Early childhood from ages 2-6 is a period of rapid cognitive development. Children progress through Piaget's pre-operational stage, developing the ability for representational thought and pretend play. However, at this stage children have limitations in logical thinking and reasoning. They do not understand the concept of conservation or how to make logical inferences. Memory skills also develop during this stage, with recognition abilities stronger than recall. Vygotsky's sociocultural theory emphasizes that cognitive development occurs through social interactions and guided learning from adults and more capable peers.

1. Early Childhood
Cognitive Development

2. Early Childhood
Age group 2-6 years.
Period of rapid
physical, mental,
emotional, social and
language development

3. Early Childhood
•Foundation period of
life.
•Period of slow
growth and rapid
development.
•“Pre-School age”.

4. Cognitive Development
(Conservation Concepts, Classifying, Ordering
Objects, Memory Abilities)

5. Pre-operational Stage
 Capable of
representational
thought such as
through drawings.
 Ability to engage in
pretend play.
Cognitive Development

6. Limitations in
Pre-operational Stage
• Egocentrism
• Concept of
Conservation
• Logical Inferences
Cognitive Development

7. Limitations in Pre-operational Stage
Egocentrism
Piaget noted that children do
not yet understand concrete
logic, cannot mentally
manipulate information, and
are unable to take the point
of view of other people.

8. Concept of Conservation
 The fact that some of properties of
objects remain the same while
other properties are changing.
 In Piaget’s theory, preoperational
children do not grasp this concept.
Limitations in Pre-operational Stage

9. Limitations in Pre-operational Stage
Logical Inferences
 Children's thinking in pre-
operational is dominated by
the concrete reality of the
way things look.

10. Concept of Conservation
By Jean Piaget

11. Conservation of Number

12. Conservation of Length

13. Conservation of Mass
Conservation of
Area

14. Conservation of Displaced Liquid

15. Development of Memory Skills

16. NO FACE LIKE NO OTHER

19. Recognition
•Ability to identify an object, person,
or quality that was encountered
before.
Recall
•Ability to reproduce material
from memory

20. Recognition vs. Recall
 4-year olds are usually able to recall
only three or four items
 Pre-schooler’s recognition memory is
much better than their recall
 Because they have taken in-or
encoded- information and retained
over time.

21. Poor Recall attributed to
Use of strategies for retrieval
 Pre-schoolers don’t memorize
 Use of Categorization strategies
 Not based from semantic content
Lack of knowledge about the
materials

22. Poor Recall attributed to
Lack of knowledge about memory itself
Metamemory
• Knowledge about memory itself- about memory
tasks, strategies and conditions
• Pre-schoolers cannot explain that
remembering the gist of a short story is easier
that reciting it verbatim.

23. • The young child’s ideas about the nature of
mental activities, especially those of people
around them.
• Children who have daily interactions are
more advanced in their understanding of
false beliefs than those with fewer
interactions

24. the ability to hear and
manipulate sounds of spoken language
– the concept that the last number in a
counting series represents the quantity of objects in a
set.
 Dialogic reading
 Exposure to the alphabet and to printed
materials of all kinds.

25. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Approach
• He emphasized the contexts in
which children’s learning takes
place.
• He stressed the role of guided
participation in children’s learning.
• Children learn how to perform the
to become independent participants
in activities that are valued by their
culture.

26. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Approach
Scaffolding– adults support
that allow young children to
begin to participate in family
activities.
• By gradually decreasing the
amount of scaffolding they
provide, parents enable
children to act independently.

27. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Approach
(ZPD) the distance
between the actual developmental level as
determined by independent problem solving and the
level of potential development as determined through
problem solving under adult guidance, or in
collaboration with more capable peers
• Private speech arises out of children’s internalization
of speech that they have heard from others.