Cognitive Development and the Education of Young Children

By Kelvin Seifert, University of Manitoba

As in previous editions of this handbook, this chapter is not about cognitive development per se, but about how cognitive development relates to and is influenced by early childhood education. As before, the content is therefore selective: in spite of the importance of cognition within developmental psychology, I do not survey “all” of the research here (even if it were possible!). Instead I select and frame material according to its relevance to the work of early childhood educators. Since their work usually happens in classrooms, homes, and other places with strongly social features, the chapter also has markedly social emphasis. As a result, some topics with strong research programs, such as the neuropsychology of cognition, receive less emphasis than might be expected. Others, such as social cognitive development, are discussed only for their relevance to how early childhood educators might use the research to influence children’s cognition. The converse of this practical idea—that educators might use children’s cognition to regulate their social experiences—is of course important as well. It is acknowledged from time to time in this chapter, but is more appropriately discussed elsewhere in this volume (see, for example, Sokol, et al., 2010).

For this particular chapter, my assumption is that early childhood classrooms are busy, social places, and that teachers of the young normally rely on the richness of that social life to nudge or move children toward more mature forms of thinking. From this perspective, social experience is primarily construed as stimulus, independent variable, or cause, and cognition as response, outcome, or effect. Reviews based on other assumptions also exist and are in fact already plentiful in the literature of developmental psychology (e.g. Asamen, Ellis, & Berry, 2008; Barbarin & Wasik, 2009; Haith, M. & Benson, J., 2008; Kuhn & Siegler, 2006). The alternatives are valuable to read, and I them recommend to interested readers. But their purposes do not speak to the needs of early childhood educators as directly as this chapter (hopefully) does.

Fortunately, there is ample research about the effects of children’s social development on cognitive functioning. Most of it is founded on and continues major traditions of child study dating back 100 years (Dick & Overton, 2010; Lewis & Carpendale, 2009). The original fathers (and mothers) of developmental psychology were very aware that social experiences are likely to influence children’s thinking, and they commented at length on the possible relationships. Freud described how cognitive distortions sometimes originate in unfortunate social experiences; William James speculated philosophically about the nature of social/cognitive links; Piaget noted that cooperative games were both cause and effect of taking the perspective of others; Vygotsky emphasized the importance of social mentoring for learning common conventional knowledge. The current research has echoes of all of these ideas.

The chapter has several sections, followed by a conclusion. I begin by assessing the contribution of neuropsychology (sometimes nicknamed “brain research”) for understanding and supporting children’s cognition. As will be seen, neuropsychology has promise for the future of developmental studies, but its current practical uses for teachers of young children are focused somewhat narrowly, in spite of large amounts of research in the area. The next section describes several lines of research that looks more directly at connections between cognition and social experience, even though in some cases the researchers did not present their work as “social” research. First is information processing theory—traditionally considered a thoroughly cognitive topic, even though it is in fact based on social encounters between and among adults and children. Next are studies of language development, in both its psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic aspects. Finally are studies designed framed explicitly to show relationships between social experience and cognitive development. After considering these three areas of research, I consider again the theme of the chapter—that cognitive development can be facilitated with appropriate social encounters—in the light of the practical, current constraints on early childhood teachers’ work.

Neuropsychology: Its Value and Limits

Neuropsychology seeks to explain cognition in terms of the brain structures and functions that animate or make cognition possible (Fusaro & Nelson, 2009). From this point of view, cognitive development has a lot to do with biological development: children may not be able to perform certain cognitive activities because they have not yet developed or “grown” the necessary physical brain structures. Neuropsychologists have pointed out, for example, that the physiological process of myelination, or formation of conductive sheaths along nerve fibers, is still incomplete in younger preschool-age children. Since myelination helps in conducting impulses along nerve fibers, it is hypothesized that comparatively limited myelination may also limit younger preschoolers’ memory abilities. By implication, efforts to teach or tutor younger preschoolers (age three, for example) in using memory strategies cannot be fully effective, but efforts to teach the same strategies to older children (age eight, for example) can be more successful.

Neuropsychological research has also highlighted a number of social experiences that support the healthy development of brain structures (Kagan & Herschkowitz, 2005). The most important of these happen not during the preschool years, but during the first three years of life: nurturing of attachment between the infant and caregiver(s), for example, very early visual exposure to print and book reading, and a responsive, interactive language environment. Infants benefit from these experiences because their brain physiology “expects” them; except for individuals with certain physical disabilities, every child’s nervous system is especially sensitive and ready for them during infancy and toddlerhood. They can make up for deficits in these experiences later in childhood, or even in adulthood, but remediation is not always complete, and it is never as efficient as if children have had the experiences during the relatively critical period of infancy.

Neuropsychological explanations offer important general insights about why young children may be able to perform certain cognitive skills but not others. As such it can be helpful in grounding instruction in developmentally appropriate practices. It should be noted, though, that the field so far has not provided advice or information for early childhood educators that is very specific (Odom, Barbarin, & Wasik, 2010). There are two problems with “brain science” from the point of view of early childhood educators. One is its emphasis on studying infants rather than preschool children, and the resulting implication that the most malleable time of life, physiologically speaking, is not early childhood but infancy. A corollary is that interventions on behalf of infants will be more effective than interventions on behalf of preschool children. Much of the value of the field therefore consists of general guidance in understanding what the very young can and cannot do—a sort of broad diagnosis of developmental capacities. Much of it takes the form of cautions about the limits of cognition in the young: if child X is missing brain structure Y at age Z, then teachers should not expect general skill W to be learned at that age, no matter how well it is taught or encouraged.

