style="font-size:15px;"> The quality of scaffolding influences children’s development. In one study of preschool teachers and children, the degree to which the adult matched the child’s needs for help in playing predicted more autonomous play on the part of children over a 6-month period (Trawick-Smith & Dziurgot, 2011). Adults may act intentionally to encourage and support children’s learning (Zuckerman, 2007). For example, one study of parents and young children visiting a science museum found that when parents provided specific guidance in considering a conservation of volume problem, such as discussing the size of the containers, asking “how” and “why” questions, and talking about simple math, children were more likely to give correct responses to scientific reasoning problems, including those involving conservation (Vandermaas-Peeler, Massey, & Kendall, 2016).
Figure 7.5 Zone of Proximal Development
Source: Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, https://lmrtriads.wikispaces.com/Zone+of+Proximal+Development licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Parents and preschool teachers can take advantage of the social nature of learning by assigning children tasks that they can accomplish with some assistance, providing just enough help so that children learn to complete the tasks independently. This helps to create learning environments that stimulate children to complete more challenging tasks on their own (Wass & Golding, 2014). Through guided play, teachers can develop play environments and settings with materials that encourage exploration and guide children with comments, encouraging them to explore, question, or extend their interests (Bodrova & Leong, 2018).
Evaluating Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory
Although relatively unknown until recent decades, Vygotsky’s ideas about the sociocultural nature of cognitive development have influenced prominent theories of development, such as Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). They have been applied in educational settings, supporting the use of assisted discovery, guiding children’s learning, and cooperative learning with peers.
Similar to Piaget, Vygotsky’s theory has been criticized for a lack of precision. The mechanisms or processes underlying the social transmission of thought are not described (Göncü & Gauvain, 2012). Moreover, constructs such as the zone of proximal development are not easily testable (Wertsch, 1998). In addition, underlying cognitive capacities, such as attention and memory, are not addressed. It is understandable, however, that Vygotsky’s theory is incomplete, as he died of tuberculosis at the age of 37. We can only speculate about how his ideas might have evolved over a longer lifetime. Nevertheless, Vygotsky provided a new framework for understanding development as a process of transmitting culturally valued tools that influence how we look at the world, think, and approach problems.
Thinking in Context 7.2
1 Contrast Vygotsky and Piaget’s theories of cognitive development.
2 Do you think that young children can be taught to respond correctly to conservation problems? Why or why not? Should they?
3 What cultural tools have you adopted? How have interactions with others influenced your cognitive development?
4 How might Vygotsky’s ideas be applied to children’s learning at home and in the classroom? Give some examples.
Information Processing in Early Childhood
From an information processing perspective, cognitive development entails developing mental strategies to guide one’s thinking and use one’s cognitive resources more effectively. In early childhood, children become more efficient at attending, encoding and retrieving memories, and problem solving.
Attention
Early childhood is accompanied by dramatic improvements in attention, particularly sustained attention, the ability to remain focused on a stimulus for an extended period of time (Rueda, 2013). Young children often struggle with selective attention. Selective attention refers to the ability to systematically deploy one’s attention, focusing on relevant information and ignoring distractors. Young children do not search thoroughly when asked to compare detailed pictures and explain what’s missing from one. They have trouble focusing on one stimulus and switching their attention to compare it with other stimuli (Hanania & Smith, 2010). For example, young children who sort cards according to one dimension such as color may later be unable to successfully switch to different sorting criteria (Honomichl & Zhe, 2011). Young children’s selective attention at age 2.5 predicts working memory and response inhibition at age 3 (Veer, Luyten, Mulder, van Tuijl, & Sleegers, 2017).
Working Memory and Executive Function
Young children simply get better at thinking. Recall from Chapter 5 that working memory is where all thinking or information processing takes place. Working memory consists of a short-term store (short-term memory), a processor, and a control mechanism known as the central executive, responsible for executive function (Baddeley, 2016; Miyake & Friedman, 2012). Children get better at holding information in working memory, manipulating it, inhibiting irrelevant stimuli, and planning, which allows them to set and achieve goals (Carlson, Zelazo, & Faja, 2013).
Short-term memory is commonly assessed by a memory span task in which individuals are asked to recall a series of unrelated items (such as numbers) presented at a rate of about 1 per second. The greatest lifetime improvements on memory span tasks occur in early childhood. In a classic study, 2- to 3-year-old children could recall about two digits, increasing to about five items at age 7, but only increasing another two digits, to seven, by early adulthood (Bjorklund & Myers, 2015).
As their short-term memory increases, young children are able to manipulate more information in working memory and become better at planning, considering the steps needed to complete a particular act and carrying them out to achieve a goal (Rueda, 2013). Preschoolers can create and abide by a plan to complete tasks that are familiar and not too complex, such as systematically searching for a lost object in a yard (Wellman, Somerville, & Haake, 1979). But they have difficulty with more complex tasks. Young children have difficulty deciding where to begin and how to proceed to complete a task in an orderly way (Ristic & Enns, 2015). When they plan, young children often skip important steps. One reason why young children get better at attention, memory, and cognitive tasks is because they get better at inhibiting impulses to engage in task-irrelevant actions and can keep focused on a task.
Long-Term Memory
Young children’s memory for events and information acquired during events, episodic memory, expands rapidly (Roediger & Marsh, 2003; Tulving, 2002). For example, a researcher might study episodic memory by asking a child, “Where did you go on vacation?” or “Remember the pictures I showed you yesterday?” Most laboratory studies of memory examine episodic memory, including memory for specific information, for scripts, and for personal experiences.
Memory for Information
