The Child as Thinker

The Development and Acquisition of Cognition in Childhood

Sara Meadows

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135422530
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This second edition of The Child as Thinker has been thoroughly revised and updated to provide an informed and accessible overview of the varied and extensive literature on children's cognition. Both theory and research data are critically examined and educational implications are discussed.

After a brief discussion of the nature and subject of cognition, Sara Meadows reviews children's thinking in detail. She discusses the ways children remember and organise information in general, the acquisition of skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic, and the development of more complex reasoning as children grow to maturity. As well as studies that typically describe a generalised child, the book also reviews some of the main areas relevant to individual differences in normal cognitive development, and critically examines three major models of cognitive development. In outlining the work of Piaget, information-processing accounts and neo-Vygotskian theories, she also evaluates their different explanations of cognitive development and their implications for education. Finally, the book examines biological and social factors that may be involved in normal and suboptimal cognitive development.

Sara Meadows provides an important review of the crucial issues involved in understanding cognitive development and of the new data and models that have emerged in the last few years. This book brings together areas and approaches that have hitherto been independent, and examines their strengths and weaknesses. The Child as Thinker is essential reading for all students of cognitive development.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The study of cognitive development in childhood is one of the major areas of child psychology. The aim of this book is to provide an informed and accessible overview of the area that will give the reader useful descriptions of what children do as thinkers and begin to show how we could explain why their cognition develops. Currently there are a number of interesting shifts in what cognitive development is thought to be, and this book is intended to review the field and, as far as possible, suggest what answers to the issues involved might be like. There is relevant research in a wide range of disciplines. These have tended to be isolated from each other, and I am convinced that workers in each field need to be better informed about each other's progress. Recent work has generated new data and new explanatory models that I want to juxtapose, and has shown that some of the assumptions we have left unquestioned need to be re-examined. I hope to give students who are new to the field of cognitive development a sense of what is going on, to allow researchers who are more dug into it to access the relevant research flowering outside their own areas, and to fork over and refresh the general compost heap: which may all, finally, help us to grow children's cognition better than we do at present.

Here, in the first chapter, I will present, briefly, some of the issues that will surface for closer examination elsewhere. The first is fundamental for how we describe cognition; it is the question of what ‘cognition’ is. This may seem to be capable of a clear answer, but in fact there are a number of problems in the background, stretching right back to psychology's unresolved tension between its two definitions as ‘the science of mental life’ and ‘the science of behaviour’. At one level cognition is what people can be observed to do when they have to think, learn, remember, understand, judge, use concepts and so forth; at another it is the system behind these different abilities. Researchers tend to focus on one level rather than another, just as they differ on whether they attend to the formal properties of a cognitive system or to the material it is made of, when seeking to explain why it works as it does. Sometimes this is because different researchers are using different allied disciplines; the user of the latest neurophysiological research is probably not dealing with quite the same question about cognition as the users of the latest advances in artificial intelligence or in educational programmes. I am going to argue that there would be more progress in the study of cognitive development if practitioners who differed in their focus on the subject nevertheless took into account the illumination that other focuses provided. The study of reading processes in childhood and adulthood is a shining example of the advances that arise when different disciplines, in this case experimental cognitive psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neurophysiology, are brought together intelligently.