A second problem relates to the uniqueness of its findings for teachers. Even if neuropsychology eventually can diagnose children’s brains precisely, its value to early childhood educators will depend on whether its findings yield insights not already available from current, socially based knowledge of children’s development. So far educational recommendations based on brain science coincide to a remarkable extent with those already justified on social or cultural grounds (e.g. Ritchie, Maxwell, & Bredekamp, 2010; Bredekamp & Copple, 1996). In this sense the field tends simply to add support for pre-existing professional knowledge and policy. Such support helps to build public and professional support in early childhood education. But professional early educators in particular need more than general support; to fulfill their mission they also need advice related to classroom theory and practice that is fairly specific. So far specifics are provided by neuropsychology only to a limited extent.

Information Processing: The Interplay of Cognitive Components

Information processing studies of development identify components of cognition, and investing-ate how the components interact (or fail to do so) to produce children’s thinking (see, for example, Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008; Hrabok & Kerns, 2010; Marti, 2003). Much attention has gone to understanding so-called executive functions of thinking, those associated with activity in the frontal cortex, such as reasoning, planning, self-regulation of attention, memory strategies, and the like. The implied research paradigm is that a younger child (or in some cases an infant, not a preschooler) can perform a simple component X, but not a more complex component Y without first developing another relatively simple component Z. Describing the combined activity of X + Z, and perhaps of other components as well, therefore provides an account of cognitive development that is more functional than causal. Unlike accounts based in neuropsychology, the child’s thinking is not “reduced to” or equated with biological processes.

Functional accounts are worthy and have produced a number of findings useful to educators. Interpreting them, however, requires keeping their intellectual risks clearly in mind. Many information processing accounts of cognition verge on presenting only descriptions of cognitive functioning—simply detailed observations of the components of children’s thinking—even when they claim to present explanations (Dick & Overton, 2010). By the standards of most educators, furthermore, information processing research tends to simplify or even ignore the social and cultural context in which thinking and development occurs—a tendency that Martin & Failows (2010) call “psychologism.” Development is sometimes described and/or explained as if it happens only “inside” the individual child, with external influences that are minimal and under far better control than educators normally experience. These tendencies do not render information processing accounts unusable by early childhood educators, but they do necessitate conceptual work in order to situate and use them in the rather complicated, social atmosphere of classrooms or families.

A general conclusion from information processing research on young children is that most everyday academic skills (e.g. reading or mathematics) activate not one, but many cognitive functions simultaneously (Fusaro & Nelson, 2009). Another is that rendering new learning really memorable or permanent takes both practice and time away from overt, deliberate instruction (Bauer, 2009). Neither of these conclusions may be news to experienced early childhood teachers, but the detailed documentation of information processing studies can be helpful to educators nonetheless. The principle that memory for learning takes time and repetition, for example, applies to students of any age, but most especially to those who are the youngest. As a rule of thumb, the younger the child, the longer it takes to insure that memory of new material remains with the child permanently. Infants take longer than preschoolers, and preschoolers take longer than primary-grade students. One way that information processing theory explains the age-related improvement is in terms of increases in the richness of children’s associative abilities. Relative to younger ones, older children have more prior knowledge to which new information can be connected, at least if they are shown ways to make the connections. The result is that 1) memories consolidate (i.e. become organized and easy to retrieve) more quickly in older, compared to younger children, and 2) there is no way for teachers to avoid dealing this developmental difference. Older children are more “intelligent” than younger children in the sense that they can often remember things more easily (though this fact certainly does not make them either more worthy as human beings, nor more deserving of teachers’ efforts!).

But such ideas should not be taken to suggest that deliberate teaching makes no difference. Even infants, it seems, can learn from deliberate instruction. In a series of experiments, Bauer and her associates induced infants 16-20 months of age to imitate an experimenter striking a miniature, table-size “gong” (Bauer, 2005, 2007). The babies showed patterns of learning very familiar to parents and teachers of older children. As with older preschoolers, most infants could reproduce at least some of the actions of gong-striking after just a single demonstration, and many could still reproduce the actions even after a two-week interval. Like older children, too, most infants could remember how to strike a gong better if they had had more than one demonstration of the correct actions initially. And not surprisingly, older infants’ memories were less impaired by a two-week delay than were young infants’ memories. Bauer interpreted these findings primarily as showing the importance of cognitive consolidation, a relatively slow process of organizing recent memories and linking them to prior skills and knowledge. Consolidation, she argued, is both inevitable and necessary to form permanent memories (including memories of how to strike a gong). But it takes significant time, repeated exposure to the material to be learned, and slight but deliberate variation of the exposures each time it is presented.

As noted, these findings also describe what practicing teachers observe in students every day. As a developmental psychologist, Bauer unfortunately does not go on to discuss how to reconcile children’s need for consolidation with the practical dilemmas of teaching, such as common pressures to “cover” an overly large curriculum, insufficient instructional time, or diversity in students’ background skills—all of which affect individuals’ needs and capacity for consolidating material. But the findings do show relatively pure examples of how children, even infants, can develop a cognitive skill (memory for the striking of a gong) as the result of a social experience (the modeling of a behavior by a “teacher-experimenter”). Bauer summarized the findings in two slogans meant as advice for teachers: “Repeat, with variation on the theme,” and “Link early, link often.” To insure that learning is not forgotten, that is, teachers need to provide material more than once, each time in a slightly different way so that students can form new associations with the material during each encounter. The advice is reminiscent of Jerome Bruner’s (1960) classic recommendation to follow a “spiral curriculum,” one in which ideas are revisited repeatedly, but each time in a new or different form.

