WHAT YOUNG MIND NEED TO KNOW

Frequently Asked Questions

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For example, Massey and Gelman reported that 3- and 4-year-old children correctly responded when asked if novel objects like an echidna and a statue can move themselves up and down a hill. Despite the fact that the echidna looked less like a familiar animal than did a statue, the children claimed that only the living object could move itself up and down a hill. Similarly, young children in this age range can give sensible answers to questions about the difference between the insides and outsides of animals, machines, and natural inanimate objects; see Figure 4.

These are only a handful of findings from a large body of research that goes a long way to challenge the idea that young children are incapable of considering non-perceptual data in scientific areas. Given that there is a mounting body of evidence showing that youngsters are busy constructing coherent accounts of their physical and biological worlds, one needs to ask to what extent these early competencies serve as a bridge for further learning when they enter school.

An ever-increasing body of evidence shows that the human mind is endowed with an implicit mental ability that facilitates attention to and use of representations of the number of items in a visual array, sequence of drumbeats, jumps of a toy bunny, numerical values represented in arrays, etc. For example, Starkey et al.

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Each successive picture showed different household items, including combs, pipes, lemons, scissors, and corkscrews that varied in color, shape, size, and texture and spatial position. Half of the infants saw a series of two-item displays while the other half were shown a series of three-item displays. When they became bored, their looking times dropped by 50 percent they habituated. At this point, they were then shown displays that alternated between two and three items, and if the displays showed a different number of items from what they had seen before, the infants began to show interest by looking again.

The only common characteristic within the two-item and three-item displays was their numerical value, so one can say the infants habituated to the set of two or three things and then recovered interest when they were shown a different number of things. The infants could have focused on perceptual attributes of the items such as their shapes, motion, textural complexity, and so on, but they did not.

This is an important clue that they are able to process information that represents number at a rather abstract level. Other researchers have shown that infants pay attention to the number of times a toy rabbit jumps up and down, so long as the number of jumping events they have to keep track of is kept between two and four jumps Wynn, They found that 5-month-old infants used visual expectation see previous section to show that infants are able to distinguish three pictures presented in one location from two pictures in another.

Massey and Gelman Through their surprise or search reactions, young children are able to tell us when an item is added or subtracted from what they expected Wynn, , a, b; Starkey, For example, 5-month-old infants first saw two objects repeatedly; then a screen covered the objects and they watched as an experimenter proceeded to add another object or remove one from the hidden display. The screen was then removed, revealing one more or one less item than before.

Experimental evidence of this kind implies a psychological process that relates the effect of adding or removing items to a numerical representation of the initial display. A similar line of evidence with preschool children indicates that very young children are actively engaged in using their implicit knowledge of number to attend to and make sense of novel examples of numerical data in their environments; see Box 4.

Together, the findings indicate that even young children can actively participate in their own learning and problem solving about number. But just because children have some knowledge of numbers before they enter school is not to say that there is little need for careful learning later. Early understanding of numbers can guide their entry into school-based learning about number concepts. Successful programs based on developmental psychology already exist, notably the Right Start Program Griffin and Case, Although making the entry levels easier, these early number concepts can also be problematic when it comes to the transitions to higher-level mathematics.

Rational numbers fractions do not behave like whole numbers, and attempting to treat them as such leads to serious problems. They believe the larger number always represents a bigger quantity or larger unit. We introduced the idea that children come equipped with the means necessary for understanding their worlds when considering physical and biological concepts. It should not be surprising that infants also possess. How do 3- to 5-year old children react when they encounter unexpected changes in the number of items?

Before the dialog below, children had been playing with five toy mice that were on a plate; the plate and mice were then covered and the experimenter surreptitiously took away two mice before uncovering the plate Gelman and Gallistel, One, two, three, four, five; no—one, two, three, four. Uh…there were five, right? They begin at an early age to develop knowledge of their linguistic environments, using a set of specific mechanisms that guide language development.

Infants have to be able to distinguish linguistic information from nonlinguistic stimuli: By 4 months of age, infants clearly show a preference for listening to words over other sounds Colombo and Bundy, And they can distinguish changes in language. For example, after being habituated to English sentences, infants detected the shift to a different language, such as Spanish; they did not register shifts to different English utterances Bahrick and Pickens, , which indicates that they noticed the novel Spanish utterances.

Young infants learn to pay attention to the features of speech, such as intonation and rhythm, that help them obtain critical information about language and meaning. As they get older, they concentrate on utterances that share a structure that corresponds to their maternal language, and they neglect utterances that do not. By 6 months of age, infants distinguish some of the properties that characterize the language of their immediate environment Kuhl et al.

