OPTIMAL COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

By Victor Okpanachi 

THE ROLES OF FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES IN PROMOTING OPTIMAL COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

This paper addresses concept development in preschool children, based on recent psychological research. Over the past 30 years, there have been more than 7,000 journal articles written on children’s concepts or categories. Scholars are attracted by the opportunity to understand fundamental theoretical issues (How can we characterize early thought? How does it change over time?) as well as by the practical concern of determining how children reason about concepts that are directly relevant to their lives and schooling (including mathematics, biology, and physics).

Cognitive Development

What is cognitive development?

Cognitive development refers to the development of the ability to think and reason. Children (6 to 12 years old) develop the ability to think in concrete ways (concrete operations), such as how to combine (addition), separate (subtract or divide), order (alphabetize and sort), and transform (change things such as 5 pennies=1 nickel) objects and actions. They are called concrete because they are performed in the presence of the objects and events being thought about.

Preschoolers, generally between the ages of 3-5;

·         Develop a longer attention span,

·         Talk a lot, ask many questions, ( as did Yao in our case study)

·         Test physical skills and courage with caution,

·         Reveal feeling in dramatic play

·         Like to play with friends, do not like to lose, share and take turns sometimes

In addition to the requirements for healthy growth of the previous years, children at this age require the opportunity to:

·         Develop fine motor skills

·         Continue expanding language skills through talking, reading, and singing

·         Learn cooperation by helping and sharing

·         Experiment with pre-writing and pre-reading skills.

Four key themes have emerged from recent research. They will be highlighted and illustrated in this paper.

• Theme 1. Concepts are tools and as such have powerful implications for children’s reasoning both positive and negative.
• Theme 2. Children’s early concepts are not necessarily concrete or perceptually based. Even preschool children are capable of reasoning about non-obvious, subtle, and abstract concepts.
• Theme 3. Children’s concepts are not uniform across content areas, across individuals, or across tasks.
• Theme 4. Children’s concepts reflect their emerging “theories” about the world. To the extent that children’s theories are inaccurate, their conceptions are also biased.

These four themes contradict some widely held (but erroneous) views of early concepts, and they raise a variety of issues regarding early education.

Theme 1: Concepts as Tools

Concepts provide an efficient way of organizing experience. If children were unable to categorize, their experiences would be chaotic filled with objects, properties, sensations, and events too numerous to hold in memory. In contrast to this hypothesized “blooming, buzzing confusion” (to use the words of William James), children from earliest infancy form categories that are remarkably similar to those of adults. Before they have even begun to speak, infants form categories of faces, speech sounds, emotional expressions, colors, objects, animals, and mappings across modalities. By 18 months of age, most children have begun a vocabulary “explosion,” adding roughly nine new words each day to their vocabulary (Carey 1978). Assuming that most new words encode concepts, this fact suggests that one- and two-year-old children are adept at concept acquisition.

However, concepts do more than organize information efficiently in memory. They also serve an important function for a range of cognitive tasks, including identifying objects in the world, forming analogies, making inferences that extend knowledge beyond what is already known, and conveying core elements of a theory. Many of these tasks are central to school performance; thus, concepts can be thought of as the building blocks to these more complex skills.

One of these cognitive functions, known as induction, is the focus of the following discussion. Induction involves how concepts foster inferences about the unknown.

In sum, this theme illustrates four important points:

• Concepts are used by children and adults to extend known information to previously unknown cases through a process called inductive inference.
• Such inferences are not based on perceptual similarity alone.
• Naming is an important vehicle for conveying category membership and thus guiding induction. Naming leads children to search for similarities among category members. Thus, this function is a highly useful tool available to children by at least preschool age.
• Despite children’s ability to use categories for induction, even in the preschool years, they do not always appropriately constrain these inferences.