Studies of infant memory like these confirm the importance of links between social and cognitive experiences for young children: it appears that the stock-in-trade of teachers, social interaction, can stimulate cognitive development in preschoolers, at least under some conditions. No doubt other factors, including physical brain growth and society-wide cultural practices, also affect children’s thinking. Since neither physical growth nor culture are normally under teachers’ direct control, however, they are more important to teachers as background knowledge—as reminders to hold expectations for children’s learning that are realistic.

Directly or indirectly, many studies in the information processing tradition have supported the importance of talking to and with children. They also suggest that adults’ style of interaction matters a lot. For example, Haden and colleagues (2001) and Ornstein, Haden, and Hedrick (2004) have studied dramatic play “adventures” in which mothers and their 3- and 4-year-old children enacted a make-believe scene using dramatic play materials provided by the researchers. One adventure consisted of a make-believe camping outing; another, of a make-believe bird watching activity; a third, of a re-enactment of an ice cream store. In each case appropriate props were provided. The dramatic play experiences were videotaped, and investigators analyzed the tapes for how the mothers’ interaction styles affected their preschool children. Children were then interviewed one day after the experience, as well as three weeks later to find out how much they remembered. In general, the children remembered significantly more of the dramatic play experience if the mother had encouraged the child not only to talk jointly with her about the materials as they were used, but also to handle the props jointly with her. Joint discussion without joint handling was somewhat less helpful to a child’s later memory, and a lack of either joint discussion or joint handling was least helpful of all.

In another study using the same dramatic play events and children of similar ages, Hedrick and colleagues (2009) analyzed the verbal interactions between mother and child to identify the specific features of the joint-talk conversations that might account for their effectiveness. They found that in high joint-talk conversations, mothers more often asked open-ended Wh- questions (who, what, where, when, why, or how), and these tended to elicit more elaborate responses from the children. In a related program of research, furthermore, Boland and colleagues (2003) successfully trained mothers to interact more effectively with their preschool children. Specifically, they were trained to use 1) more wh- questions to elicit their child’s participation, 2) more associations of the current activity to what the mothers knew that the child already knew, 3) follow-ins, or comments that supported and extended features of the situation in which the child showed interest, and 4) positive evaluations or praise for the child’s participation. Mothers learned these techniques successfully, and children of trained mothers recalled more of the dramatic play activities than children of untrained mothers.

A follow-up study used a similar training procedure, but instead of training mothers, it trained researchers unfamiliar with the children to use the same interaction techniques (Hedrick, Haden, & Ornstein, 2009). During the later memory interviews, in addition, the researchers were also trained to use “high elaborative event talk,” which were interaction techniques similar to those used during the dramatic play events themselves. The overall results gave clear support for the benefits of the high elaborative event talk both during the dramatic play itself and during later recall conversations. Asking open-end wh- questions led to better recall if used during the dramatic play, as in the earlier studies, but so did asking wh- questions later, during the recall interview or “test.” Most effective of all was to ask wh- questions on both occasions.

Put in terms a bit more familiar to educators, the mothers and researchers using high elaborative event talk were scaffolding memory strategies for young children, though without actually calling the process by this term. The wh- questions and follow-ins stimulated classic mnemonic memory strategies—elaboration and rehearsal—and modeled them for the child, albeit unconsciously or subliminally. In the short-term the events created examples of a zone of proximal development in the Vygotskian sense: the child could do more (i.e. recall more) in the presence of a mentoring adult than she could do alone (Hoskyn, 2010; Stetsenko & Vianna, 2009). The long-term result was a stabilization of the child’s new knowledge, along with a richer experience observing and using, but not thinking consciously about, memory strategies.

There is a further education-related inference from these ideas: it seems plausible, as children grow a bit older, that parents, teachers, and other caregivers might wish to transfer some of their scaffolding responsibility more fully to the child. Transferring responsibility would presumably involve making the existence and benefits of metacognitive memory strategies conscious within the child. This cognitive developmental goal would seem especially appropriate for teachers of young children, since metacognitive strategies would serve children well as they moved on into the elementary school years.

These ideas guided a study by Ornstein, Coffman, & Grammer (2009), who observed first-grade teachers in action as they taught lessons in language-arts and mathematics, and who then tested the students’ memory with a card sorting task at intervals throughout first- and second-grade. Not surprisingly, they found variation in how habitually and explicitly teachers described memory strategies to students, and how often they recommended strategies or urged students to create strategies of their own. After several months, however, the students of the “high-mnemonics” teachers showed greater use of memory strategies, an advantage that continued through the end of second-grade. Detailed analysis showed three further points about the individual differences: 1) the students who benefitted the most from high-mnemonics teaching tended to be lower-achieving students, 2) higher-achieving students were relatively unaffected by the teacher’s use of mnemonics (perhaps because they already were using effective memory strategies without coaching), and 3) students of high-mnemonics teachers did not show better memory performance initially, but required several months of such teaching to begin showing their advantage.

As mentioned earlier, the studies just described are all framed in functional terms: a child (or infant) can do simpler function X, but not harder function Y without first developing at least one other simpler function Z. In Bauer’s studies of infants remembering how to hit a gong, for example, the younger infants were shown capable of imitating elements of the action (simpler function X), but not of reproducing the entire sequence reliably (more complex function Y) without first consolidating the simpler elements by associating the elements mentally—on their own time, so to speak—in between practice sessions (simpler function Z). In the dramatic-play recall studies by Ornstein and associates, preschoolers could recall fragments or elements of a make-believe episode (simpler function X), but not the entire experience (complex function Y) without elaborating on elements of the episode while it was happening (simpler function Z). In the studies of first-grade teachers using mnemonics, school-age students could perform an arbitrary memory task to some extent (simpler function X), but they did it without coaching (complex function Y) if they were repeatedly coached not on the task itself, but on memory strategies to apply to the task (a set of simpler functions Z).