Around 8—10 months of age, infants stop treating speech as consisting of mere sounds and begin to represent only the linguistically relevant contrasts Mehler and Christophe, For example, Kuhl et al. Mean latencies of initiation of a visual saccade in the direction of the sound for American 2-month-olds listening to French and English sentences.

Adapted from Mehler and Christophe Such studies illustrate that the learning environment is critical for determining what is learned even when the basic learning mechanisms do not vary. Young infants are also predisposed to attend to the language spoken by others around them.

They are attracted to human faces, and look especially often at the lips of the person speaking. They appear to expect certain types of coordination between mouth movements and speech. When shown videos of people talking, infants can detect the differences between lip movements that are synchronized with the sounds and those that are not. Young children also actively attempt to understand the meaning of the language that is spoken around them.

Parents of 1-year-olds report that their children understand much of what is said to them, although there is obviously a great deal of information that children really do not understand Chapman, For example, Lewis and Freedle analyzed the comprehension abilities of a month-old child. In everyday settings, young children have rich opportunities for learning because they can use context to figure out what someone must mean by various sentence structures and words. The child uses meaning as a clue to language rather than language as a clue to meaning MacNamara, The biological underpinnings enable children to become fluent in language by about age three, but if they are not in a language-using environment, they will not develop this capacity.

Experience is important; but the opportunity to use the skills— practice—is also important. Janellen Huttenlocher, for example, has shown that language has to be practiced as an ongoing and active process and not merely passively observed by watching television Huttenlocher, cited in Newsweek, These predispositions help prepare human infants for the complex challenges of adaptive learning that come later in life.

In order to thrive, children must still engage in self-directed and other-directed learning, even in areas of early competence. In this section we look at how children learn about things that they would not be predisposed to attend to, such as chess or the capital cities of countries. We discuss how children come to be able to learn almost anything through effort and will. It has generally been assumed that in the arena of deliberate, intentional, mindful, and strategic learning, young children are woefully inadequate.

But recent scientific studies have revealed hitherto unsuspected strategic competence and metacognitive knowledge in young children. A traditional view of learning and development was that young children know and can do little, but with age maturation and experience of any kind they become increasingly competent. From this view, learning is development and development is learning.

There is no need to postulate special forms of learning nor for learners to be particularly active see Bijou and Baer, ; Skinner, Yet even in privileged domains, as described above, this passive view does not fully apply. In addition, research in another major area began to show how learners process information, remember, and solve problems in nonprivileged domains. All human learners have limitations to their. Simon and others e.

The crucial argument for developmental psychologists is whether young learners are particularly hampered by memory limitations and whether, compared with adults, they are less able to overcome general limitations through the clever use of strategies or by lack of relevant knowledge factors.

One view of learning in children is that they have a less memory capacity than adults. With more mental space, they can retain more information and perform more complex mental operations. A complementary view is that the mental operations of older children are more rapid, enabling them to make use of their limited capacity more effectively Case, If one holds either of these positions, one would expect relatively uniform improvement in performance across domains of learning Case, ; Piaget, A second view is that children and adults have roughly the same mental capacity, but that with development children acquire knowledge and develop effective activities to use their minds well.

Such activities are often called strategies. There are a variety of well-known strategies that increase remembering, such as rehearsal repeating items over and over , which tends to improve rote recall Belmont and Butterfield, ; elaboration Reder and Anderson, , which improves retention of more meaningful units such as sentences; and summarization Brown and Day, , which increases retention and comprehension. These are just three of many strategies. Perhaps the most pervasive strategy used to improve memory performance is clustering: Clustering is a strategy that depends on organizing knowledge.

Given a list of numbers to remember, sounds phonemes to distinguish from one another, or a set of unrelated facts to recall, there is a critical change in performance at around seven items. A prototype experiment would involve, for example, presenting 4- to year-olds with long lists of pictures to remember, far more than they could if they simply tried to remember them individually.

Such a list might consist of pictures of a cat, rose, train, hat, airplane, horse, tulip, boat, coat, etc. Given a item list, older children remember more than younger children, but the factor responsible for better recall is not age per se, but whether the child notices that the list consists of four categories animals, plants, means of transportation, and articles of clothing. If the categories are noticed, young children often recall the entire list. In the absence of category recognition, performance is poorer and shows the age effect.

