Lecture: Early Childhood: Physical and Cognitive Development
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 9
Opening
Picture a family car on a dark road. A 4-year-old in a car seat stares out the back window and says, "The moon is following us. It wants to come home with us." Now picture a preschool teacher hearing a puzzling answer at the art table, a librarian reading to a circle of children, and a parent building a block tower on the rug. Each of them is meeting the same thing: a young mind that works in its own way.
That's what this lecture is about. In Week 2 you met Piaget's cognitive-developmental theory and Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, by name. In Week 3 you learned time sampling and how to keep what a child did apart from what it might mean. Week 6 gave you Piaget's first stage, and Week 8 gave you Parten's play categories with a 10-minute time sample. This week we follow the child into early childhood, from about 2 to 6.
I'll take you through seven ideas in order. First the body: how motor skills grow. Then Piaget's preoperational stage, its egocentrism, and its other limits. Then Vygotsky's ideas about learning with others, then theory of mind, and last early literacy, where the two theories meet. By the end, I want you to hear a surprising answer as a window on thinking, not a mistake.
1. The body gets busier
Stand at the edge of a playground for a minute. One child runs to the slide and climbs the ladder. Another hops on one foot along a painted line, wobbles, and laughs. At a picnic table, a third child cuts out a paper star with blunt scissors.
You already know how to sort these, because Week 5 gave you the split. Gross motor skills use the large muscles of the body. In early childhood they grow from steady walking into running, jumping, hopping, and climbing. Fine motor skills use the small muscles, especially of the hands. They grow from scribbling into drawing shapes and people, using scissors, and handling buttons and zippers.
Here's something worth noticing. This course pins no single age for hopping, for cutting, or for drawing a person. Those skills vary widely, so we describe them in words across the whole span of about 2 to 6. Every age here is a typical range, never a deadline.
Pause and try this. The child on the playground hops on one foot, and the child at the table cuts a paper star. Which one is the fine motor skill, and why?
Think about which muscles do the main work.
Here's the answer. Cutting the star is fine motor, because the small muscles of the hand and fingers do the work, while hopping uses the large muscles of the legs.
2. One thing can stand for another
Here's a scene from a kitchen table. A 3-year-old picks up a wooden block, holds it to one ear, and says, "Hello? Grandma? Yes, I ate my lunch." The block isn't a phone. But for that child, right now, it stands for one.
Piaget had a name for this period. The preoperational stage is Piaget's second stage of cognitive development, placed at about 2 to 7, in which children use symbols and pretend play but show egocentrism, centration, and animism and do not yet conserve. Its great gain is symbolic thought: the ability to let one thing stand for another, like a word for an object, a drawing for a house, or a block for a phone. And pretend play is play in which a child acts as if one thing were another. It's symbolic thought in action.
Let's call back the play time sample from Week 8. It's illustrative, made up for this course. An observer coded one 4-year-old's play in 20 intervals of 30 seconds. Parallel play took 6 intervals, associative play took 5, and cooperative play took 3. Put those three together and you get 14 of the 20, which is 70 percent, play with or beside other children. Associative and cooperative alone make 8 of 20, or 40 percent.
But here's a caveat I want you to hold. That time sample codes social participation. It doesn't code pretend. So it can't tell you how much of that play was symbolic.
Pause and try this. Someone reads the time sample and says, "This child pretended 70 percent of the time." What's wrong with that reading?
Look again at what the codes actually record.
Here's the answer. The 70 percent is play with or beside other children, and the codes record social participation, not pretend, so the sample can't count pretend play at all.
3. Seeing from somewhere else
Try this with a friend. Hold up a picture so it faces you, and ask a 3-year-old what your friend sees. The child may name the picture, even though your friend sees only the blank back. The child isn't being rude. The child is answering from the only place the child can stand.
Piaget called this egocentrism: in Piaget's sense, a young child's difficulty taking another person's point of view. Piaget and Inhelder built a task to show it. In the three mountains task, a child sits in front of a model of three mountains, and a doll sits on another side. The child is asked what the doll sees. The typical preoperational response is to pick the child's own view. Later, in a stage you'll meet in Week 11, children typically pick the doll's view.
Now, the everyday word "egocentric" sounds like "selfish". That's the trap. A child in the three mountains task isn't refusing to care about the doll. The child has trouble picturing a view from somewhere else.
Pause and try this. A classmate says the three mountains task shows that preschoolers are selfish. How would you correct that?
Think about what the child is actually being asked.
Here's the answer. Egocentrism is difficulty taking another person's point of view, a limit on seeing from another place, not a lack of caring, so the task shows a way of thinking, not selfishness.
4. Height, the moon, and a tall glass
Go back to the car and the moon for a second. The child said the moon "wants to come home with us." Two more of Piaget's ideas live in that sentence.
Animism is giving life, thoughts, or feelings to things that are not alive. That's the moon with a want. Centration is focusing on one striking feature of a situation, such as the height of the water in a glass, and ignoring the others, such as its width. And conservation is the understanding that an amount stays the same when its appearance changes, as long as nothing is added or taken away.