Theme 2: Non-Obvious Concepts

On many traditional accounts, conceptions are said to undergo a fundamental, qualitative shift with development. That is, children and adults are often said to occupy opposite endpoints of various dichotomies, moving from perceptual to conceptual (Bruner et al. 1966), from concrete to abstract (Piaget 1951), or from similarity to theories (Quine 1977).

These developmental dichotomies are intuitively appealing, in part because children often do seem to reason in ways that are strikingly different from how adults reason. For example, in the well-known “conservation error” studied by Piaget, children under six or seven years of age report that an irrelevant transformation leads to a change in quantity (e.g., concluding that the amount of a liquid increases when it is simply poured from a wide container into a taller, narrower container). Children appear to focus on one salient but misleading dimension—for example, the height of a container—forgoing a deeper conceptual analysis. Throughout the past several decades, there have been many demonstrations that young children are “prone to accept things as they seem to be, in terms of their outer, perceptual, phenomenal, on-the-surface characteristics” (Flavell 1977).

Theme 3: Expertise and Task Effects Across Areas

The previous section illustrated that detailed knowledge is not a prerequisite for learning some of the core concepts in a domain (such as “germs”). Nonetheless, specialized knowledge can exert surprisingly powerful effects on cognition (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994; Wellman and Gelman 1997). Twenty-five years ago, Chase and Simon (1973) found that chess experts have superior memory for the position of pieces on a chessboard, although they are no better than non-experts in their memory for digits. Chi (1978) demonstrated the same phenomenon in children: Child chess experts even outperform adult chess novices, which is an interesting reversal of the more usual developmental finding. In these examples, experts are not in general more intelligent or more skilled than novices. The effects are localized within the domain of expertise.

Theme 4: Concepts and Theories

Adults’ concepts are influenced by theoretical belief systems. This statement can be readily illustrated with a very simple example. Until recently, a biological mother could be defined or understood as the woman who gives birth to a child. More recently, however, with new reproductive technology (including surrogate mothers and donor eggs), a biological mother need not be the woman who gives birth. Thus, even a concept so basic and fundamental as “mother” undergoes change as one’s theory of reproduction changes (which itself is influenced by changing technology).

A central developmental question is when and how children begin to incorporate theories into their concepts. One long-held view was that children’s initial categories are similarity-based and that children only begin to incorporate theories as they gain experience and formal schooling (Quine 1977). Likewise, Piaget argued that pre-operational children do not have the logical capacity to construct either theories or true concepts.

In contrast, many researchers now believe that concept acquisition in childhood may require theories. Murphy (1993) notes that theories help concept learners in three respects:

·         Theories help identify those features that are relevant to a concept.

·         Theories constrain how (e.g., along which dimensions) similarity should be computed.

·         Theories can influence how concepts are stored in memory.

Theories of cognitive development

Although there is no general theory of cognitive development, the most historically influential theory was developed by Jean Piaget, a Swiss Psychologist (1896-1980).

1.      Piaget's theory of cognitive development

Piaget's theory of cognitive development is a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence. Piaget believed that one's childhood plays a vital and active role in a person's development Piaget’s idea is primarily known as a developmental stage theory. The theory deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how humans gradually come to acquire, construct, and use it. To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes resulting from biological maturation and environmental experience.

2.      Lev Vygotsky's Theory of Cognitive Development

Lev Vygotsky's, cultural-historical theory of cognitive development is focused on the role of culture in the development of higher mental functions, such as speech and reasoning in children. His theory is sometimes referred to as having a socio-cultural perspective, which means the theory emphasizes the importance of society and culture for promoting cognitive development.

3.      Jerome Bruner's Theory of Development: Discovery Learning & Representation

Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner felt the goal of education should be intellectual development, as opposed to rote memorization of facts.

Three Stages of Representation:

Jerome Bruner identified three stages of cognitive representation.

1. Enactive, which is the representation of knowledge through actions.
2. Iconic, which is the visual summarization of images.
3. Symbolic representation, which is the use of words and other symbols to describe experiences.