Insights like these highlight the relationships among cognitive skills, and they are useful for helping early childhood educators identify and sequence reasonable instructional and developmental goals for children. But they overlook the obviously social elements of “cognitive” tasks as experienced by the children. Cognitive benefits documented like the ones above develop not just because of other cognitive skills, but also because of significant social interactions and positive emotional relationships. To state an obvious but overlooked point: in every case a kindly, reasonable adult arranges a particular kind of conversation or experience with the child, and the child elects to trust the adult’s motives in the social situation thus created. The child’s trust in turn derives from a history of social encounters that many published accounts of child cognition put in the background because of the constraints of experimental design. A relevant background factor might be the fact that a mother and child (hopefully) love each other, for example, so that her child is willing to follow an experimental procedure simply because she asks him to do so. Another backgrounded factor might be that a teacher who recommends metacognitive strategies to students has already developed such good rapport with the students that they are willing to give her recommendations a trial sight unseen, so to speak. Still other background factors are the broad cultural regularities that influence behavior during every research experiment, such as whether a child considers it acceptable for any adult in authority to ask “test” questions (ones to which the adult already knows the answer), or whether arbitrary problems framed outside of everyday contexts are really worth thinking about.

In spite of these comments, I should emphasize that these “social” omissions are not the fault either of the researchers or of the information processing framework adopted for their studies; they were not, after all, trying to conduct social or cultural research. I mention them instead in order to place cognitive developmental research in the context of early childhood education, a task for which it is often not directly designed. The latter activity is primarily based on the activities of an adult who enjoys children interacting intensely with a number of young children or students. To be useful early childhood teachers, therefore, strictly cognitive studies often need a degree of reframing, not because they are badly conceived or conducted, but to take the obviously social emphasis of early childhood education into account. The critique in this chapter is meant only for that specific purpose.

Socially Focused Studies of Early Cognition

Notwithstanding the previous comments, many studies have in fact looked relatively directly at relationships between social experiences and the development cognitive skills. These often require less reframing than studies that are more exclusively cognitive. How well a particular study serves the needs of early childhood teaching, however, depends on how closely it parallels or represents significant features of classroom teaching and learning. Since even “social” studies vary on this dimension, it is still necessary to interpret the educational usefulness of a developmental study carefully. In this section I attempt to make such interpretations with regard to several programs of research connecting social experiences to cognitive change. Most involve language in some way, though their effects are simultaneously cognitive and social.

A Grand Tour of Social Influences on Cognition

A lot of cognition is acquired and influenced by the language witnessed by and directed to a child during social activities (see Wells, 2009). The resulting cognitive changes begin shortly after birth and continue through early childhood and beyond. In this section I begin with a brief “grand tour” of several social influences on cognition, and then explain the key elements of each in more detail.

Arguably, the first social influence on cognition is joint attention, in which an infant and adult use gestures or vocalizations to call each other’s attention to a commonly experienced event, such as looking at the family cat, or commenting on the arrival or departure of a parent (Eilan, et al., 2005). When the adult includes bits of speech to the exchange—e.g. says “cat!” while pointing and looking at the cat—the spoken words become part of the experience for the child (Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2005). Thanks to the child’s initial egocentricity, and possibly also to innate human biases facilitating language learning, a child usually assumes that speech labels are conventional. She behaves, that is, as if the same word is used for the same object on all occasions and by all people, and that the word is unique and distinctive from words used for other objects or events (Kalish & Sabbagh, 2007). The assumption of conventionality simplifies the learning of vocabulary and thus makes language development much easier. With time and further language development, however, the child also begins noticing variations in the certainty and reliability of other persons’ knowledge and beliefs—clues expressed through various evidentiality markers (Jeschull & Roeper, 2009; Matsui & Fitneva, 2007). As awareness of such variability dawns on the child, she qualifies or limits the general assumption of conventionality (Callanan, Siegel, & Luce, 2007). There is more than one way, she realizes, to say the “same” thing, and individuals sometimes differ in how they refer to the “same” object or event.

Awareness of the variability of knowledge prompts the child to begin expressing, if not truly reflecting on, the cognitive status of her own knowledge and reasoning—her own degree of certainty. The rudimentary self-awareness implied by evidentiality markers in turn allows for more effective problem solving skills to develop; the child begins to know what she knows and what she may only imagine or suppose. Continuing dialogues with adults supports further improvements in the child’s problem solving skills, and features of these dialogues are eventually appropriated by the child in the form of private speech, or self-directed talk that allows thinking and problem solving to become more autonomous. Using private speech, the child can talk her way through more challenging problems than in the past, and that would otherwise confuse the child or require adult assistance (Winsler, Fernyhough, & Montero, 2009). More or less at the same time, the child’s public speech becomes more nuanced: she can begin understanding and using irony and sarcasm, for example, and engage in extended dialogues at social gatherings such as meal times or in play activities.

Early Key Social Influences: Joint Attention and the Emergence of Private Speech

As early as six months of age, infants show a tendency to follow an adult’s gaze or pointing gesture, and by 18 months they have perfected this behavior to a high degree (Butterworth, 1995). Such joint attention—an eminently social experience—makes possible a lot of learning because adults often pay attention to objects, people, and events that are especially important, interesting, dangerous, or complicated. Adults often also accompany their attention with language, which for the child’s purposes initially becomes part of the experience (Woodward, 2003). The challenge for the infant—one that takes months or years to accomplish—is to understand why an adult attends to or gazes at an object. Tracing the course of the infant’s detective work is the focus of much research about infant cognitive development (Eilan & Heal, 2005).

