__________ is not a prerequisite for concrete whole number operations.

This section highlights what is known about cognitive development in young children. It begins with key concepts from research viewpoints that have contributed to recent advances in understanding of the developing mind, and then presents the implications of this knowledge for early care and education settings. The following section addresses the learning of specific subjects, with a focus on language and mathematics.

Studies of early cognitive development have led researchers to understand the developing mind as astonishingly competent, active, and insightful from a very early age. For example, infants engage in an intuitive analysis of the statistical regularities in the speech sounds they hear en route to constructing language (Saffran, 2003). Infants and toddlers derive implicit theories to explain the actions of objects and the behavior of people; these theories form the foundation for causal learning and more sophisticated understanding of the physical and social worlds. Infants and young children also are keenly responsive to what they can learn from the actions and words directed to them by other people. This capacity for joint attention may be the foundation that enables humans to benefit from culturally transmitted knowledge (Tomasello et al., 2005). Infants respond to cues conveying the communicative intentions of an adult (such as eye contact and infant-directed speech) and tune in to what the adult is referring to and what can be learned about it. This “natural pedagogy” (Csibra, 2010; Csibra and Gergely, 2009) becomes more sophisticated in the sensitivity of preschoolers to implicit pedagogical guides in adult speech directed to them (Butler and Markman, 2012a,b, 2014). Young children rely so much on what they learn from others that they become astute, by the preschool years, in distinguishing adult speakers who are likely to provide them with reliable information from those who are not (Harris, 2012; Jaswal, 2010; Koenig and Doebel, 2013). This connection of relationships and social interactions to cognitive development is consistent with how the brain develops and how the mind grows, and is a theme throughout this chapter.

Much of what current research shows is going on in young children's minds is not transparent in their behavior. Infants and young children may not show what they know because of competing demands on their attention, limitations in what they can do, and immature self-regulation. This is one of the reasons why developmental scientists use carefully designed experiments for elucidating what young children know and understand about the world. By designing research procedures that eliminate competing distractions and rely on simple responses (such as looking time and expressions of surprise), researchers seek to uncover cognitive processes that might otherwise be more difficult to see. Evidence derived in this experimental manner, such as the examples in the sections that follow, can be helpful in explaining young children's rapid growth in language learning, imitation, problem solving, and other skills.

Implications for Care and Education Settings and Practitioners

The research findings on cognitive development in young children summarized above reflect an evolving understanding of how the mind develops during the early years and should be part of the core knowledge that influences how care and education professionals support young children's learning, as discussed in Chapter 7. Many of these concepts describe cognitive processes that are implicit. By contrast with the explicit knowledge that older children and adults can put into words, implicit knowledge is tacit or nonconscious understanding that cannot readily be consciously described (see, e.g., Mandler, 2004). Examples of implicit knowledge in very young children include many of the early achievements discussed above, such as their implicit theories of living things and of the human mind and their nonconscious awareness of the statistical frequency of the associations among speech sounds in the language they are hearing. Infants' and young children's “statistical learning” does not mean that they can count, nor are their “implicit theories” consciously worked out. Not all early learning is implicit, of course. Very young children are taking significant strides in their explicit knowledge of language, the functioning of objects, and the characteristics of people and animals in the world around them. Thus early learning occurs on two levels: the growth of knowledge that is visible and apparent, and the growth of implicit understanding that is sometimes more difficult to observe.

This distinction between implicit and explicit learning can be confusing to early childhood practitioners (and parents), who often do not observe or recognize evidence for the sophisticated implicit learning—or even the explicit learning—taking place in the young children in their care. Many of the astonishingly competent, active, and insightful things that research on early cognitive development shows are going on in young children's minds are not transparent in their behavior. Instead, toddlers and young children seem highly distractable, emotional, and not very capable of managing their impulses. All of these observations about young children are true, but at the same time, their astonishing growth in language skills, their very different ways of interacting with objects and living things, and their efforts to share attention (such as through pointing) or goals (such as through helping) with an adult suggest that the cognitive achievements demonstrated in experimental settings have relevance to their everyday behavior.

This point is especially important because the cognitive abilities of young children are so easily underestimated. In the past, for example, the prevalent belief that infants lack conceptual knowledge meant that parents and practitioners missed opportunities to explore with them cause and effect, number, or symbolic play. Similarly, the view that young children are egocentric caused many adults to conclude that there was little benefit to talking about people's feelings until children were older—this despite the fact that most people could see how attentive young children were to others' emotions and how curious about their causes.

