Guide to Lesson 12
The Play Years: Cognitive Development
The textbook accompanying the course is very informative, accurate and wellwritten. I encourage you to read the entire book, try answering the questions the
author poses, take time to make sense of the figures, charts and graphs presented
and enjoy the anecdotes and stories she uses to illustrate her points. However, I
know that time is important to you and when you get down to the business of
studying for the tests, you would like some guidance in determining what is really
important to process.
Here are my general guidelines for studying the reading material for this lesson:
Piaget underestimated the preschool child’s ability to reason about the world but the
obstacles to logical thought (p. 254-255) he discussed help us to understand some of
the errors children make in reasoning and problem solving. His concept of egocentrism
in this period is particularly insightful (p. 254). The section on Vygotsky reviews the
concepts of apprenticeship in thinking, guided participation and zone of proximal
development. The new concepts introduced are scaffolding, private speech and social
mediation.
The concept of theory-theory and theory of mind and the development of these abilities
is important to understand.
The distinction between sensitive period and critical period is confusing and
controversial (p. 266). You won’t be tested on this. You don’t need to memorize
numbers in the language section (e.g., vocabulary of a 6-year-old) and you won’t be
tested on the In Person section (p. 268). The section on Learning Two Languages (p.
271-275) is interesting but the research is a bit confusing. The important point is that if
children get experience interacting effectively with two or more languages, they can
learn them as easily as a child exposed to only one language.
In the section on Early-Childhood Education (p. 275-281) you need to understand the
difference between Child-Centered and Teacher-Directed Programs but you don't need
to understand the specifics of the Montessori and Reggio Emilia Approaches.
Understand what Head Start and the Perry Project (p. 279-280) are trying to accomplish
and the information on "Quality Matters" is important.
Here are my guidelines for reviewing the videos for this lesson:
The video segments reinforce many of the key concepts raised in the reading including
egocentrism, theory of mind and scaffolding. The video also raised some issues not
mentioned in the reading. In the segment on Piaget, the video discusses symbolic
thinking and connects this both to Piaget’s theory and the development of language.
One of the researchers in the video discusses more explicitly some of the major
criticisms of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development in this period. Other interesting
points mentioned in the video are how to deal with a child’s language errors and how to
encourage memory for details.
One advantage of the video is you get to actually see some of the little “tests”
researchers do to determine a child’s cognitive abilities. For instance, you see a child
making mistakes in a conservation of volume task, you see how a test for egocentrism
might be set up and the theory of mind test with the discrepant event (a band-aid box
with crayons in it) is demonstrated and discussed.
The segment on high quality early childhood education covers much the same
information as is covered in the book.