The 12th semester is over, 13th will start next month. Was so busy for the just ending semester. This coming new semester will be even worst because there’s no study break, no semester break and I’m taking 3 subjects! -.-” My practical will start in mid September and end in mid November.

CRAZY! No study break summore, I have my own work to do again. WOW! This coming semester is going to kill me very soon. Even previous semester with study break was quite bad, this coming one? I cannot imagine.

Hopefully I’ll survive by then… ;p

This Saturday, class will start and guess what?!?! There’s exam break for this semester but no semester, it’s a long one summore yet I’m taking one subject only because I’m exempted from Moral. However, for the others they are taking two so the exam break is fine for them but too long for me. How I wish the coming semesters will have such long study break as I’m sure I’ll be taking 2 subjects by then.

If not mistaken, I have 5-6 more subjects to go including practical.

My practical is confirmed. September to November, this will mean no more sleeping late or waking up late for two whole months. Kind of dreading it hahaha… You don’t get paid for practical, and it’s like doing free labour for 2 months! ARG! Hate that but what to do? It’s the requirement for you to graduate.

Hehehe… It’s 1st June, Happy Gawai to those celebrating it.

I’ve been pretty busy these days that’s why I forgot all about updating this blog ;p.

I’ll try to update some notes later.

Exam will be in June, few more weeks to go. Assignment due less than 2 weeks from now.

Take care!

Cognitive development includes the fields of thinking, reasoning, problem solving, logic, imagination, concentration, memory, concept formation, language-related learning abilities.

Theories of Cognitive Development

• Jean Piaget – a Swiss Biologist (Cognitive Development)
  • Action = Knowledge
  • Knowledge is the product of direct motor behavior
  • Concept of Schema
    • Assimilation
    • Accommodation
    • Equilibration
  • Stages of Cognitive Development
    • Sensory-motor stage (0-2 years)
    • Preoperational stage (2-7 years)
    • Concrete operational stage (7-11 years)
    • Formal operational stage (11 and above)
• Lev Vygotsky – a Russian Psychologist (Zone of Proximal Development aka ZPD)
  • Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks that are too difficult for children to master alone but can be learnt with the guidance and assistance of more skilled adults and peers
• Jerome Bruner – an American Educational Psychologist (Scaffolding)
  • A teaching technique in which a more skilled person adjusts the level of guidance to fit the child’s current performance level
  • Dialogue is an important aspect of scaffolding
  • Language plays a key role in cognition
  • Teaching Strategies
    • 1. Assess the child’s ZPD
    • 2. Use the child’s ZPD in teaching
    • 3. Use more skilled peers as teachers
    • 4. Monitor and encourage children’s use of private speech
    • 5. Play instruction in a meaningful context
    • 6. Transform the classroom with Vygotskian ideas
  • 3 different modes of learning
    - Enactive mode (action-based)
    - Iconic mode (image-based)
    - Symbolic mode (language-based)

Theories 1. Behaviourist Theory
By Skinner (1957), language is learnt. Language is acquired by conditioning and reinforcement. Listening and responding to input is sufficient.

Theories 2: Nativism
Maintains that using a language requires a set of highly abstract, unconscious rules – a universal grammar that is innate and common to all languages. Argues that the cognitive abilities that support language development are highly specific to language.

Evidence for this position is provided by the universal and species-specific nature of language, and by observations of invented sign language among groups of deaf children that imposes grammatical structure onto simple signs. The approach is criticized for focusing almost exclusively on syntax and ignoring the communicative role of language

Learning a Language Involves…

• Learning the language’s sounds and sound patterns, its specific words, and the ways in which the language allows words to be combined
• Using the finite set of words in our vocabulary, we can put together an infinite number of sentences and express an infinite number of ideas—a process described as generatively

Required Competencies for Learning Language

• Phonological development
• Semantic development
• Syntactic development
• Pragmatic development

To learn language, children must also be exposed to other people using language—spoken or signed. Sometime between age 5 and puberty, language acquisition becomes much more difficult and ultimately less successful.

Infant-Directed Talk (Child-Directed Speech)
The distinctive mode of speech that adults adopt when talking to babies and very young children. Infants prefer IDT (CDS) to speech directed to adults

Prosody
Infants know a great deal about language long before their first linguistic productions.
Fetuses appear to be sensitive to prosody, the characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonational patterns, and so forth with which a language is spoken.

Phonemic Perception
Infants are born with the ability to discriminate between speech sounds in any language. Beginning at around 7 months, however, infants gradually begin to specialize, retaining sensitivity to sounds they hear and losing the capacity to discriminate among sounds to which they are not exposed.

Sensitivity to Language Patterns
In addition to focusing on the speech sounds that are used in their native language, infants become increasingly sensitive to many of the numerous regularities in that language:
- Stress patterns
- Distributional properties
- Minute pauses

Vocalizations
At around 6 to 8 weeks of age, infants begin producing drawn out vowel sounds. As the repertoire of sounds they can produce expands, infants become increasingly aware that their vocalizations elicit responses from others and they begin to engage in dialogues of reciprocal sounds with their parents.

Babbling
Sometimes between 6 and 10 months of age, infants begin to babble by repeating strings of sounds comprising a consonant followed by a vowel. A key component of the development of babbling is receiving feedback about the sounds one is producing. As infants’ babbling becomes more varied, it conforms more to the sounds, rhythm, and intonation patterns of the language they hear daily

Word Production
Most infants produce their first words between 10-15 months of age. The period of one-word utterances is referred to as the holophrastic period. Overextension, using a given word in a broader context than is appropriate, represents an effort to communicate despite a limited vocabulary.