The concept of discovery learning implies that a learner constructs his or her own knowledge for themselves by discovering as opposed to being told about something.

4.      Erikson's stages of psychosocial development

Erikson's stages of psychosocial development, as articulated by Erik Erikson, is a psychoanalytic theory which identifies eight stages through which a healthily developing human should pass from infancy to late adulthood. In each stage, the person confronts, and hopefully masters, new challenges. Each stage builds upon the successful completion of earlier stages. The challenges of stages not successfully completed may be expected to reappear as problems in the future.

Thus, from the case study the Piaget's theory of cognitive development and Jerome Bruner's Theory of Development: Discovery Learning & Representation were very much present because Bruner and Piaget agreed that children are born ready to learn. They both thought that children have a natural curiosity. They also both agreed that children are active learners and that cognitive development entails the use of symbols.

Ms. Serrano’s experience with her students would best be supported by Vygotsky's Theory.

As stated by Vygotsky adults in a society foster children's cognitive development in an intentional and systematic manner by engaging them in challenging and meaningful activities

What needs to be done by Families and home care-givers:

        i.            Enhance knowledge, attitudes and practices for appropriate care

      ii.            Enable access and opportunity to utilize adequate services

    iii.            Develop social and economic opportunity to care for children in early childhood

Necessary inputs by Families:

·         Capacity building and advocacy surrounding ECD (Early child development)

·         Provision of responsive and inclusive systems of accessible service delivery

·         Programs that enable parents and guardians to have adequate time and resources to provide the care necessary for children.

What needs to be done by the community:

·         Strengthen values, knowledge-base and commitment to ECD (Early child development)

·         Support and organize collective action for support services for ECD (management, resource mobilization and service delivery)

·         Enable participation and advocacy with local government on issues of ECD

Necessary Inputs by the community:

·         Advocacy amongst and capacity building of community organizations and networks on ECD (Early child development)

·         Financial and technical support for the development of networks

·         Provision of opportunities for decision making through the creation of fora and avenues for participation.

REFERENCE

Atran, S. (1993). Cognitive foundations of natural history: Towards an anthropology of science. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Au, T.K. (1994). Developing an intuitive understanding of substance kinds. Cognitive Psychology, 27:71–111.

Au, T.K., and Romo, L.R. (1996). Building a coherent conception of HIV transmission: A new approach to AIDS education. In The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory, ed. D.L. Medin, 193–241. New York: Academic Press.

Au, T.K., and Romo, L.R. (1998). In The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory, ed. D.L. Medin, 193–241. New York: Academic Press.

Barrett, S.E., Abdi, H., Murphy, G.L., and Gallagher, J.M. (1993). Theory-based correlations and their role in children’s concepts. Child Development, 64:1595–1616.

Bauer, P.J., and Mandler, J.M. (1989). Taxonomies and triads: Conceptual organization in one- to two-year-olds. Cognitive Psychology, 21:156–184.

Bruner, J.S., Olver, R.R., and Greenfield, P.M. (1966). Studies in cognitive growth. New York: Wiley.

Carey, S. (1978). The child as word learner. In Linguistic theory and psychological reality, eds. J. Bresnan, G. Miller, and M. Halle, 264–293. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Crain, William (2011). Theories of Development: Concepts and Applications (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc. ISBN 978-0-205-81046-8.

"PSY 345 Lecture Notes - Ego Psychologists, Erik Erikson" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-08-11.

Torres, J. and Ash, M. (2007). Cognitive development. In Encyclopedia of special education: A reference for the education of children, adolescents, and adults with disabilities and other exceptional individuals. Retrieved from http://proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/login?url=/login?qurl=http://search.credoreference.com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/content/entry/wileyse/cognitive_development/0

 McLeod, S. A. "Piaget | Cognitive Theory". Simply Psychology. Retrieved 18 September 2012.