Younger children employ categorization strategies less often than older ones. However, the skill is knowledge related, not age related; the more complex the categories, the older the child is before noticing the structure. One has to know a structure before one can use it. If one believes that learning differences are determined by gradual increases in capacity or speed of processing, one would expect relatively uniform increases in learning across most domains.

The importance of prior knowledge in determining performance, crucial to adults as well as children, includes knowledge about learning, knowledge of their own learning strengths and weaknesses, and the demands of the learning task at hand. Whereas self-regulation may appear quite early, reflection appears to be late developing.

If children lack insight to their own learning abilities, they can hardly be expected to plan or self-regulate efficiently. The evidence suggests that, like other forms of learning, metacognition develops gradually and is as dependent on knowledge as experience. It is difficult to engage in self-regulation and reflection in areas that one does not understand. However, on topics that children know, primitive forms of self-regulation and reflection appear early Brown and DeLoache, Attempts at deliberate remembering in preschool children provide glimpses of the early emergence of the ability to plan, orchestrate, and apply strategies.

In a famous example, 3- and 4-year-old children were asked to watch while a small toy dog was hidden under one of three cups. The children were instructed to remember where the dog was. The children were anything but passive as they waited alone during a delay interval Wellman et al. Some children displayed various behaviors that resemble well-known mnemonic strategies, including clear attempts at retrieval practice, such as looking at the target cup and nodding yes, looking at the non-target cups and nodding no, and retrieval cueing, such as marking the correct cup by resting a hand on it or moving it to a salient position.

Both of these strategies are precursors to more mature rehearsal activities. These efforts were rewarded: These attempts to aid remembering involve a dawning awareness of metacognition—that without some effort, forgetting would occur. And the strategies involved resemble the more mature forms of strategic intervention, such as rehearsal, used by older school-aged children.

By recognizing this dawning understanding in children, one can begin to design learning activities in the early school years that build on and strengthen their understanding of what it means to learn and remember. The strategies that children use to memorize, conceptualize, reason, and solve problems grow increasingly effective and flexible, and are applied more broadly, with age and experience.

But different strategies are not solely related to age. To demonstrate the variety, we consider the specific case of the addition of single-digit numbers, which has been the subject of a great deal of cognitive research. For a group of and month-old children, an attractive toy, Big Bird, was hidden in a variety of locations in a playroom, such as behind a pillow, on a couch, or under a chair. Instead, they often interrupted their play with a variety of activities that showed they were still preoccupied with the memory task.

More recently, however, a more complex and interesting picture has emerged Siegler, On a problem-by-problem basis, children of the same age often use a wide variety of strategies. This finding has emerged in domains as diverse as arithmetic Cooney et al. Even the same child presented the same problem on two successive days often uses different strategies Siegler and McGilly, For example, when 5-year-olds add numbers, they sometimes count from 1, as noted above, but they also sometimes retrieve answers from memory, and sometimes they count from the larger number Siegler, The fact that children use diverse strategies is not a mere idiosyncrasy of human cognition.

Good reasons exist for people to know and use multiple strategies. Strategies differ in their accuracy, in the amounts of time their execution requires, in their processing demands, and in the range of problems to which they apply. Strategy choices involve tradeoffs among these. The broader the range of strategies that children know and can appreciate where they apply, the more precisely they can shape their approaches to the demands of particular circumstances.

Even young children can capitalize on the strengths of different strategies and use each one for the problems for which its advantages are greatest. The adaptiveness of these strategy choices increases as children gain experience with the domain, though it is obvious even in early years Lemaire and Siegler, Once it is recognized that children know multiple strategies and choose among them, the question arises: How do they construct such strategies in the first place? This question is answered through studies in which individual children who do not yet know a strategy are given prolonged experiences weeks or months in the subject matter; in this way, researchers can study how children devise their various strategies Kuhn, ; Siegler and Crowley, ; see also DeLoache et al, a.

In this approach, one can identify when a new strategy is first used, which in turn allows examination of what the experience of discovery was like, what led to the discovery, and how the discovery was generalized beyond its initial use. Three key findings have emerged from these studies: Children often generate useful new strategies without ever having generated conceptually flawed ones. They seem to seek conceptual understanding of the requisites of appropriate strategies in a domain.

On such tasks as single-digit addition, multidigit subtraction, and the game of tic-tactoe, children possess such understanding, which allows them to recognize the usefulness of new, more advanced strategies before they generate them spontaneously Hatano and Inagaki, ; Siegler and Crowley, A common feature of such innovations as reciprocal teaching Palincsar and Brown, , communities of learners Brown and Campione, , ; Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, , the ideal student Pressley et al.