Here's the task that shows centration best. In the conservation of liquid task, a child sees two short, wide glasses with the same amount of water. Then an adult pours one into a taller, thinner glass and asks whether they still hold the same amount. The typical preoperational response is that the tall glass has more. The child centers on the height of the water and ignores how narrow the glass is. Later, in the stage Week 11 teaches, children say it's the same and give a reason.
Pause and try this. A child says the tall glass has more water. Which of the three terms in this section best names what the child is focusing on?
Go back over animism, centration, and conservation.
Here's the answer. It's centration, because the child focuses on one striking feature, the height of the water, and ignores the narrower width.
And one more thing. Failing a conservation task marks a stage of thinking, not low intelligence.
5. Learning with someone beside you
Picture two children on a living-room rug, building a block tower after dinner, with a parent nearby. The tower keeps falling. The parent asks, "What if the big blocks go on the bottom?" The tower gets taller. Next round, the parent only points at the big blocks. The round after that, the parent says nothing, and the children start with the big blocks on their own.
Vygotsky would say the children did more with help than alone. The zone of proximal development is the gap between what a child can do alone and what the child can do with help from someone more skilled. Private speech is talking to oneself out loud to guide a task. And scaffolding is support that's adjusted to the learner and withdrawn as the learner's skill grows. That shrinking help on the rug is scaffolding.
Get the credit right, because people get it wrong all the time. The word "scaffolding" comes from Wood, Bruner, and Ross, in 1976, in a paper called "The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving." It's usually linked to Vygotsky's ideas, but it isn't his own word.
Now the running case. Record R5 was written at 4 years in a preschool classroom. While drawing, the child says quietly, "Now the roof. Then the door." That's private speech, and the drawing is a fine motor skill too.
Pause and try this. A visitor hears the child in R5 talking quietly while drawing and worries that something is wrong. What would you say?
Think about what the talking is doing for the drawing.
Here's the answer. Private speech isn't a sign of a problem, because it helps the child guide their own actions, the way an adult's voice once guided them out loud.
6. Knowing what someone else believes
Think of a time someone moved your keys while you were out. You walked back in and reached for the hook where you'd left them. You were acting on a belief that wasn't true anymore, and anyone watching could have predicted your reach.
That understanding has a name. Theory of mind is the understanding that other people have beliefs, wants, and knowledge that can differ from your own and from reality. And a false-belief task tests it by asking where someone will look for an object that was moved while they were away. The task comes from Wimmer and Perner, in 1983. A puppet version was used by Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith, in 1985. Most children pass false-belief tasks at around age 4.
Here's the first half of record R5. In a puppet game, the child says the first puppet will look for the ball "in the basket, where she left it," though the ball was moved. The child predicts the puppet will act on her old, now false belief. That's false belief understood.
Pause and try this. Does the three mountains task test the same thing as the false-belief task in R5?
Think about seeing versus believing.
Here's the answer. No, because the three mountains task asks what another person sees, and the false-belief task asks what another person believes.
7. Stories, symbols, and two theories
Last stop is a library story time. A librarian reads a picture book aloud, stops before the last page, and asks, "What do you think the bear will do?" Then she waits. One child points to a big word on the cover. Later, at home, another child scribbles loops on paper and "reads" them to a stuffed rabbit.
That's early literacy: the talk, stories, sounds, and early marks on paper that come before and support reading and writing. Both theories see something here. For Piaget, letters and words are symbols, so early literacy grows out of symbolic thought. For Vygotsky, the librarian's question and her pause are support inside the children's zone of proximal development.
So let's read R5 the course's way, with both theories. What the child did: predicted the puppet would look where she left the ball, and said "Now the roof. Then the door." while drawing. What it shows: false belief understood, and private speech. Vygotsky's theory reads the quiet talk as the child guiding the drawing. Piaget's theory adds that the drawing of a house is symbolic thought, the gain of the preoperational stage. In one plain sentence: the puppet answer shows false belief understood, which most children reach at around age 4, and the quiet talk while drawing is private speech guiding the child's own actions.
Pause and try this. In one sentence, how do Piaget and Vygotsky differ about where a young child's knowledge comes from?
Picture the child alone with blocks, then the child with a parent.
Here's the answer. Piaget's child builds knowledge mostly by acting on the world, while Vygotsky's child builds it with other people and the tools of a culture, such as language.
Closing
Let me pull it together. The body gets busier from about 2 to 6, in gross and fine motor skills, read as ranges. Piaget's preoperational stage gains symbolic thought, and the play time sample showed 70 percent of play with or beside others, though it can't count pretend. Egocentrism is a limit on seeing from another place, not selfishness. Centration, animism, and not yet conserving are the stage's other limits. Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and private speech show learning with others, and scaffolding belongs to Wood, Bruner, and Ross. Theory of mind shows up when a child passes a false-belief task, most often at around age 4. And early literacy is where both theories meet.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, the quiz, and the discussion. And in Week 10, we stay in early childhood and turn to the social-emotional side: Erikson's third stage and the parenting-styles model.
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