Both experimental and correlational studies suggest that the language learned during joint attention encourages a number of cognitive functions, particularly an ability to inhibit dominant responses deliberately, in favor of less dominant or subordinate responses. This ability is illustrated by the common children’s game of “Simon Says.” In the game, inhibiting a motor response while also listening carefully to verbal instructions allows a child to be more successful in the game. In a controlled assessment of an analogous skill with inhibition, Muller and colleagues (2009) devised what they called the “Colored Smarties” task. Preschool children were presented with an array of colored cards, each of which had a candy on it (the Smartie) that did not match the color of the card. In order to win a Smartie to eat, a child had to select a card of a particular color without being distracted by the color of the Smartie itself. Three-year-olds had considerable difficulty with this task, but four- and five-year-olds performed it almost perfectly. A series of experiments with the task suggested that the challenge for three-year-olds was language-related: if a child said the name of the card before selecting it, he or she was less distracted by the color of the Smartie, and performed better. Older preschoolers either used this strategy of their own accord or else discovered it for themselves during the task. Younger children did not usually say the color words on their own initiative, though Muller showed that they could be if trained to do so, and that training improved their performance significantly.

The language needed for the Colored Smarties task was a simple example of self-directed or private speech, which Vygotsky and others have argued serves as a transition between problem solving with the assistance of linguistic support from an adult, and fully autonomous problem solving by the child. In the research by Muller and colleagues, for example, the child was in essence encouraged to “talk to himself” as a way of insuring cognitive success. Other studies corroborate the influence of language heard initially in social encounters on the development of private speech. A longitudinal one by Landry and colleagues (2002), for example, observed verbal interaction between mothers and children during free play when the children were three or four years old. Two years later, when the children six, they observed the children’s problem solving abilities. They found significant correlations between the mothers’ earlier tendency to scaffold the child’s actions during free play, and the child’s later skill at various problem solving tasks. Scaffolding in this case included expressing explicit links among objects, people, and activities in which the child was engaged. The authors argued that the parents’ language style at the earlier age provided children with language-related models for thinking or reasoning, models which children later used without assistance and on their own initiative.

Landry and colleagues did not actually observe the presence or absence of self-directed speech directly, but other research has done so. Fernyhough and Fradley (2005), for example, used a “Tower of London” game, in which a child sorts and transfers a stack of nested rings from one peg to another following a few simple rules. For research purposes, the task has the advantage that its difficulty level can be adjusted easily—there can be many rings to sort or just a few. Using this task with five- and six-year-olds, Fernyhough and Fradley found that private speech increased with task difficulty up to intermediate levels of challenge, after which it decreased somewhat. The trend suggested that children used self-directed speech to assist if necessary and helpful, but that when a problem became so difficult that success was unlikely, they gave up using it as a cognitive strategy.

Later Key Social Influences: Conventionality, Evidentiaility, and Theory of Mind

When first acquiring language, children as young as 24 months seem to make the crucial assumption that certain features of language are conventional—that is, that people label objects, for example, everyone uses the same word, and that a label does not change from one occasion to the next (Sabbagh & Henderson, 2007). When taught an unfamiliar label for an object by one speaker (e.g. “This is a teega”), for example, a young child will later point to the same object even when asked to identify it by a different speaker (e.g. the new person asks, “Which one is the teega?”). Notably, the conventionality assumption is made for objects but not for personal preferences or for proper names; apparently therefore even two-year-olds do not assume that every person has the same preferences or the same name (Graham, Stock, & Henderson, 2006). By age 3 and 4, furthermore, children show a consistent preference to learn labels from speakers who express certainty and who have a proven history of accuracy (Koenig & Harris, 2005). When interacting with two adults who label objects, one of whom has consistently made labeling mistakes in the past, preschoolers will attend to and remember the labels primarily from the “accurate labeler.” If a child is asked to look for a hidden object, furthermore, the child is more likely to follow the advice of one who says, “I saw it in this box” than one who says, “I think it is in this box.”

It seems therefore that preschoolers begin differentiating types of knowledge according to its cognitive status and purposes. In particular, knowledge is distinguished from belief, and knowledge that is certain is distinguished from knowledge that is not certain. Skill at differentiation is developed through conversations primarily with parents, though it is probably also supplemented somewhat by other adults (Callahan, Siegel, & Luce, 2009). It is expressed through lexical, pragmatic, and even grammatical features of language itself—so-called evidentiality markers (Matsui & Fitneva, 2009). In English the markers usually take the form of words or phrases indicating the source, reliability, or certainty of knowledge, as when someone says, “Apparently he ate the cake,” as compared to “I saw him eat the cake,” or “I think he may have eaten the cake.” English speakers also use non-verbal gestures and vocalizations to indicate the status of their knowledge—a well-timed shrug of the shoulders, for example, or a tentative tone of voice. Many non-English languages, in addition, have “built-in” grammatical (syntactic) features that indicate sources and levels of certainty and that may provide additional ways to recognize types of evidence and to express the differences. With or without grammatical features being available, though, evidentiality markers help to develop the idea that individuals have minds of their own: that people vary not only in what they know, but also in their certainty and trustworthiness (Fitneva, 2009; Jaswal & Neeley, 2006).

The conventionality assumption, it should be noted, does not begin as a “belief” in the adult sense of the term, but more as an expression of immature egocentrism or lack of thoughtful belief on the part of the young child (Sabbagh & Henderson, 2007). Two-year-olds probably do not hold a conscious principle that everyone uses language in the same way. Instead they simply, and thoughtlessly, behave as if everyone does—and as it happens, the assumption facilitates the learning of common language and social relationships. The evidentiality distinctions gradually developed in these social encounters, on the other hand, facilitate cognitive development in their own way: by initiating glimmers of reflection about the nature and sources of knowledge—about who knows what and why, and therefore also who has a mind of his or her own, so to speak.