These programs differ, but all are aimed at helping students to understand how strategies can help them solve problems, to recognize when each strategy is likely to be most useful, and to transfer strategies to novel situations. The considerable success that these instructional programs have enjoyed, with young as well as older children and with low-income as well as middle-income children, attests to the fact that the development of a repertoire of flexible strategies has practical significance for learning.

In his theory of multiple intelligences, Gardner , proposed the existence of seven relatively autonomous intelligences: The theory of multiple intelligences was developed as a psychological theory, but it sparked a great deal of interest among educators, in this country and abroad, in its implications for teaching and learning. The experimental educational programs based on the theory have focused generally in two ways. Some educators believe that all children should have each intelligence nurtured; on this basis, they have devised curricula that address each intelligence directly.

Others educators have focused on the development of specific intelligences, like the personal ones, because they believe these intelligences receive short shrift in American education. There are strengths and weaknesses to each approach. The application of multiple intelligences to education is a grass roots movement among teachers that is only just beginning.

An interesting development is the attempt to modify traditional curricula: Children with entity theories believe that intelligence is a fixed property of individuals; children with incremental theories believe that intelligence is malleable see also Resnick and Nelson-LeGall, Children who are entity theorists tend to hold performance goals in learning situations: They avoid challenges that will reflect them in poor light. They show little persistence in the face of failure.

Their aim is to perform well. In contrast, children who are incremental theorists have learning goals: They regard their own increasing competence as their goal. They seek challenges and show high persistence. Although most children probably fall on the continuum between the two theories and may simultaneously be incremental theorists in mathematics and entity theorists in art, the motivational factors affect their persistence, learning goals, sense of failure, and striving for success. Teachers can guide children to a more healthy conceptualization of their learning potential if they understand the beliefs that children bring to school.

Just as children are often self-directed learners in privileged domains, such as those of language and physical causality, young children exhibit a strong desire to apply themselves in intentional learning situations. They also learn in situations where there is no external pressure to improve and no feedback or reward other than pure satisfaction—sometimes called achievement or competence motivation White, ; Yarrow and Messer, ; Dichter-Blancher et al.

Children are both problem solvers and problem generators; they not only attempt to solve problems presented to them, but they also seek and create novel challenges. An adult struggling to solve a crossword puzzle has much in common with a young child trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle.

Why do they bother? It seems that humans have a need to solve problems; see Box 4. Children 18 to 36 months of age are given nesting cups to play with DeLoache et al. However, the children immediately started trying to fit the cups together, often working long and hard in the process. Overall, in their spontaneous manipulations of a set of nesting cups, very young children progress from trying to correct their errors by exerting physical force without changing any of the relations among the elements, to making limited changes in a part of the problem set, to considering and operating on the problem as a whole.

Most important, the children persist, not because they have to, or are guided to, or even because they are responding to failure; they persist because success and understanding are motivating in their own right. Research has shown that learning is strongly influenced by these social interactions.

Parents and others who care for children arrange their activities and facilitate learning by regulating the difficulty of the tasks and by modeling mature performance during joint participation in activities. A substantial body of observational research has provided detailed accounts of the learning interactions between mothers and their young children.

As an illustration, watch a mother with a 1-year-old sitting on her knees in front of a collection of toys. A large part of her time is devoted to such quietly facilitative and scene-setting activities as holding a toy that seems to require three hands to manipulate, retrieving things that have been pushed out of range, clearing away those things that are not at present being used in order to provide the child with a sharper focus for the main activity, turning toys so.

Parents frame their language and behavior in ways that facilitate learning by young children Bruner, a, b, ; Edwards, ; Hoff-Ginsberg and Shatz, For example, in the earliest months, the restrictions of parental baby talk to a small number of melodic contours may enable infants to abstract vocal prototypes Papousek et al. Parental labeling of objects and categories may assist children in understanding category hierarchies and learning appropriate labels Callanan, ; Mervis, An extremely important role of caregivers involves efforts to help children connect new situations to more familiar ones.

In our discussion of competent performance and transfer see Chapter 3 , we noted that knowledge appropriate to a particular situation is not necessarily accessed despite being relevant. Effective teachers help people of all ages make connections among different aspects of their knowledge. Scaffolding involves several activities and tasks, such as:. Consider the efforts to reach an understanding between an adult and a month-old about which toy the infant wants to play with. The adult is looking for a toy in the toy box.

