Developmental and Cognitive Psychology
This is an excerpt from the paper...
The fields of developmental and cognitive psychology have provided us with valuable insights into the combined effects of age and cognitive ability on a child's learning readiness. The questions a child may ask, and his or her corresponding ability to understand, will be relative to a particular developmental level. For example, a three-year-old might ask a "why" question, such as "why do people get old?" From time to time, children who have first started asking questions about babies when they were three years of age, will repeat them a little later on if a particular stimulus prompts them. Thus, the five-year-old may very well ask, "How does a newborn baby get out of the mommy?" The five-year-old's seemingly insatiable curiosity may lead to other questions about the mechanisms of natural phenomena, such as "Where does the moon go during the daytime?" Cognitive-developmental theory has been most completely elaborated on and described by Jean Piaget. He did not study children's emotions or their personality development, although he considered them important. Rather, his interest in examining thought processes and their developmental changes led him to study changes in how children process information as they mature. Consequently, the three-year-old and the five-year-old would not process information in the same manner because each would be at different developmental stages. The three-year-old who asks why people get old is in Piaget's preoperational stage o
. . .
day. During the daytime the sun is in the sky, but at night, the moon replaces the sun in the bed of the sky. As the day grows older, the moon starts to come out to live in the sky for awhile. When the moon is done with its work, the sun comes out to do its work on a different day. Thus, a new day has both a sun and a moon. Because children at this age get along well in small groups, are generally cooperative, and conform to adult ideas, the parent could ask the child to select several friends to play "moon in the sky." The children could act out the roles of the moon, the sun, and the earth to show that all three bodies are in the sky at the same time, even though we can only see the moon when the sun is shining on it. This is a difficult concept to demonstrate, however, and many adults would have a difficult time remembering the astronomical positions of the earth, moon, and sun relative to one another, given the rotation and revolution of the earth and moon. Even so, the child would at least appreciate that the sun and moon don't merely cease to exist, but rather "hide" from us during different times of a day. The parent should also make clear that one day contains both a sun and a moon, a moon always following a sun,
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Children Ages, , Jean Piaget, Faber Spodek, spodek 1987, moon sun, References Catron, Merrill Chaloner, chaloner 1962, sun moon, three-year-old able, mother's body, cognitive behaviors, catron 1993, parent child, Cliffs Prentice-Hall, newborn baby mommy, spodek 1987 82, five-year-old newborn baby, day sun, spodek 1987 85,
Approximate Word count = 1855
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Developmental and Cognitive Psychology
|