Another uncertainty stretching back to the early days of psychology is about what the limits of cognition are in the sense of what is not ‘cognitive’. Virtually every human action involves some thinking, learning, use of concepts, and so forth, and is therefore cognitive. The traditional division of psychology's subject-matter was into ‘affective’ (or emotional), ‘conative’ (or motivational) and ‘cognitive’ (or intellectual). The problem with this division is that it underplays the links between cognition, emotion and motivation, and they have been largely neglected in research, which, as I show later, is regrettable. Nor does it easily accommodate the social dimension of behaviour, and here another problematic issue about cognitive development is relevant: is it a matter of each individual constructing his or her own individual cognitive system, or are cognitive systems constructed within and by social interaction? Again, much of the literature tends to focus on either individual or social without giving the other adequate consideration, and many of the descriptive studies do not help with the problem because they seek to describe a generalised child and do not examine the variation between individuals with different powers of construction or different experience of social interaction. The theoretical models that make individual construction pre-eminent tend to focus on very general abstract cognitive processes instantiated in behaviour on problems that are not part of the usual educational curriculum, such as conservation, or solving the problems of the Tower of Hanoi. The social constructivist theories are more likely to look at cognition in socially valued areas, such as school achievement or becoming a skilled craft worker. It might be that these are in important ways different sorts of cognition, and so might have different origins and development; but as they operate in the same individual and very probably with pretty much the same brain cells, it seems a pity to treat them separately.

One way of putting this sort of problem about cognition is to question whether it is general – a matter of a few processes that dominate cognitive behaviour in all disciplines and all domains – or whether it is ‘domainspecific’, with each area of subject-matter having its own specialised ways of thinking. Again, it must be both, but we need to say how the two work together in development. A parallel debate to this one is concerned with whether there are universal cognitive processes that are the same for every normal individual, or at least a level of description where universals may be used, or whether there may not be more than one normal way of solving the same problem. The two very important developmental versions of this are whether the successful solution processes of children might differ from the successful solution processes of adults, and whether there might not be distinctly different pathways from early childhood to adulthood for different individuals or groups. I argue that some attention to the possibility of differences between individuals in their cognition may illuminate both what cognition is and how it gets to be as it is, and would clarify how individual construction and social construction are balanced.

A whole set of even more unresolved issues arise about the parallel question of what ‘development’ is. These interact with the problems of the nature and limits of ‘cognition’ that I have just mentioned; if these are difficulties when we look at completed cognition in adults, they are much more delicate when we look at cognitive development in childhood, because in childhood we have to explain both development and stability. Even when we have a stable state of language, cognition or intelligence, it may be the result of dynamic processes that maintain that stability within a permanent process of change. Development is not just about how X becomes Y or gives rise to Y, but about how X maintains itself as X. As I discuss in Chapter 3, there are theoretical accounts of both development and stability (e.g. Fischer and Bidell 1998; Gottlieb et al. 1998; Lerner 1998; Magnusson and Stattan 1998; Overton 1998; Valsiner 1998b; Oyama et al. 2001), which need to be brought to bear on descriptions of the ways in which children behave.

The introduction is not the place to discuss these difficult issues. They will be implicit (occasionally explicit) in my description of ‘the child as thinker’, and are more fully addressed in the later part of the book, in which I look at accounts of ‘cognitive development’ and what pushes, pulls and mauls it. I hope readers will read the descriptive chapters to get a reasonably firm sense of what has to be explained, but be able to enjoy a bit of uncertainty about what sorts of explanation might work. Years of immersion in the field have taught me that very little indeed is at the level of scientific certainty that we would like, but there are enough fairly firm tussocks in the marsh of our ignorance to keep us from getting wet much above the knees.

There are, I think, three good reasons for studying the development and acquisition of cognition in childhood. First, it is there, interesting in itself. Second, understanding it is going to make a major contribution to understanding human cognition: as J. M. Baldwin (1895) said, ‘the study of children is often the only means of testing the truth of our mental analyses’. Third, understanding it should illuminate our activities as formal and informal educators of children; I think we can already draw ideas from the field about how to facilitate their cognitive development, and about what could impede it, even though we are some way from a rigorous understanding.

The plan of the book is as follows. It begins with description of cognition in childhood (Chapter 2), with a review of what children's thinking is like in a number of different areas, beginning with the generally applicable cognitive skills of talking, reading, writing and arithmetic and the ways that children remember and organise information in general, and going on to areas such as drawing, spatial reasoning and ideas about socio-economic systems. This long chapter addresses the ‘what’ of cognitive development in childhood: what do children do when they remember, draw maps, act as naïve psychologists or physicists, or whatever; what changes and what remains the same as they grow to maturity? Developmental principles begin to appear here, and get some discussion in terms of how well they could account for children's cognitive behaviour.