But the infant ignores the cloth and points again at something in the toy box, then, impatiently, waves his arm. They repeat the cycle with another toy, and the baby waves his arm impatiently. How is it that children, born with no language, can develop most of the rudiments of story telling in the first three years of life? A variety of literacy experiences prepare children for this prowess. Recently, the efficacy of this process has been scientifically validated—it has been shown to work see National Research Council, In the late nineteenth century, C.

The majority of the book consisted of reprints of the famous Tenniel woodcut illustrations. This was a first of its kind, and we quote Lewis Carroll cited in Cohen, Sixteenth-month-old Julie is left alone temporarily with a visiting grandfather. The pictures were the primary focus; much of the original tale is left unspecified. For example, when looking at the famous Tenniel picture of Alice swimming with mouse in a pool of her own tears, Carroll tells the adult to read to the child as follows cited in Cohen, And Alice has tumbled into the Pool: You can just see her blue stockings, far away under the water.

But Why is the Mouse swimming away from Alice is such a hurry? Well, the reason is, that Alice began talking about cats and dogs: Suppose you were swimming about, in a Pool of your own Tears: For example, one mother began reading with her child, Richard, when he was only 8 months old Ninio and Bruner, Initially, the mother did all the labeling because she assumed that the child could not; later, the mother labeled only when she believed that the child would not or could not label for himself.

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Responsibility for labeling was thereby transferred from the mother to the child in response to his increasing store of knowledge, finely monitored by the mother. During the course of the study the mother constantly updated her inventory of the words the child had previously understood and repeatedly attempted to make contact with his growing knowledge base. Do you know what bees make?

They get nectar from flowers and use it to make honey, and then they put the honey in the beehive. They continually elaborate and question information, which. As the child advances, so does the level of collaboration demanded by the mother. The mother systematically shapes their joint experiences in such a way that the child will be drawn into taking more and more responsibility for their joint work. In so doing, she not only provides an excellent learning environment, she also models appropriate comprehension-fostering activities; crucial regulatory activities are thereby made overt and explicit.

Story telling is a powerful way to organize lived and listened-to experiences, and it provides an entry into the ability to construe narrative from text. By the time children are 3 or 4, they are beginning narrators; they can tell many kinds of stories, including relating autobiographical events, retelling fiction, and recalling stories they have heard. The everyday experiences of children foster this story telling.

Children like to listen to and retell personal experiences.

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These reminiscences are stepping stones to more mature narratives. As they get older, children increase their levels of participation by adding elements to the story and taking on greater pieces of the authorial responsibility. By 3 years of age, children in families in which joint story telling is common can take over the leadership role in constructing personal narratives.

This early interest in sharing experience, joint picture book reading, and narrative, in general, have obvious implications for literary appreciation in preschool and early grades. There are great cultural variations in the ways in which adults and children communicate, and there are wide individual differences in communication styles within any cultural community. All cultural variations provide. However, some variations are more likely than others to encourage development of the specific kinds of knowledge and interaction styles that are expected in typical U.

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It is extremely important for educators—and parents—to take these differences into account. Research shows that using your muscles also helps your mind. Animals who exercise regularly increase the number of tiny blood vessels that bring oxygen-rich blood to the region of the brain that is responsible for thought.

Exercise also spurs the development of new nerve cells and increases the connections between brain cells synapses. This results in brains that are more efficient, plastic, and adaptive, which translates into better performance in aging animals. Exercise also lowers blood pressure, improves cholesterol levels, helps blood sugar balance and reduces mental stress, all of which can help your brain as well as your heart. Good nutrition can help your mind as well as your body.

For example, people that eat a Mediterranean style diet that emphasizes fruits, vegetables, fish, nuts, unsaturated oils olive oil and plant sources of proteins are less likely to develop cognitive impairment and dementia. High blood pressure in midlife increases the risk of cognitive decline in old age. Use lifestyle modification to keep your pressure as low as possible.

Stay lean, exercise regularly, limit your alcohol to two drinks a day, reduce stress, and eat right. Diabetes is an important risk factor for dementia. You can help prevent diabetes by eating right, exercising regularly, and staying lean. But if your blood sugar stays high, you'll need medication to achieve good control. High levels of LDL "bad" cholesterol are associated with an increased the risk of dementia. Diet, exercise, weight control, and avoiding tobacco will go a long way toward improving your cholesterol levels.

But if you need more help, ask your doctor about medication.

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