Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children

Olivia N. Saracho, Olivia N. Saracho

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429810237
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children is the essential reference on research on early childhood education throughout the world. This outstanding resource provides a comprehensive research overview of important contemporary issues as well as the information necessary to make knowledgeable judgments about these issues.

Now in its fourth edition, this handbook features all new sections on social emotional learning, non-cognitive assessment, child development, early childhood education, content areas, teacher preparation, technology, multimedia, and English language learners. With thorough updates to chapters and references, this new edition remains the cutting-edge resource for making the field's extensive knowledge base readily available and accessible to researchers and educators.

It is a valuable resource for all of those who work and study in the field of early childhood education including researchers, educators, policy makers, librarians, and school administrators. This volume addresses critical, up-to-date research on several disciplines such as child development, early childhood education, psychology, curriculum, teacher preparation, policy, evaluation strategies, technology, and multimedia exposure.

Part I

Early Childhood Education and Child Development

1

Cognitive Development and the Education of Young Children

ENRIQUE B. ARRANZ-FREIJO, JOANA ACHA, AND FLORENCIA B. BARRETO-ZARZA

This chapter offers an updated overview of the basic landmarks of cognitive development during early childhood. First, the so-called classical theories are presented; these theories marked the beginning of the scientific study of cognitive development and provide key frameworks of reference for understanding the developmental and educational importance of this complex process. The historical origins of developmental scales will be expounded, and the contributions made by Piaget’s genetic epistemology and Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory will be explored. Finally, the section will outline the most important contributions made by information processing theories, which offer a new framework to understand the early progress of basic cognitive processes as prerequisites for developing higher-level cognitive functions, with special attention being paid to executive functions and their cross-cutting nature in the cognitive, emotional and behavioural self-regulation domains. The third section will analyse the major cognitive development challenges of early childhood, namely the development of language and theory of mind (ToM), which, while sharing common areas, nevertheless develop differently. Phonological, lexical and grammatical development culminates in basic learning processes such as reading and writing, which enable children to attend school, while ToM has deep-rooted implications for children’s cognitive and social development. Finally, the last section presents and discusses the implications of all the previous findings for preventive-educational interventions focusing on cognitive development and its optimisation within different development contexts.

Internal Cognitive Mechanisms and External Mediators for Child Development: The Classical View and the Transition towards Information Processing Theories

The contributions of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) underpin our current understanding of human cognitive development, and indeed, many aspects of Piaget’s work are still relevant even today. His theory will be presented in accordance with the summary drafted by Arranz (1998). To understand Piaget’s theoretical proposal of the evolution of the cognitive structure, known as genetic epistemology, one must first comprehend and accept the concept of functional invariants, which are basically functions which are present in a stable manner throughout the entire development process, but which manifest themselves differently in the different developmental stages identified by Piagetian theory. The first of these invariants is Organisation, which reflects the fact that the internal cognitive structure is always organised in accordance with a certain set of operating rules. This structure and its operating rules change over time as the result of the actions of another invariant function known as Adaptation, an interactive and dialectic process that operates in a bidirectional way between the structure and the physical and social environment. These functional invariants constitute what Piaget called an individual’s modus operandi, a way of functioning that is innate to each member of the human species.

Adaptation is twofold in nature. Its first component is Assimilation, or in other words the distortion of the external in accordance with the internal. Here, the cognitive structure itself is not modified, but rather new experiences and information are distorted to fit pre-existing categories in a process known as distorting assimilation. One example of this would be a child saying that a horse is a big dog because it has four legs. The opposite process consists of modifying the internal cognitive structure in accordance with the characteristics of the external object. This process is called Accommodation. To continue with the previous example, an instance of Accommodation would be to create a new category for horses, thus giving rise to an evident enrichment of the cognitive structure.

It is important to highlight the fact that no adaptive act is either pure Assimilation or pure Accommodation. Rather, the two processes coexist and complement each other. If an external object or piece of information resists the cognitive structure’s attempts at assimilation, such as, for example, when a little girl applies the same motor patterns to a golf ball as to the tennis ball she had earlier, the old structure enters into conflict with the object and becomes unbalanced in its relationship with it. The search for a new balance will force the cognitive structure to accommodate the object by generating new resources that enable the individual to explore its characteristics. The dynamic process of searching for Balance is the cornerstone of the model of change proposed in Piaget’s theory. Assimilation is behaviourally represented through play, understood as a repetitive, reassuring activity that serves to consolidate the cognitive structure while at the same time being enjoyable. Accommodation is behaviourally represented through imitation, an activity which seeks to integrate the new and which is flexible by nature and vital to ensuring developmental crises within the cognitive structure. The constant action of functional invariants enhances the active role that the individual plays in his or her own development process, through the construction of increasingly more complex representations of reality. Constructivism is therefore a key element in Piagetian theory.

Perhaps the most significant legacy bequeathed by Piaget’s theory to our understanding of cognitive development is its identification of the importance of both play and imitation in this process. In relation to play, the recent clinical report published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (Yogman et al., 2018) is worth mentioning, since it highlights the role of play in cognitive development, the construction of brain architecture and the development of executive functions and self-regulation abilities, among others. As regards imitation, research into its impact on cognitive development continues to be a vibrant field of study today, as regards both its innate and acquired components (Heyes, 2016), its cross-cultural components (Wang, Williamson, & Meltzoff, 2015) and the development of its neurological infrastructure within the mirror neuron system (Campbell & Cunnington, 2017). The educational implications of play and imitation will be discussed in the final section of this chapter.