The studies reviewed in Chapter 2 typically seek to describe a generalised child: they say ‘5-year-olds do this, 10-year-olds do that’; variation among children of the same age or stage is rarely focused on, and may be explicitly consigned to the separate study of ‘individual differences’. I think that this is unfortunate, for reasons developed throughout the rest of the book, and therefore Chapter 3 reviews some of the main areas relevant to individual differences in normal cognitive development. As it happens, much of the work on intelligence, creativity and cognitive style has been assertively non-developmental, insisting that many of these individual differences are to a major extent innate; my discussion of them focuses on how this has impoverished the research and how it could be enriched by a developmental perspective.

Having discussed the ‘what’ of cognitive development, I move towards the ‘how’: what drives, leads, or produces change in cognition over childhood. Chapter 4 reviews the three major current models of cognitive development. Here Piaget's work, information-processing accounts, and neo-Vygotskian theories are outlined and evaluated. It is in this section that I present theorists’ accounts of the principles behind cognitive development, and discuss them in terms of their adequacy as models of the development described in Chapter 2. Each has a different set of answers to the question of how cognitive development occurs, and different descriptions of its causes and of the role of education. I use some examples of children's thinking to illustrate their goodness-of-fit with the data and suggest their achievements and inadequacies.

Chapter 5 examines some of the areas in mainstream psychology that might contribute to our understanding of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of cognitive development. The first part is predominantly biological and medical, drawing on research on genetics, brain development and the effects of environmental problems for what they can tell us about both normal and suboptimal cognitive development. The second part looks at social influences on cognitive development, focusing first on demographic variations in cognitive achievement and then on the effect of social interaction in the family and in school on how well cognitive development proceeds.

The final chapter raises some of the pervasive problems and omissions of the field, and indicates where I think progress is likely.

Note to second edition

Users of the first edition of this book suggested that it should be expanded to include discussion of cognition in infancy and the development of spoken language. I have added some description of language development to Chapter 2, I now include it in my discussion of debates about the causes of cognitive development, and there are many more items on it in the References. I have not added much on infancy research. My reason is that this deserves a book in itself. The field is full of interesting but conflicting data and interpretation, and as an outsider I did not feel well placed to discern what was the best account of it. It would also add to what is already a long book. No-one identified parts of the first edition that could be cut out, and so each has been retained and revised. There are a lot of indications of cross-references, as similar points are made or related issues raised in different chapters. I have tried not to repeat myself, though as many topics were related or had been addressed from different angles it was not possible to provide a simple linear structure to the material. I have tried to prune as well as add, and to rethink more than either, but have retained most of the older references. The balance has shifted a little towards more on cognition in its biological and social setting, and less on purely cognitive accounts, reflecting the opening up of new research areas and my own preferences.

Chapter 2

Descriptive studies of children's cognitive skills and knowledge

This chapter contains reviews of some of the knowledge and the cognitive skills that children develop and acquire during the years of childhood, including talking, reading, writing, arithmetical computation, remembering, reasoning, drawing, metacognition, categorising into concepts, and their ideas about music, persons, socio-economic systems, science, stories, maps, and so on. I provide here only a brief outline of each topic with references to the material from which my outline is derived; readers must consult these references to get anything like a comprehensive picture. I have not attempted to integrate the separate bodies of research that have produced the descriptions I summarise here, nor to go beyond description to explanation. Nor have I dealt with every skill or area of knowledge that has appeared in the literature. The selection of material has necessarily been dependent on what I came across: doubtless there have been many brilliant studies that I simply failed to notice, and some I failed to understand, which are therefore not dealt with here.