Vocabulary
A spurt in vocabulary growth typically occurs at around 19 months, although there is great variability. The rate of vocabulary development is influenced by the sheer amount of talk that they hear.

Creating Sentences
Most children begin to combine words into simple sentences by the end of their second year. Children’s first sentences are two-word utterances that have been described as telegraphic speech because nonessential elements are missing. Once children are capable of producing four-word sentences, generally at around 2½ years of age, they begin to produce sentences containing more than one clause.

Learning Grammar
The strongest support for the idea that young children learn grammatical rules from their production of word endings. Further evidence is provided by overregularization, speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular. Parents play a role in children’s grammatical development by modeling correct grammar and expanding incomplete utterances.

Key Elements
- Voluntary muscle control
- Awareness of the need
- Access to toilet
- Caregiver coach & praise
- Motive to control bladder and intestine

Readiness Signals
- Indications that infant/toddler needs changing
- Interest in toilet
- Asks for more mature underwear

Child-set pace for toilet training seems to be most adaptive strategy

SENSORY SYSTEMS

• Vision
  At birth vision is blurry
  Focal length 8-15 inches
  Tends to focus at the center of the visual field
  Across development infants prefer
  Patterned objects to solid color objects
  Bright colors rather than pastels (3-6 months)
  Faces rather than other objects
  Facial preference: initially at hairline, then eyes, then expression thus focal attention shifts
  Infants as young as 1-2 months react to perceptual differences
  Mechanisms:
  Binocular vision and parallax
  Relative size of objects at different distances
  Relative motion
  Interactions between neurological maturation and experience
• Auditory Sense
  Fetus reacts to loud noises as early as a few weeks before birth
  Neonates sensitive to different sounds
  React to human voice differentially
  Early on (late neonatal period) infants can distinguish caregivers’ voices from others
  Adults and older children use code-switching when interacting with infants
  Higher frequency
  Sing-song rhythm
  Rhyming
• Smell
  Breast fed infants recognize smell of mothers over other females (pads in armpits or breast pads)
  Preference for breast milk regardless of whether the infant is breast fed
• Taste
  Discriminate between sweet and sour tastes

REFLEXES—Hardwired Systems
Indicators of neurological and motor development
Primitive Reflexes
Rooting and Sucking Reflexes
Grasping
Looming (depth perception)
Babinski – Checked to determine neurological maturation
Postural Reflexes
Parachute reflex
Loco motor reflexes e.g Stepping, Crawling, swimming

MOTOR DEVELOPMENT
Gross Motor—large muscle groups e.g. Neck, Torso, Arms, Legs
Fine Motor—smaller muscle groups e.g. Finger, Thumb
Refined grasping reflex (pincher motions)

• Bases for Motor Development:-
  - Neurological Development
  - Caregiver interactions and encouragement
  - Opportunities for exercise & practice
  - Maturation of Cognitive System
  - Cultural Differences: Wide variability in practices associated with differences in ages of onset but generally, across cultures, children tend to thrive with competent caregiving

Frontal Lobe: reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving

Parietal Lobe: movement, orientation, recognition, perception of stimuli

Occipital Lobe: visual processing

Temporal Lobe: perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory, and speech

At approximately 20 weeks gestation:

• Brain has near the same number of neurons as full term infant
• Development of neurons slows and development of synapses or connections among neurons (synaptogenesis)
• At approximately 30-31 weeks cerebral cortex begins forming convolutions or folds
• At birth the neonate’s brain has the appearance of the adult brain
• Establishment of myelin sheath (myelination) continues far into childhood and adolescence
• Myelin sheath insulates the axon and increases speed and efficiency of synaptic impulse
• Development of motor function occurs as myelin sheath develops in the motor areas of the brain
• Pruning occurs as unused neurons die
• Pruning begins during fetal development and continues across the lifespan
• Leads to diversion of nutrients to regions more used

Method of Habituation to Study Sensation and Perception

Steps in habituation studies:

• Baseline data are collected with neutral stimulus
• Introduction of novel stimulus
• Change in response from baseline is recorded
• Over repeated presentation of stimulus systems return to baseline
• Neutral stimulus is reintroduced
• Original novel stimulus is reintroduced

The beginnings—a rough start
Prematurity: <37 weeks gestation
Low birth weight: <5.5 pounds
Very low birth weight: < 3.5 pounds
Small for gestational age: <10th percentile of birth weight for gestational age

Growth sequences:
Cephalocaudal pattern – the sequence in which the greatest growth occurs at the top (the head) with physical growth in size, weight and feature differentiation gradually working from top to bottom.

Proximodistal pattern – the sequence in which growth starts at the centre of the body and moves toward the extremities.

Factors related to infant mortality
Low birth weight
Prematurity
Congenital abnormalities
SIDS
Pregnancy complications
Respiratory distress

Reducing Infant Mortality
Modifying lifestyles
Smoking
Substance abuse
Nutrition
Prenatal care
Contraception—young maternal age linked with predictors of infant mortality

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)
Risk Factors
Infant sleep position
Soft sleep surfaces
Loose bedding
Overheating
Smoking
Bed sharing/positional suffocation
Low birth weight or preterm infants

Feeding & Nutrition
Breast feeding in regions with water quality problems or sanitation problems can reduce the incidence of infant mortality through dehydration and diarrhea. Potential in reinforcing bond between caregiver and infant

Risks for Breastfeeding
Maternal nutrition
HIV/AIDS can be passed to nursing infants
Cultural taboos