Developmental Psychology

Increased control of motor skills is created by increased coordination. What gross motor skills include activities such as running, jumping and larger bodily movements. Young children experience slower motor skills and will take longer to improve said skills. Younger children, during their younger years will spent most of their time exploring their surroundings. One of the number one causes of child mortalities is accidental death; such as drowning, choking and even poisoning. There are many other risk factors that raise the chance for accidental deaths. Some of these things are socioeconomic status, and a parent’s involvement in their child’s life. Studies show that children in lower socioeconomic statuses are three times more likely to die from an accidental death than counterparts in other socioeconomic statuses and categories. 5.2 Cognitive Development Egocentric refers to preschool aged children viewing the world from their own perspective, and not anyone else’s perspective. Most children can rely on scripts or outlines of common occurrences that happen in their lives. Usually children have the ability to exhibit empathy prior to this particular stage, which happens to be dependent on parent involvement as well as the surrounding environments. Intellectual and language skills will develop together with the ever-increasing memory capabilities. During this stage, a child’s memory is not quite mature enough to deal with difficult memories Children who are of preschool age, are considered to be in the early childhood stage, or what Jean Piaget categorized as the preoperational stage . This particular stage does not last very long, as it usually lasts until a child has reached 6 years of age. Children in this stage will not be able to handle complex mental operations, but their language skills do improve. In the preoperational stage, children in increase their skills and move towards performing even more complex situations or operations. One thing that this stage is known for the milestone that occurs and that is children are able to communicate using symbols. This is a function called the semiotic function . When a child assumes that two objects that have similar qualities, that the two objects are identical and is often referred to as transductive reasoning . An example would be a child calling all four-legged animals a dog even if there is no dog within the environment the child is in. One preoperational stage characteristic is called centration . This is when children have the ability to focus on a single object at a time, or perform one activity at a time, showing satisfaction with the single object or performing the one activity. Jean Piaget studied a lot of things, and one of these things was a child’s ability to reason and use logic. Some of the principles include conservation and irreversibility. Let’s take a look at these two principles. • Conservation : This is the understanding that the amount or number is not affected by the placement or shape of the object. An experiment was conducted called the Classic Conservation Experiment. o Classic Conservation Experiment : A child was presented with 2 classes that were short and wide. Both of the glasses had liquid in them that were the same volume. The child was asked to pour liquid from one of the short glasses into a tall, slim glass. Since

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