Children's Thinking
David F. Bjorklund
Language: English
Pages: 688
ISBN: 1111346054
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A comprehensive book supported by extensive research studies and data, Bjorklund's text presents the broadest coverage of topics in cognitive development. Unlike other books, Bjorklund shows readers how developmental function can help explain individual differences in cognition by covering both the typical pattern of change in thinking observed over time and the individual differences in children's thinking in infancy and childhood. A major theme of this book is the continuous transaction between the embodied child embedded in a social world: although a child is born prepared to make some sense of the world, his or her mind is also shaped by forces in the physical and social environment.
ride with his grandfather because he drove a somewhat battered, stick-shift Chevy, which Nicholas called “Papa’s car.” Nicholas’s grandmother, however, only drove cars with automatic transmissions. Thus, she was unable to take Nicholas to school in Papa’s car. One morning when Grandma was about to drive Nicholas to school, he said, “Grandma, dress up like a man this morning. Put on Papa’s shirt and wear his hat.” When asked why he wanted her to do that, he responded, “Then you can take me to
reflected in the often-reckless behavior of adolescents and the belief that bad things happen only to other people (for example, “I won’t get pregnant,” or “I can get off the tracks before the train gets here”) (Arnett, 1992). The risk-taking behavior that springs from adolescents’ personal fables clearly has its drawbacks, but it might also have some adaptive value, just as preschool children’s egocentricity might. For example, teenage egocentricity ensures that adolescents will experiment with
conversation on child-related topic 60 40 20 0 Efe FIGURE San Pedro West Newton Sugarhouse 3-2 Children in different cultures can have drastically different experiences that will affect what they learn and how they think. Children in more traditional cultures (Efe and San Pedro) observe adults at work and imitate work in their play more than children in middle-class communities, who engage more in child-focused activities. Source: Adapted from Morelli, G. A., Rogoff, B., & Angelillo, C.
ordinality refers to a basic understanding of more than and less than—for instance, that the number of items in one array is more (or less) than the number of items in another array. To do this, one does not necessarily have to understand the concept of “two” or “three.” Rather, infants display numerosity and ordinality by consistently being able to differentiate between two arrays with different numbers of items in them. For example, very young infants can tell the difference between two arrays
debate (Clearfield & Westfahl, 2006; Moore & Cocas, 2006). For example, some researchers suggest that babies are not responding to number but to the total amount of substance present (Mix, Huttenlocher, & Levine, 2002). In other words, infants are not doing primitive (and unconscious) addition and subtraction. They are responding to changes in the amount of “stuff” that is present in the various arrays. For example, rather than reflecting infants’ abstract understanding of integers (that is,