In light of these observations, how do early educators contribute to the cognitive growth of children in their first 3 years? One way is by providing appropriate support for the learning that is occurring in these very young children (see, e.g., Copple et al., 2013). Using an abundance of child-directed language during social interaction, playing counting games (e.g., while stacking blocks), putting into words what a classroom pet can do or why somebody looks sad, exploring together what happens when objects collide, engaging in imitative play and categorization (sorting) games—these and other shared activities can be cognitively provocative as long as they remain within the young child's capacities for interest and attention. They also build on understandings that young children are implicitly developing related to language; number; object characteristics; and implicit theories of animate and inanimate objects, physical causality, and people's minds. The purpose of these and other activities is not just to provide young children with cognitive stimulation, but also to embed that stimulation in social interaction that provokes young children's interest, elicits their curiosity, and provides an emotional context that enables them to focus their thinking on new discoveries. The central and consistent feature of all these activities is the young child's shared activity with an adult who thoughtfully capitalizes on his or her interests to provoke cognitive growth. The implications for instructional practices and curricula for educators working with infants and toddlers are discussed further in Chapter 6.

Another way that educators contribute to the cognitive growth of infants and toddlers is through the emotional support they provide (Jamison et al., 2014). Emotional support is afforded by the educator's responsiveness to young children's interests and needs (including each child's individual temperament), the educator's development of warm relationships with children, and the educator's accessibility to help when young children are exploring on their own or interacting with other children (Thompson, 2006). Emotional support of this kind is important not only as a positive accompaniment to the task of learning but also as an essential prerequisite to the cognitive and attentional engagement necessary for young children to benefit from learning opportunities. Because early capacities to self-regulate emotion are so limited, a young child's frustration or distress can easily derail cognitive engagement in new discoveries, and children can lose focus because their attentional self-regulatory skills are comparably limited. An educator's emotional support can help keep young children focused and persistent, and can also increase the likelihood that early learning experiences will yield successful outcomes. Moreover, the secure attachments that young children develop with educators contribute to an expectation of adult support that enables young children to approach learning opportunities more positively and confidently. Emotional support and socioemotional development are discussed further later in this chapter.

The characteristics of early learning call for specific curricular approaches and thoughtful professional learning for educators, but it is also true that less formal opportunities to stimulate early cognitive growth emerge naturally in children's everyday interactions with a responsive adult. Consider, for example, a parent or other caregiver interacting with a 1-year-old over a shape-sorting toy. As they together are choosing shapes of different colors and the child is placing them in the appropriate (or inappropriate) cutout in the bin, the adult can accompany this task with language that describes what they are doing and why, and narrates the child's experiences of puzzlement, experimentation, and accomplishment. The adult may also be using number words to count the blocks as they are deposited. The baby's attention is focused by the constellation of adult behavior—infant-directed language, eye contact, and responsiveness—that signals the adult's teaching, and this “pedagogical orientation” helps focus the young child's attention and involvement. The back-and-forth interaction of child and adult activity provides stimulus for the baby's developing awareness of the adult's thinking (e.g., she looks at each block before commenting on it or acting intentionally on it) and use of language (e.g., colors are identified for each block, and generic language is used to describe blocks in general). In this interaction, moreover, the baby is developing both expectations for what this adult is like—safe, positive, responsive—and skills for social interaction (such as turn taking). Although these qualities and the learning derived from them are natural accompaniments to child-focused responsive social interaction with an adult caregiver, the caregiver's awareness of the child's cognitive growth at this time contributes significantly to the adult's ability to intentionally support new discovery and learning.

As children further develop cognitively as preschoolers, their growth calls for both similar and different behavior by the adults who work with them. While the educator's emotional support and responsiveness remain important, children from age 3 to 5 years become different kinds of thinkers than they were as infants and toddlers (NRC, 2001). First, they are more consciously aware of their knowledge—much more of their understanding is now explicit. This means they are more capable of deliberately enlisting what they know into new learning situations, although they are not yet as competent or strategic in doing so as they will be in the primary grades. When faced with a problem or asked a question, they are more capable of offering an answer based on what they know, even when their knowledge is limited. Second, preschoolers are more competent in learning from their deliberate efforts to do so, such as trial-and-error or informal experimentation. While their success in this regard pales by comparison with the more strategic efforts of a grade-schooler, their “let's find out” approach to new challenges reflects their greater behavioral and mental competence in figuring things out. Third, preschoolers also are intuitive and experiential, learning by doing rather than figuring things out “in the head.” This makes shared activities with educators and peers potent opportunities for cognitive growth.

Nonetheless, the potential to underestimate the cognitive abilities of young children persists in the preschool and kindergarten years. In one study, for example, children's actual performance was six to eight times what was estimated by their own preschool teachers and other experts in consulting, teacher education, educational research, and educational development (Claessens et al., 2014; Van den Heuvel-Panhuizen, 1996). Such underestimation represents a lost opportunity that can hinder children's progress. A study in kindergarten revealed that teachers spent most of their time in basic content that children already knew, yet the children benefited more from advanced reading and mathematics content (Claessens et al., 2014)—an issue discussed in depth in Chapter 6. Unfortunately, when care and education professionals underestimate children's abilities to understand and learn subject-matter content, the negative impact is greatest on those with the fewest prior learning experiences (Bennett et al., 1984; Clements and Sarama, 2014).