All in all, conventionality and evidentiality contribute gradually to developing a theory of mind, or attributions about individual mental states (Wellman, 2003). By about age four, a child comes to act as if other persons perceive objects and events based on beliefs and knowledge unique to each person’s experience. Prior to this age, a child is apt to believe that others believe and know whatever the child himself believes and knows. The phenomenon is illustrated clearly in the widely researched “false belief task.” In one common version of the task, a child watches while an object is hidden behind one of two boxes in the presence of a third person. Then the object is moved to the other box while the child watches, but without the third party seeing or knowing about the move. Older preschoolers (age 4 or 5) know that the third person will mistakenly believe that the object is still behind the original (first) box, and that the third person can be expected to search for it there. Younger children will instead assume that the third person knows whatever the child himself has witnessed, i.e. that the person will therefore search behind the second box. The ability of the child to differentiate his own knowledge the other person’s false belief is taken as evidence of a “theory of mind.” The child has (apparently) developed a belief or assumption that each person experiences the world independently of other persons, based in this case on their individual sources of knowledge.

The Cognitive Benefits of Ambiguity: Irony

Several researchers have argued that social interactions that are ambiguous stimulate cognitive conflict—a sort of Piagetian disequilibrium—that motivates children to develop their interpretive and expressive skills beyond current levels. Ambiguous contacts may actually be relatively plentiful for young children, who are still mastering the nuances of language as well as appropriate uses for nonverbal gestures and social behaviors. One obvious example of such a challenge occurs, for example, when a parent or adult uses sarcasm or verbal irony, either directed to the child or simply witnessed by her. Sarcasm by nature communicates double meanings; the literal words “say” one thing but the speaker intends something else. Sorting out the two meanings requires cognitive work: the child must hold the literal meaning of a remark in mind, but simultaneously discern, or at least guess, a different underlying meaning or intention. Studies show that children learn this cognitive skill by about age 5 or 6; at about that age they know when a person is sarcastic—i. e. does not mean what he says (Pexman, 2008, 2010). Note, though, that irony is by nature prone to misunderstanding at any age; there is always a risk that a listener will take the speaker literally and not notice an implied meaning distinct from the words. Perhaps for this reason children are slower to use irony than to recognize it when it occurs (Pexman, et al., 2009). Many do not use it at all until well into the elementary school years, though some children do begin making ironic remarks late in the preschool period, especially if they have parents who report using it in their own conversations more than usual (Hala, et al., 2010; Pexman, et al., 2009).

The Cognitive Benefits of Ambiguity: Bilingualism

Another sort of ambiguity that confronts some preschoolers is the learning of a second language. Whether learning a second language or simply using one, a child in a bilingual family has to keep two languages actively in mind at the same time, decide repeatedly which grammar and lexicon to draw on, and inhibit responses using the nonrelevant language. The result is continual linguistic disequilibrium that may stimulate a number of cognitive skills that extend beyond language as such (Adescope, et al., 2010). One such skill, for example, is cognitive flexibility—an ability to switch attention easily from one dimension of a situation to another dimension. Suppose both monolingual and bilingual preschoolers are given a set of cards that vary in two ways, such as color and shape. If the children are asked to sort the cards by one of the dimension (e.g. color), three- and four-year-olds succeed to a large extent, whatever their language backgrounds. If they are then asked to switch to sorting the cards by the other dimension (shape), however, monolingual children experience significantly more trouble than bilingual children; the monolinguals tend to perseverate on using the first sorting dimension. Researchers have interpreted the difference as evidence for a cognitive benefit of bilingualism: a skill at shifting attention flexibly from one dimension of language to another, and of dealing with the cognitive conflict resulting from the shift. The flexibility appears to generalize beyond language as such (Bialystok & Craik, 2010).

Meal Times and Extended Dialogue

Family conversations at mealtimes have been studied extensively since the 1970s, and the results generally show a number of benefits for children’s language and cognitive development (Hamilton & Wilson, 2009; Kiser, et al., 2010). By providing extended dialogue between parent and child, for example, mealtimes give children opportunities to hear unusual words used in context, listen to explanations of the words, and to begin using the words themselves (Snow & Beals, 2006). The extended dialogue of meal times includes both extended explanatory talk (“logical” problem solving) and extended narrative talk (story telling), and allows children chances to enhance their own expressive skill with these genres. The discourse skills thus acquired are important for academic success in the elementary grades, and are also therefore important as educational goals for preschool and primary-grade classrooms. Unfortunately, because of issues of administration, class size, and classroom group management, teachers of very young children are often not able to provide extended conversations with individual children, even when their programs literally involve serving meals (Helburn, 1995). Intervention experiments in early childhood programs have shown, however, that teachers are quite capable of engaging in extended dialogue with children—and indeed prefer to do so—when supported with appropriate ideas and materials (Bradley & Reinking, 2010). Observations of lunchtimes at child care centers, in any case, show that preschool children engage in substantial language play, narrative, and explanatory talk at these times with each other, even when adults are not present to participate (Holmes, 2010). From the point of view of an early childhood teacher, therefore, a constructive teaching strategy may be to allow extended conversations simply to happen, participate in and support them whenever possible, but recognize that classrooms cannot always reproduce the individualized atmosphere of a family discussion fully.

