Exam 9: Cognitive Development in the Preschool Years

Madeline, a preschooler, has just learned how to use the buttons on the remote control to change the channels on the television. Madeline loves to give demonstrations. She says, "First, you pick up the remote and you make it look at the television and push a button. . . . See, that's how it works!" This is an example of __________.

During Piaget's preoperational stage of cognitive development, __________ thought grows as mental reasoning emerges.

According to your text, by age 6 the average child has a vocabulary of more than 14,000 words. Think about your own child's vocabulary and how his or her language has developed over the past few years. Has sentence length increased, as well as understanding of plurals and possessives? Describe. What role did fast mapping play in the acquisition of language? In addition, have you noticed a change in the amount of social speech versus private speech? Describe.

Most 4-year-olds respond that there is more apple juice in the tall, thin glass than there was in the short, broad one. In fact, if the juice is poured back into the shorter glass, they are quick to say that there is now less juice than there was in the taller glass. This is an example of a(n) __________ task.

Recent research on learning to read and write suggests that 5-year-old children show increased brain activation when they learn letters by __________.

Three-year-old Sam gets a lot of satisfaction out of scolding Gill, his pretend friend and imaginary playmate. Sam is in Piaget's __________ stage of cognitive development.

Children that attend Head Start are benefited by __________.

According to Hart and Risley's research on language development, __________.

__________ is at the heart of one of the major advances that occurs in the preoperational period: the increasingly sophisticated use of language.

By the end of the preoperational stage, preschoolers begin to understand the notion of __________, the idea that actions, events, and outcomes are related to one another in fixed patterns.

Children who watch more than __________ hours per day of television and videos have a higher risk of obesity.

Identify three types of early education options.

Six-year-old Roman is an expert bike rider. He loves to share his expertise with anyone who will listen to him. Roman's favorite line is "If you wanna go really, really, really speedy fast, you hafta push real hard on the pedals." Roman's understanding that the pedals on the bicycle in some way control the speed of the bicycle illustrates __________.

Almost half of the states in the United States fund __________, a type of child care for pre-kindergarten programs that is often aimed specifically at disadvantaged children.

How would you evaluate Vygotsky's contributions to the understanding of cognitive development?

A meta-analysis on the importance of reading to young children found that __________.

Which is an example of learning the pragmatics of language?

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children over the age of 2 should be exposed to less than __________ hour of high-quality programming per day.

Longitudinal research on economic standing and language development found a positive correlation between affluence and time interacting (talking) with children. This means that __________.

What are the highlights of Piaget's preoperational period?