Conversely, when educators practice in a way that is cognizant of the cognitive progress of children at this age, they can more deliberately enlist the preschool child's existing knowledge and skills into new learning situations. One example is interactive storybook reading, in which children describe the pictures and label their elements while the adult and child ask and answer questions of each other about the narrative. Language and literacy skills also are fostered at this age by the adult's use of varied vocabulary in interaction with the child, as well as by extending conversation on a single topic (rather than frequently switching topics), asking open-ended questions of the child, and initiating conversation related to the child's experiences and interests (Dickinson, 2003; Dickinson and Porche, 2011; Dickinson and Tabors, 2001). In each case, dialogic conversation about text or experience draws on while also extending children's prior knowledge and language skills. Language and literacy skills are discussed further in a subsequent section of this chapter, as well as in Chapter 6.

Another implication of these cognitive changes is that educators can engage preschool children's intentional activity in new learning opportunities. Children's interest in learning by doing is naturally suited to experimental inquiry related to science or other kinds of inquiry-based learning involving hypothesis and testing, especially in light of the implicit theories of living things and physical causality that children bring to such inquiry (Samarapungavan et al., 2011). In a similar manner, board games can provide a basis for learning and extending number concepts. In several experimental demonstrations, when preschool children played number board games specifically designed to foster their mental representations of numerical quantities, they showed improvements in number line estimates, count-on skill, numerical identification, and other important quantitative concepts (Laski and Siegler, 2014).

Other research has shown that instructional strategies that promote higher-level thinking, creativity, and even abstract understanding, such as talking about ideas or about future events, is associated with greater cognitive achievement by preschool-age children (e.g., Diamond et al., 2013; Mashburn et al., 2008). For example, when educators point out how cardinal numbers can be used to describe diverse sets of elements (four blocks, four children, 4 o'clock), it helps them generalize an abstract concept (“fourness”) that describes a set rather than the characteristics of each element alone. These activities also can be integrated into other instructional practices during a typical day.

Another implication of the changes in young children's thinking during the preschool years concerns the motivational features of early learning. Preschool-age children are developing a sense of themselves and their competencies, including their academic skills (Marsh et al., 1998, 2002). Their beliefs about their abilities in reading, counting, vocabulary, number games, and other academic competencies derive from several sources, including spontaneous social comparison with other children and feedback from teachers (and parents) concerning their achievement and the reasons they have done well or poorly. These beliefs influence, in turn, children's self-confidence, persistence, intrinsic motivation to succeed, and other characteristics that may be described as learning skills (and are discussed more extensively later in this chapter). Consequently, how teachers provide performance feedback to young children and support for their self-confidence in learning situations also is an important predictor of children's academic success (Hamre, 2014).

In the early elementary years, children's cognitive processes develop further, which accordingly influences the strategies for educators in early elementary classrooms. Primary grade children are using more complex vocabulary and grammar. They are growing in their ability to make mental representations, but they still have difficulty grasping abstract concepts without the aid of real-life references and materials (Tomlinson, 2014). This is a critical time for children to develop confidence in all areas of life. Children at this age show more independence from parents and family, while friendship, being liked and accepted by peers, becomes more important. Being in school most of the day means greater contact with a larger world, and children begin to develop a greater understanding of their place in that world (CDC, 2014).

Children's growing ability to self-regulate their emotions also is evident in this period (discussed more extensively later in this chapter). Children understand their own feelings more and more, and learn better ways to describe experiences and express thoughts and feelings. They better understand the consequences of their actions, and their focus on concern for others grows. They are very observant, are willing to play cooperatively and work in teams, and can resolve some conflicts without seeking adult intervention (CDC, 2014). Children also come to understand that they can affect others' perception of their emotions by changing their affective displays (Aloise-Young, 1993). Children who are unable to self-regulate have emotional difficulties that may interfere with their learning. Just as with younger children, significant adults in a child's life can help the child learn to self-regulate (Tomlinson, 2014).

Children's increasing self-regulation means they have a greater ability to follow instructions independently in a manner that would not be true of preschool or younger children. Educators can rely on the growing cognitive abilities in elementary school children in using instructional approaches that depend more independently on children's own discoveries, their use of alternative inquiry strategies, and their greater persistence in problem solving. Educators in these settings are scaffolding the skills that began to develop earlier, so that children are able to gradually apply those skills with less and less external support. This serves as a bridge to succeeding in upper primary grades, so if students lack necessary knowledge and skills in any domain of development and learning, their experience during the early elementary grades is crucial in helping them gain those competencies.

Building on many of the themes that have emerged from this discussion, the following sections continue by looking in more depth at cognitive development with respect to learning specific subjects and then at other major elements of development, including general learning competencies, socioemotional development, and physical development and health.

Which basic skills does a child use when making a graph?

Is the driving force behind problem solving in science?

Which of the following is a quantity comparison?

Which of the following does a primary science investigation usually begin?