Pretense Play and Games as Preparation for Institutional Life

Much has been written about the cognitive functions of play (Linn, 2008; Berk, Mann, & Ogan, 2006; Piaget, 1962). As Piaget emphasized and subsequent research has generally confirmed, make-believe play both stimulates and uses young children’s ability to represent objects and activities, nudging preschoolers beyond the sensorimotor here-and-now of infancy into more logical, but still rather concrete worlds of concrete operations. More recent writing has further argued that that make-believe actually fosters a component of hypothetical thinking, because children use objects “as if” they were something not immediately visible and in this sense treat objects as abstractions—a necessary though not sufficient feature of hypothetical thinking (Seifert, 2006). Abstract, counterfactual thinking is a feature of formal or hypothetical thinking posited by Piagetian psychologists for the period of adolescence, with the obvious difference that adolescents manipulate representations that are both more abstract and more logically coherent.

Games with rules carry this cognitive challenge a step further than the earlier make-believe by challenging children not just to use one object to represent another, but to agree with others about how to represent an object or action. Small, round pieces of wood are markers in a board game of checkers, and they can only be moved in certain ways. But this is true only because people who play the game agree to define and use the bits of wood in these ways. People could instead agree to use rocks, bits of paper or glass. On a community-wide scale—to consider a broader example—slips of paper with certain markings on them become “money” because people conventionally agree to treat the slips as such, even though other objects (lumps of metal or even heads of cattle) could be defined as “money” by convention. On a culture-wide scale, in fact, most human institutions owe their reality to objects and actions with meanings agreed on by convention.

During the preschool years, games with rules provide children with early experiences of conventionally assigned statuses, and in this sense such games initiate a journey toward understanding the nature of institutional life that characterizes much of adulthood (Rakoczy, 2007). Young children must understand that a game of hide-and-seek, for example, is a “game” because the players agree that it is, and agree on the rules for playing it. The rules acquire their key properties not because of their intrinsic features, but because of agreements among the participants. If the conventionality is not understood, then hide-and-seek ceases to be “just a game,” and players either fail to coordinate their actions or else hurt each other’s feelings easily.

Later in life, adults frequently face analogous needs to understand conventionality, even though conventionality it may not be labeled as such: a marriage becomes a “marriage,” for example, because everyone—the partners, relatives, and society—deems it to be one and therefore expects the participants to follow certain rules about marital behavior. Understanding conventionality obviously takes experience and reflection, and misunderstandings about the status of conventional agreements are not uncommon, either for adults (e.g. in marriage) or for children (in games). As Piaget pointed out, individuals at first may treat the rules of a game simply as sacred, unchangeable laws governing behavior and needing strict enforcement (Kalish, 2005). They fail to see that rules are also constituted from human agreement, and therefore can in principle be revised by mutual agreement. Such misunderstanding is especially likely for young children, who have relatively little experience with inventing, and negotiating revisions to rules. But repeated experience at games-with-rules helps move their views toward more mature perspectives about conventions. As it happens, early childhood teachers are well-positioned to provide such experiences, because the group settings that typify early childhood programs lend themselves to play and games (Singer, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2006).

How Can Cognitive Developmental Research Be Used?

As the preceding sections suggest, cognitive developmental research offers ideas relevant to the teaching of young children. At a minimum the research helps early childhood professionals to hold expectations about children’s cognition that are appropriate, and sometimes in addition it suggests ways to intervene on children’s behalf actively. From cognitive developmental research we know, for example, that children can remember aspects of “instructional” experiences almost from birth, and that no matter how young, children benefit from opportunities to consolidate memories of experiences. Consolidation takes time, however, and short cuts may or may not be possible. The research confirms the common sense notion that younger children do not remember as reliably as older children, but it also suggests that the younger children’s memory can be improved significantly when encouraged to use deliberate mnemonic strategies.

There is also ample evidence that children benefit cognitively from extended conversations in a variety of situations—eating meals, reading story books, interacting with a second language, playing at make-believe or games-with-rules. Cognitive developmental research also suggests why extended conversation helps: it exposes the child to new vocabulary and gives chances to practice using complex discourse genres. Conversation also engages the child’s attention jointly with adults’. The joint attention makes it more likely that a child will learn not only what adults consider to be important, but also ways to talk that recognize universal conventions of meaning as well as diversity in the credibility and reliability of others’ knowledge. Problem solving becomes more clear-headed and focused as a result.

Yet if history is a guide, ideas such as these will make their way into professional practice only partially and slowly. There are several reasons for this assertion, some of which are easier to deal with than others. One reason is that teachers’ sometimes just lack knowledge of recent relevant research. An interview study by Deniz (2009), for example, found that many early childhood teachers’ were not aware of the idea that preschoolers’ self-directed private speech during problem solving might serve as a bridge between active verbal support from adults and completely silent thinking by the child. Instead teachers often interpreted private speech as a sign of a child’s persistent immaturity rather than as a step toward the greater maturity of silent thought. In class, therefore, they sometimes discouraged children from talking to themselves, rather than allowing or respecting this behavior. To deal with this misunderstanding, Deniz recommended professional development education about language development.

Another factor that limits adoption of cognitive developmental research is the extent of cultural diversity and of associated differences in values and behaviors. Culturally based interaction patterns that are comfortable to researchers or even to participants in a study may be inappropriate outside the study context (Sternberg, 2007; Tharp & Dalton, 2007), even including the contexts served by early childhood programs. A frequent finding of child development research, for example, is that lively give-and-take between child and adult is not only beneficial cognitively, but also trainable in parents and children. Yet some families—or even whole communities within society—may consider such interaction disrespectful on the part of the child, and therefore discourage children from engaging in it (Philips, 2009). Many cognitive developmental studies also depend on children’s willingness to engage with problems or tasks out of their normal intellectual or practical context, and at the behest of relatively unknown adults. Judging by cross-cultural and other ethnographic research, however, such interactions may pose problems that are social as well as cognitive. In observing child care centers in Asia and the United States, for example, Tobin and his associates found a range of practices at meal times, some of which seem less likely to create extended table conversation with the qualities recommended earlier in this chapter (Tobin, Hsueh, & Karasawa, 2009). At one center (in Japan), the youngest children were served not by adults, but by older children. Mealtime conversation presumably did happen during these encounters, but it is reasonable to suspect that their conversation may have been more limited linguistically and/or more focused on the immediate tasks of eating. In any case the setting was not really what American educators and psychologists have in mind in recommending meal times as a venue for developing cognitive skills (Snow and Beals 2006;Hamilton & Wilson, 2009; Kiser, et al., 2010). In another child care center (in the USA) observed by Tobin, staff members were obliged by certification requirements to serve meals “family style,” meaning that preschool children were not served by adults, but helped themselves from bowls of food set at group tables. Again, developmentally productive conversations may have happened anyway, but the need to monitor spills, excess helpings, and logistics with a large number of children suggests that conversations might easily become more focused on management than in the family meal settings as described in research studies.