I would not want to draw a strong distinction between skills and knowledge, being persuaded by the evidence that they are so interdependent as to be inextricable. However, there is some difference in the descriptions of children's behaviour in this section that maps on to the skills–knowledge distinction. In some areas what is described is what children do, and these areas are on the whole more skill-like (reading, writing, reasoning, and so forth), while in other areas the description is of what children say about a topic, and here the focus is perhaps knowledge (of people, socio-economic systems, music, etc.). There are some intermediate areas, metacognition for example, where the interplay between skill and knowledge is most conspicuous. Many would argue that knowing enough about your cognitive skills to apply them consciously, deliberately and flexibly is a major part of cognitive development, perhaps the major part so far as cognition acquired through formal education is concerned. How far knowledge about one's ‘declarative’ knowledge (of persons, countries, sub-atomic particles, or whatever) affects either that knowledge or one's ‘procedural’ knowledge (skills such as remembering, understanding and reasoning) is not clear; but certainly differences in the efficiency of such cognitive procedures will affect one's access to and use of one's knowledge. An ability to remember information or to recognise that there is a contradiction between two ‘facts’ will no doubt be necessary for using knowledge satisfactorily. Some aspects of the procedural knowledge–declarative knowledge distinction are discussed later in this book. The distinction functions here only as the reason why the contents of this section are presented in the order that follows: roughly, ‘mainly about skills’ before ‘mainly about content’. This structure separates some areas that would ideally be linked, and deals with some topics several times, from somewhat different angles. Readers will find that the text does contain cross-references, but it would be advisable to use the index too. It is essential, rather than advisable, that readers should not believe that any section contains all that is to be said about its subject! The References section includes a number of review articles that will give a supplementary overview to mine and start the reader on more extensive study, as well as original books and papers. I have referenced what I say rather thoroughly, with the intention that readers should have no excuse not to follow up ideas or experiments rather than rely on my review.

2.1 Language development

Being language users, and more specifically highly educated literate adults, those reading this book, and I myself writing it, may be inclined to think that human language is the pinnacle of achievement for our species and for each of us as an individual. We delight in what we can do with language, with what we can see it do in the utterances or writings of other people. We may find its development in the child especially amazing; find it wonderful how fast children learn to use language to communicate, describe, argue, analyse, persuade, inform, and deceive. Language seems a more special, uniquely human ability, than any other; it has often been said to be the defining attribute of Homo sapiens. While sharing the delight and the admiration, I am going to argue that we need to be cautious about the specialness of language. Much of the literature on children's language development deals with it as a phenomenon separate from other human activities. In the first edition of this book, I omitted discussion of it for this reason; if the language development specialists dealt with language as different from the rest of children's cognition, then a book on children's cognition that was already in danger of being far too long could refer its readers to other sources for an account of something that specialists thought was separate. Since then, readers have asked for language development to be added to the book, and the theory around language development has itself shifted towards more links between language and the rest of children's cognition. This has given me more incentive to look (selectively) at the enormous amount of literature on child language and provide a brief review of its development. It also increases the scope for addressing the difficult question of the relationship between language and cognition.

Classic pictures of children's language development centred on the quite brief period between the first recognisable word (early in the second year of life) and the child using language fluently (by something like age three). They also centred on language production, especially on the production of grammatical sentences. The dominant theoretical accounts of language development for many years were models that gave the child an innate ability to develop language given minimal exposure to other people's language use, models that were heavily nativist; these had developed in reaction to earlier models in which the child was a passive recipient of parental conditioning to use language as the parents did. The nature–nurture polarity flourished, just as it did in theories of intelligence (Chapter 3). A tremendous amount of interesting research and theorising was done, but it was unhelpfully influenced by a set of pres...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Descriptive studies of children's cognitive skills and knowledge
• 3 Individual differences in cognitive development
• 4 Models of cognition in childhood Metaphors, achievements and problems
• 5 Causes of change and variation in cognitive development
• 6 Teaching thinking
• 7 Questions, problems – and possibilities
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index