E-zpass Was Just The Beginning Ielts Reading Answers

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Committeeon the Science of Children Birth to Age 8: Deepening and Broadening the Foundation for Success; Board on Children, Youth, and Families; Institute of Medicine; National Research Council; Allen LR, Kelly BB, editors. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2015 Jul 23.

The challenge of cleanly separating these concepts highlights a key attribute of all of these domains, which is that they do not develop or operate in isolation. Each enables and mutually supports learning and development in the others. Therefore, the importance of the interactions among the domains is emphasized throughout this chapter. For example, socioemotional competence is important for self-regulation, as are certain cognitive skills, and both emotional and cognitive self-regulation are important for children to be able to exercise learning competencies. Similarly, although certain skills and concept knowledge are distinct to developing proficiency in particular subject areas, learning in these subject areas also both requires and supports general cognitive skills such as reasoning and attention, as well as learning competencies and socioemotional competence. In an overarching example of interactions, a child's security both physically and in relationships creates the context in which learning is most achievable across all of the domains.

With these caveats in mind, the remainder of this chapter addresses in turn the domains of child development and early learning depicted in Figure 4-1: cognitive development, including learning of specific subjects; general learning competencies; socioemotional development; and physical development and health. The final section examines a key overarching issue: the effects on child development and early learning of the stress and adversity that is also an important theme in the discussion of the interaction between biology and environment in Chapter 3.

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.

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.

Statistical learning refers to the range of ways in which children, even babies, are implicitly sensitive to the statistical regularities in their environment, although they are not explicitly learning or applying statistics. Like the development of implicit theories, this concept of statistical learning counters the possible misconception of babies as passive learners and bears on the vital importance of their having opportunities to observe and interact with the environment. Several examples of statistical learning are provided in Box 4-2.

Csibra and Gergely (2009) argue that humans are equipped with a capacity to realize when someone is communicating something for their benefit and that they construe that information differently than when they merely witness it. As noted previously in the discussion of developing theory of mind, children as early as infancy devote special attention to social situations that are likely to represent learning opportunities because adults communicate that intention. Information learned in such communicative contexts is treated as more generalizable and robust than that learned in a noncommunicative context.

Babies have the capacity to realize when someone is communicating something for their benefit and therefore to construe information differently than when they merely witness it. When adults use face-to-face contact, call a baby's name, and point for the baby's benefit, these signals lead babies to recognize that someone is teaching them something, and this awareness can affect how and what they learn.

The significance of eye contact and other communication cues also is evident in research on whether, how, and when young children learn from video and other forms of digital media. Experiments conducted with 24-month-olds, for example, revealed that they can learn from a person on a video screen if that person is communicating with them through a webcam-like environment, but they showed no evidence of learning from a prerecorded video of that person. The webcam environment included social cues, such as back-and-forth conversation and other forms of social contact that are not possible in prerecorded video. Other studies found that toddlers learned verbs better during Skype video chats than during prerecorded video chats that did not allow for authentic eye contact or back-and-forth interaction (Roseberry et al., 2014; Troseth et al., 2006). (See also Chapter 6 for more on technology and learning.)

Awareness of the benefits and pitfalls of the language used by adults is important for people who interact with children. The language used by adults affects cognitive growth and learning in children in many subtle ways. Labeling is a powerful way to foster conceptual development. Simple labels can help children unify disparate things into coherent categories, but can also have the unintended consequence of reinforcing categories or concepts that are not desirable.

Development and early learning can be supported continuously as a child develops, and early knowledge and skills inform and influence future learning. When adults understand how the mind develops, what progress children make in their cognitive abilities, and how active inquiry and learning are children's natural inclination, they can foster cognitive growth by supporting children's active engagement with new experiences and providing developmentally appropriate stimulation of new learning through responsive, secure, and sustained caregiving relationships.

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.

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).

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