An especially important factor limiting adoption of research on cognitive development, however, stems from incommensurability between the goals and conditions of research studies, compared to the goals and conditions typical of early childhood classrooms. I alluded to some of these already in this chapter, and they have been discussed thoroughly elsewhere in the literature on educational research (e.g. Reason & Bradbury, 2006). Whereas developmental psychology research aims for (and often achieves) control over confounding factors, a major purpose of early childhood classroom practice is not to control “extraneous” factors, but to recognize and work with them—i.e. work with the entire context of a child’s experience. Whereas research aims for conceptual clarity, early childhood practice aims for broad human development and welfare. The differences mean that the factors that can make research “fail” are the very ones that can make practice successful. The confounding factors take many forms: the continual distraction and influence of peers, the personal diversity among children, the continual revision of lesson plans on the fly, the interplay of ideas, needs, and issues from persons outside the classroom. As has often been pointed out, classrooms are therefore messy, but research studies are comparatively clean, or at least try to be. As a result, it is hard to “see” the results of research studies in many classroom situations. Of particular relevance to this chapter, classroom tasks and activities that are purely cognitive are rare or nonexistent; all cognitive activities either serve additional social or emotional purposes, or else begin very explicitly as a social encounter. Given that early childhood programs tend by definition to be group settings, a pervasive social influence should not be surprising even if the nominal focus of some activities is cognitive.

It should also not surprise us that teachers, parents, and children construe the idea of intelligence not as a strictly cognitive talent, but as a quality that integrates social skills with cognition. In interview studies by Sara Harkness and her associates, for example, teachers from five societies (Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and USA) described their “best” or ideal students in terms that were at least as social as cognitive (Harkness, et al., 2007). The best students were not necessarily the cleverest ones intellectually, nor the highest performing on cognitive tasks. Instead they were the ones who mixed lively personality, creativity, and social and emotional sensitivity to others—qualities that presumably facilitated their ability to learn from others. The teachers’ vocabulary for describing these qualities varied, of course, but there was an underlying sense that cognitive development did not happen in a social or emotional vacuum, but was made possible by social interactions and relationships. Parents in these societies echoed these attitudes. Even when some used the term smart to describe their own child (a tendency especially of American parents), further questioning suggested that they were talking about cognitive outcomes that were made possible by social skills (Harkness & Super, 2006). Even young children themselves seem to regard intelligence in similar terms. In an ethnographic study by Chen (2010), for example, first-grade students described classmates as only mildly successful as students if they performed well academically, but much more successful if they were socially popular. Academic success, it seemed, was implicitly regarded as a component of social success, not as a separate domain of it.

What actually may be surprising is that political and funding agencies have not recognized these beliefs and attitudes, but instead have promoted the teaching of cognitive skills as if they exist independently of other domains of development (No Child Left Behind Act, 2001; Lewin, 2010; see also Zigler & Bishop-Josef, 2006). Partly as a result, assessments of early childhood programs often make this same distinction (e.g. Burger, 2009; Camilli, et al., 2010; Dee & Jacobson, 2010; Mashburn, et al., 2008); the social basis of cognition is either are either ignored or assessed as if it develops independently of cognition. The long-term result has been to pressure early childhood educators to teach specific cognitive skill behaviors, but to leave them to their own devices when teaching the social skills that make cognition possible, such as ability to self-regulate attention or to learn by watching and listening to others. The pressure, along with recent trends to limit public budgets, has made it difficult for early childhood educators to implement the best possible programs for children. As one program administrator put it, “we are caught between the NCLB and the NAEYC”—between accountability for instilling academic skills and commitment to developmentally appropriate practice (Tobin, Hseuh, & Karasawa, 2009, p. 185ff). Even if educators can eventually learn to live with this dilemma themselves, it will limit their effectiveness with children indirectly.

But all hope is not lost. A good starting point is the fact, noted above, that teachers often already recognize the importance of social relationships and interactions for developing children’s cognitive functions. One logical next step may therefore be to follow Deniz’s advice mentioned above: to share the relevant research as widely as possible early childhood educators—especially any research that offers details of how relationships and interactions affect cognition. In addition to such professional development, however, it would also help to listen more closely to the comments and questions that early childhood educators themselves consider most important for their work, and to adjust or at least reinterpret the cognitive research agenda accordingly. Toward this goal—and more radically—it would help to bridge the research-practice divide by inviting developmental psychologists to take a turn walking in the shoes of practicing early childhood educators. Doing so might vividly clarify to them how the epistemology, the freedoms to act or lack thereof, and the priority questions about children differ between the academic and professional worlds. Researchers may or may not want to alter their research agendas in view of this additional knowledge, and in fact may not always be able to so. But at least they would know more clearly what questions educators care about the most, and they would be able to assess more accurately the usefulness of existing developmental research in the landscape of educational and societal needs.

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