimentation. Nonetheless, the potential to underestimate the cognitive abilities of young children persists in the preschool and kindergarten years.
A study in kindergarten revealed that teachers spent most of their time in basic content that children already knew, yet the children benefited more from advanced reading and mathematics content Claessens et al. One example is interactive storybook reading, in which children describe the pictures and label their elements while the adult and child ask and answer questions of each other about the narrative.
In each case, dialogic conversation about text. Language and literacy skills are discussed further in a subsequent section of this chapter, as well as in Chapter 6. In a similar manner, board games can provide a basis for learning and extending number concepts. In several experimental demonstrations, when preschool children played number board games specifically designed to foster their mental representations of numerical quantities, they showed improvements in number line estimates, count-on skill, numerical identification, and other important quantitative concepts Laski and Siegler, Other research has shown that instructional strategies that promote higher-level thinking, creativity, and even abstract understanding, such as talking about ideas or about future events, is associated with greater cognitive achievement by preschool-age children e.
These activities also can be integrated into other instructional practices during a typical day. Preschool-age children are developing a sense of themselves and their competencies, including their academic skills Marsh et al. Their beliefs about their abilities in reading, counting, vocabulary, number games, and other academic competencies derive from several sources, including spontaneous social comparison with other children and feedback from teachers and parents concerning their achievement and the reasons they have done well or poorly.
Primary grade children are using more complex vocabulary and grammar. They are growing in their ability to make mental representations, but they still have difficulty grasping abstract concepts without the aid of real-life references and materials Tomlinson, This is a critical time for children to develop confidence in all areas of life.
Children at this age show more independence from parents and family, while friendship, being liked and accepted by peers, becomes more important. Being in school most of the day means greater contact with a larger world, and children begin to develop a greater understanding of their place in that world CDC, Children understand their own feelings more and more, and learn better ways to describe experiences and express thoughts and feelings.
They better understand the consequences of their actions, and their focus on concern for others grows. They are very observant, are willing to play cooperatively and work in teams, and can resolve some conflicts without seeking adult intervention CDC, Children who are unable to self-regulate have emotional difficulties that may interfere with their learning.
Educators in these settings are scaffolding the skills that began to develop earlier, so that children are able to gradually apply those skills with less and less external support. This serves as a bridge to succeeding in upper primary grades, so if students lack necessary knowledge and skills in any domain of development and learning, their experience during the early elementary grades is crucial in helping them gain those competencies.
Building on many of the themes that have emerged from this discussion, the following sections continue by looking in more depth at cognitive development with respect to learning specific subjects and then at other major elements of development, including general learning competencies, socioemotional development, and physical development and health.
These skills and abilities include the general cognitive development discussed above, the general learning competencies that allow children to control their own attention and thinking; and the emotion regulation that allows children to control their own emotions and participate in classroom activities in a productive way the latter two are discussed in sections later in this chapter.
Still another important category of skills and abilities, the focus of this section, is subject-matter content knowledge and skills, such as competencies needed specifically for learning language and literacy or mathematics. Content knowledge and skills are acquired through a developmental process. As children learn about a topic, they progress through increasingly sophisticated levels of thinking with accompanying cognitive components.
These developmental learning paths can be used as the core of a learning trajectory through which students can be supported by educators who understand both the content and those levels of thinking.
Each learning trajectory has three parts: a goal to develop a certain competence in a topic , a developmental progression children constructing each level of thinking in turn , and instructional activities tasks and teaching practices designed to enable thinking at each higher level. Learning trajectories also promote the learning of skills and concepts together—an effective approach that leads to both mastery and more fluent, flexible use of skills, as well as to superior conceptual understanding Fuson and Kwon, ; National Mathematics Advisory Panel, See Chapter 6 for additional discussion of using learning trajectories and other instructional practices.
Every subject area requires specific content knowledge and skills that are acquired through developmental learning processes. It is not possible to cover the specifics here for every subject area a young child learns.
To maintain a feasible scope, this chapter covers two core subject areas: 1 language and literacy and 2 mathematics. This scope is not meant to imply that learning in other areas, such as science, engineering, social studies, or the arts, is unimportant or less subject specific.
Rather, these two were selected because they are foundational for other subject areas and for later academic achievement, and because how they are learned has been well studied in young children compared with many other subject areas. The development of language and literacy includes knowl-. The following sections address the development of language and literacy skills, including the relationship between the two; the role of the language-learning environment; socioeconomic disparities in early language environments; and language and literacy development in dual language learners.
Language skills build in a developmental progression over time as children increase their vocabulary, average sentence length, complexity and sophistication of sentence structure and grammar, and ability to express new ideas through words Kipping et al. Catts and Kamhi define five features of language that both work independently and interact as children develop language skills: phonology speech sounds of language , semantics meanings of words and phrases , morphology meaningful parts of words and word tenses , syntax rules for combining and ordering words in phrases , and pragmatics appropriate use of language in context.
The first three parameters combined phonology, semantics, and morphology enable listening and speaking vocabulary to develop, and they also contribute to the ability to read individual words. Developing oral communication skills are closely linked to the interactions and social bonds between adults and children. This comprehension begins with pragmatics—the social aspects of language that include facial and body language as well as words, such that infants recognize positive and negative interactions.
Semantics understanding meanings of words and clusters of words that are related soon follows, in which toddlers link objects and their attributes to words. Between the ages of 2 and 4, most children show dramatic growth in language, particularly in understanding the meanings of words, their interrelationships, and grammatical forms Scarborough, Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith suggest that children build webs among words with similar semantics, which leads to broader generalizations among classes of related words.
Then, as new words arise from conversation, storytelling, and book reading, these words are linked to. The more often adults use particular words in conversation with young children, the sooner children will use those words in their own speech Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith, Research has linked the size of vocabulary of 2-year-olds to their reading comprehension through fifth grade Lee, Book reading stimulates conversation outside the immediate context—for example, children ask questions about the illustrations that may or may not be central to the story.
This introduces new words, which children attach to the features of the illustrations they point out and incorporate into book-centered conversations.
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