1. Group Presentation Assignment By Mulat & Zelalem

2. Child and Childhood  Child; Child means every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier’.  Childhood is that; The age span ranging from birth to adolescence. Childhood is a social construction;

3. Cont… Childhood is a variable of social analysis; Children’s social relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right, independent of the perspective and concerns of adults; and Children are and must be seen as citizens, active in the construction and determination of their own social lives, the lives of those around them, and of the societies in which they live.

4. A child’s cognitive world

5. 1. Piaget & cognitive developmental theory Cognition: “Thinking” in a very broad sense, including language, learning, memory, and intelligence.

6. Cont… I. Internal Principles  Assimilation:  Assimilation: A process in which people understand an experience in terms of their current stage of cognition.  Accommodation  Accommodation: Changes in existing way of thinking in response to encounters with new stimuli or events. o A complement to assimilation.  Equilibration  Equilibration: Biological drive to produce optimal state of equilibrium between cognitive structures & environment

7. Cont… o It is a dynamic process that regulates all adaptive activities. o By adaptation, individuals balance acquired knowledge (assimilation) and new information (accommodation).  According to Piaget, intelligence is governed by two functions:  Organization  Organization: Intellectual predisposition to interrelate, order & arrange elements of personal experience into systematic whole. o Adaptation o Adaptation: The process of adjusting one’s intellect to the external world.

8. Cont… II. Bridge Principles:  Schema:  Schema: Internal mental structures/ categories of knowledge that help us to interpret and understand the world.  Cognitive Operations  Cognitive Operations: Reversible mental action patterns that appear between ages of 7 & 8 years. III. Cognitive Developmental Stages of Piaget  Piaget-cognitive development proceeds through 4 stages.

9. A. The Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 Years):  Infants understand the world through their sensory perceptions & motor activities.  Behavior is limited to sensory stimuli and simple reflexes such as looking, sucking, grasping, and listening.  Object permanence: One important accomplishment at this stage. It is a child's understanding that objects continue to exist even though they are out of sight.

10. Cont…  Sensorimotor stage is divided into six separate sub-stages characterized by development of new skills. i. Simple Reflexes (Birth - 1 Month)  Characterized by reflexes such as rooting and sucking. ii. Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months):  Involves coordinating sensation and new schemas.  E.g. Accidental thumb sucking & then intentionally repeat it.

11. Cont… iii. Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months):  Children become more focused on the world & begin to intentionally repeat actions to trigger responses in the env’t.  E.g. Purposefully picking up a toy in order to put it in mouth. iv. Coordination of Secondary Reactions (8-12 months):  Children start to show clearly intentional actions.  They combine schemas in order to achieve a desired effect.

12. Cont…  Exploring surrounding environment and often imitate observed behavior of others.  Understanding of objects and their specific qualities.  E.g. Realizing that a rattle will make a sound when shaken. v. Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months):  A period of trial-and-error experimentation begins.  E.g. Trying out different sounds or actions as a way of getting attention from a caregiver.

13. Cont… vi. Early Representational Thought (18-24 months):  Begin to develop symbols to represent events/ objects of world.  Move towards understanding the world through mental operations than purely senses & actions.

14. B. The Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 Years) It is divided into 2 sub-stages: i. Symbolic Function (2-4 Years)  Children understand, represent, and remember objects in their mind without having the object in front of them. ii. Intuitive Thought (4-7 years)  Children tend to grow very curious and ask many questions;  They begin the use of primitive reasoning.  Intuitive because children realize they know many things but don’t know how they know it.

15. Cont…  Cognitive Achievements of Preoperational Children o Language & Pretend play.  Characteristics of Preoperational Children o Centration: Focusing all attention on one characteristic or dimension of a situation, whilst disregarding all others. o Conservation :Is the awareness that altering a substance's appearance does not change its basic properties. They lack

16. Cont… o Irreversibility: Refers to when children are unable to mentally reverse a sequence of events. o Class Inclusion: Inability to focus on two aspects of a situation at once inhibits to understand the principle that one category/class can contain several different subcategories/ classes. o Transitive Inference: Is using previous knowledge to determine the missing piece, using basic logic. E.g. A > B >C. So, A > C.

