5: Early Childhood Flashcards
(38 cards)
first phase of childhood, from age 3 through kindergarten (about age 6) - initiative vs. guilt
early childhood
second phase of childhood, from roughly age 7-12 - industry vs. inferiority
middle childhood
Erikson term for early childhood psychosocial task of exuberantly testing skills and expressing bodies/minds
initiative
Erikson term for middle childhood psychosocial task of bending to adult reality and learning to work for what we want
industry
physical abilities that involves large muscle movements, such as running and jumping (boys are generally superior)
gross motor skills
physical abilities that involve small, coordinated movements, such as drawing and writing one’s name (girls are generally superior)
fine motor skills
inability to step back from one’s immediate perceptions and think conceptually - age 2-7 in Piaget’s theory
preoperational thinking
emerging ability to reason about the world in logical, adult ways - age 8-11 in Piaget’s theory
concrete operational thinking
changing the shape of substances to see whether children can go beyond their visual appearance to understand that the amount remains the same
conservation tasks
knowledge that a specific change in the way a given substance looks can be reversed (concrete operational thinking)
reversibility
preoperational child’s tendency to fix on the most visually striking feature of a substance and not take into account other dimension
centering
concrete operational child’s ability to look at several dimensions of an object or substance
decentering
understanding that a general category can encompass several subordinate elements (ex. “chocolate” / “candy”)
class inclusion
ability to grasp that a person’s core self stays the same despite changes in appearance (costumes, masks) - preoperational children lack
identity constancy
preoperational child’s belief that inanimate objects are alive
animism
preoperational child’s belief that human beings make everything in nature
artificialism
preoperational child’s inability to understand that other people have different points of view from their own
egocentrism
Lev Vygotsky’s term for the gap between children’s ability to solve a problem totally on their own and their potential knowledge if taught by a more capable person
zone of proximal development (ZPD)
process of teaching new skills by entering a child’s ZPD and tailoring efforts to the child’s competence level
scaffolding
the way human beings learn to regulate their behavior and master cognitive challenges through silently repeating information or talking to themselves (Vygotsky)
inner speech
sound units that convey meaning in a given language (ca, ba, da, fa)
phonemes
smallest units of meaning in a particular language (“boys” = “boy” and “-s”)
morphemes
child’s average number of morphemes per sentence
mean length of utterance (MLU)
system of grammatical rules in a particular language
syntax