Another key element in Piaget’s theory is the clinical and experimental work he carried out on children’s egocentrism. Early childhood is the stage in which this characteristic of children’s thinking is manifested most clearly, with egocentrism being a representation of the world as animist, to think that everything in nature has a soul and is alive, artificialist, to think that everything has been created by anyone, realist, to think that non-material things have a real matter, for example dreams, finalist, to think that everything has a purpose and phenomenic, to think that everything is observable. The Piagetian assumption that egocentrism is a cross-cutting characteristic of children’s thinking, which they do not start to overcome before age seven, marked the start of a fruitful avenue of research which has given rise to more recent work on the development of ToM. This construct has key implications for understanding normative and atypical cognitive development, as well as for designing effective interventions on developmental delays. Section in this chapter devoted to cognitive challenges in the early years explores the study of ToM development in more detail.

It may be interesting to highlight the fact that Piaget’s theory found a source of inspiration in the previous developmental approach of the French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911). Binet’s proposal is basically an experimental assessment of intelligence which views this construct from a developmental perspective. The American version of the scale was developed by Lewis Terman (1857–1956), who also developed the concept of IQ (intelligence quotient), which is the result of dividing a person’s mental age (as assessed by the scale) by their chronological age. The historical forerunner of modern-day development scales is still used today by psychologists as a basic diagnostic instrument for measuring cognitive development in the educational, social and health fields, in which a precise assessment of cognitive competences is a prerequisite for planning any kind of intervention. The Merrill Palmer scales and the different versions of the Bayley scales are also worth mentioning.

A very enriching complement to the classic understanding of cognitive development can be found in the work of L. S. Vygotsky (1896–1934), also known as the Mozart of Psychology due to his early demise and brilliant contributions. A concise and integrating summing up of his theory would be that it combines the idea of Piaget’s active subject or builder of cognitive structures with a solid yet flexible proposal regarding the influence of the social context on this process of construction. His emphasis on the influence of the social context illustrates the deep influence of Marxist theory on Vygotsky’s work, particularly as regards the anthropological and psychological contents stemming from it and highlighting the typical dialectical background understanding human development as a bidirectional interactive process by nature.

One key concept in Vygotsky’s theory is the Law of the dual origin of higher psychological processes. This law explains the process known as the individuation of the social, which gives rise to higher psychological processes, conceived as the result of the gradual internalisation of social interactions. In modern-day terms, we would speak of the internalisation of an interaction that is meaningful for the subject. It is in this process that we find the origin of the symbol as a higher psychological process. According to Vygotsky’s theory, interpsychic interactions (between people) attain an intrapsychic symbolic nature (within a person) following internalisation. An interpsychic interactive event, such as, for example, the agreement to ring a bell to indicate the end of class, is constituted in the form of an intrapsychic symbol for each of the subjects participating in the event, who internalise it. This symbol maintains its potential even in other interactive contexts, thereby expressing its decontextualised nature, just like the words in a language, which are defined as decontextualised mediation instruments. This is the case of the decontextualised power of the word “summer” brought to a conversation that is being maintained in winter.

The Law of the dual origin of higher psychological processes is further specified and complemented by the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). It is in the ZPD that the social dialogue that is later to be internalised takes place. It is defined by the distance between effective development – i.e. that which the child is able to do by themselves – and their proximal development – consisting of those activities, skills, abilities, etc. that they are able to do with the help of an adult. The ZPD characterises cognitive development not retrospectively, but rather prospectively, revealing the proximal achievements inherent to the maturing process. This prospective view of development is one of Vygotsky’s most important contributions, since it has the virtue of apprehending the development process itself, while at the same time successfully combining the dialectic approach and processes of social interaction.

The key activity carried out in the ZPD is imitation. The importance attached to imitation constitutes a vital nexus between Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s work, even though they both interpret this activity in terms of their respective theoretical constructs, with Piaget considering it to be generated inside the cognitive structure, and at the service of said structure, and Vygotsky viewing it as stemming from social interaction. J. Bruner (1915–2016) was perhaps the author who explored the idea of the ZPD in most detail and depth, making seminal contributions in this field, mostly linked to language acquisition formats and the help and structuring that the more competent adult offers the child during the development process. Together, all these activities make up what is known as the scaffolding (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) on which interactions in the ZPD take place. Both imitation and scaffolding are particularly important from the perspective of fostering cognitive development through education.

Finally, it should be mentioned that research into the internalisation of social interactions converges in studies on language. This is key issue in Vygotsky’s work, in which language is seen as a decontextualised mediation tool. Vygotsky applies Engels’ concept of tool in a masterful manner, claiming that words are human beings’ special tools and that it is through their subsequently internalised mediation that higher psychological processes are constructed. Language constitutes an agent for self-regulation and helps structure psychological activity. Even basic processes such as hearing and distinguishing pitch are developed under the influence of existing social conditions and, above all, language.

To conclude this overview of the contributions made by classical theories to our current understanding of children’s cognitive development, mention must be made of those theories that fall within the information processing paradigm, which uses the computational metaphor as its framework of reference. The first of these is Pascual-Leone’s theory of constructive operators (1987), which amends Piaget’s theory by focusing on the quantitative increase in memory capacity which occurs throughout the development process trying to find an explanation to the so-called decalage phenomenon, in which a subject carries out a good performance in a task with a low demand of memory and a bad performance in a ...