17. C. Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 11 Years):  It is characterized by appropriate use of logic.  Children's thought become more mature & "adult like".  Abstract, hypothetical thinking has not yet developed. Inductive Reasoning  Incorporate Inductive Reasoning: Drawing inferences from observations in order to make a generalization. Deductive Reasoning  They struggle with Deductive Reasoning: Using a generalized principle in order to try to predict the outcome of an event.

18. Cont…  Milestones & possessions of the concrete operational stage o Classification, Conservation, Decentring, Reversibility, Seriation, Transitivity, and Perspective taking. D. Formal Operational Stage (12 to 14 Years Through Adulthood)  Extends concrete thought to propositional logic.  Milestones:

19. Cont… o Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning o Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning: The capacity to formulate hypothesis and deducting logical implication out of it (What if). o Multivariate Thinking o Multivariate Thinking: Thinking to the level of scientific explanation (Describing complex events). o Metacognition o Metacognition: Thinking about one’s own thinking. o AbstractThoughts o Abstract Thoughts: Thinking about away from “here and now” o ProblemSolving o Problem Solving: Ability to systematically solve problems in logical and methodical ways.

20. Cont…  Limitations: o Imaginary Audience: False belief of adolescents that everyone around them is watching and judging them. o Personal Fable: Believing that one is unique from anyone else in the world. It’s often called “It can’t happen to me syndrome.”

21. 2. Vygotsky’s Socio-Cultural Theory  L.S Vygotsky (1896- 1934 )  Culture and social interactions are imperative to cognitive development.  Cultural-historical theory of cognitive development.  Six important assumptions: o Formal & informal conversations & education adults convey to children teach how culture interprets & responds to the world

22. Cont… o Thought & language become increasingly independent in the first few years of life. o Complex mental processes begin as social activities. o Children can perform more challenging tasks when assisted by more advanced & competent individuals. o Challenging tasks promote maximum cognitive growth. o Play allows children to stretch themselves cognitively.

23. Cont…  Language is critical for cognitive development.  According to Vygotsky, there are three forms of language: o Social Speech: External communication. o It’s typical at age two. o Form of language where people use to talk with other people. o Private Speech: Internal communication.

24. Cont… o It is a form of language where a person directs to themselves. o It serves an intellectual function. o It is typical in children from the age of three. o Silent Inner Speech: Appears when private speech diminishes in its audibility until it become a self- regulating function. o This was typical in children from the age of seven.  Scaffolding: Changing the level of support to suit the cognitive potential of the child.

25.  ZPD: Psychological distance between children’s individual performance in solving problems (actual dev’t) & higher performance when guided by capable others (potential dev’t).  The difference between what children can achieve independently and what they can achieve with guidance and encouragement from an MKO.

26. 3. Information Processing Approach:  Focuses on how children process information during preschool years.  Attention: The focusing of mental resources on select information.  Children’s ability to pay attention improves significantly during preschool years.

27. Cont…  They wander around, shift attention from one activity to another, and seem to spend little time focused on any one object or event.  By comparison, preschoolers might be observed watching television for a half hour.  Young children especially make advances in two aspects of attention

28. Cont… o Executive Attention: involves action planning, allocating attention to goals, error detection and compensation, monitoring progress on tasks, and dealing with novel or difficult circumstances. o Sustained Attention: is focused and extended engagement with an object, task, event, or other aspect of the environment.  The ability of preschool children to control and sustain their attention is related to school readiness.

29. Cont…  Memory: The retention of information over time.  Most infants’ memories are fragile &short- lived & explicit than implicit.  STM: Findings suggests that STM increases during early childhood.  In one investigation memory span increased from 2 digits in 2- to 3-year-old to 5 digits in 7-year-old, and increased only by 1½ digits between 7 and 13 years of age.

30. Cont…  LTM: also becomes more accurate during preschool years.  Young children can remember a great deal of information if they are given appropriate cues and prompts.  Strategies & Problem Solving: Deliberate mental activities to improve the processing of information. E.g. Rehearsal & organization.

31. Cont…  Yet, young children are limited using such strategies.  Theory of Mind: Awareness of one’s own mental processes & of others.  Children’s theory of mind change as they develop through childhood.  From 18 mths. to 3 years, they begin to understand 3 mental states:

32. Cont… o Perceptions: By 2 years, a child recognizes that another person will see what’s in front of his own eyes than what’s in front of themselves. o Emotions: They can distinguish between positive & negative emotions. o Desires: Toddlers recognize that if people want something, they will try to get it.