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Kail/Cavanaugh’s Human Development: A Life-Span View 5e
Chapter 4
Learning Objectives
The Onset of Thinking: Piaget’s Account
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Explain Piaget’s concepts of scheme, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration and
how they are related to each other.
Describe the development from reflexive behavior to active experimentation.
Describe the infant’s understanding of objects.
Explain what “using symbols” means and why it is an important achievement for
cognitive development.
Describe how the three-mountains problem demonstrates egocentrism in preoperational
children.
Describe animism in preoperational children.
Describe how centration is demonstrated in the conservation of liquid quantity task.
Explain how preoperational children confuse appearance with reality.
Describe changes in children’s ability to use scale models.
Describe the implications of Piaget’s theory for teaching practices.
Explain how the phrasing of questions is related to young children’s performance on
conservation problems.
Explain how Baillargeon’s research involving possible events and impossible events
conflicts with Piaget’s description of the timing of object permanence.
Describe what Piaget would say about consistent performance across different tasks.
Does research support Piaget’s view?
Describe children’s naïve theories of physics and biology.
Information Processing During Infancy and Early Childhood
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Describe the information-processing approach to human thinking. What constitutes a
person’s hardware and software?
Define attention, orienting response, and habituation.
Describe what can be done to help children pay attention to relevant information.
Describe infants’ learning in classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and imitation.
Describe the three important features of infants’ memories that were found by RoveeCollier.
Describe the improvements in memory as children become toddlers.
Define autobiographical memory, and describe how parents, language skill, and a sense
of self contribute to it.
Describe preschoolers’ eyewitness memory and its relation to source monitoring.
Describe the three guidelines that should be followed to help improve the reliability of
child witnesses
Describe a young infant’s ability to distinguish different numbers of objects.
Describe young children’s counting ability, including the three counting principles that
most children master by age three.
Mind and Culture: Vygotsky’s Theory
 Describe Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.
 Describe how “teachers” use scaffolding to aid learning.
 Discuss how scaffolding differs in different cultures.
 Discuss the process by which private speech becomes inner speech.
Kail/Cavanaugh’s Human Development: A Life-Span View 5e
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Discuss the function of private speech.
Language
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Define phonemes.
Describe how habituation is used to determine if infants can distinguish different speech
sounds.
Describe how an infant’s ability to discriminate speech sounds not found in his/her
language environment changes as he/she approaches her first birthday.
Explain how infants identify words.
Define infant-directed speech, and describe how the features of this type of speech might
aid language development.
Define cooing, babbling, and intonation, and describe how each changes during the first
year of life.
Describe some early words that are found in young children’s vocabularies.
Explain why recognizing words as symbols is important for language development.
Define fast mapping, and describe the rules that children use to learn new words.
Distinguish between overextensions and underextensions.
Define phonological memory.
Describe the importance of the child’s language environment.
Describe how bilingual children differ from monolingual children.
Discuss the difference between referential and expressive word-learning styles.
Explain how parents and television are related to children’s language growth.
Define telegraphic speech, grammatical morphemes, and overregularization. Explain
how each concept is related to the other.
Explain the behaviorist, linguistic, cognitive, and social-interaction explanations of
children’s mastery of grammar.
Explain how turn-taking changes in one- to three-year-olds.
Describe how preschoolers adjust their messages to listeners’ different needs.
Describe how listening skills change over the preschool and elementary school years.