Faculty of Cognitive Science & Human Development

KMF1043 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT PSYCHOLOGY

ASSIGNMENT 1 CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

(COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT OF A 7 YEAR OLD)

Slot: Tuesday, 1100-1400

GROUP: 12

Students Name and

Matric Number:

1.Ikram Bin Ahmad 47004

2.Farah Nazeema Binti Johari 45561

3.Nurfarahani Norman 45921

4.Nornadirah Binti Abdul Rahman 45823

5.Faten Anis Syairah Binti Seri 46799

Programme:

KMF1043 Human Development Psychology

Topic:

Cognitive Development of a 7 Year Old

Lecturers Name:

Dr. Julia Lee Ai Cheng

CHAPTERTITLE PAGE

1 INTRODUCTION3

2 THEORY9

2.1 Case Study

2.2 Discussion

3 CONCLUSION10

4 APPENDIX

1.0INTRODUCTION

Child development is a process in which every child in the world goes through, regardless of their backgrounds or origins. It happens as soon as the child is born. Child development involves mastering skills of talking, walking, wearing their own clothes, taking a bath on their own, and includes their well-being, emotional as well as cognitive functioning. Most children learn skills of walking in the middle of the ages of 9 to 15 months. Cognitive and emotional development discusses the growth of a child in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill and language learning (Piaget.) Advancements of children are said to be multidirectional, multidimensional and lifelong. Children during their early years mainly develop their cognitive skills such as solving simple mathematical problems, and recognizing things around them. The brain of a child during birth, as we are aware of, are not fully developed, hence it grows very swiftly during the first several years of life. They also cultivate social skills, for instance being able to relate or in other words, interact with people around them. Besides having emotional and social skills, children correspondingly develop language skills in which they start to understand and use words. Each child is a unique individual and they grow within their own rapidity. Different children possess different skills of development. For this project, we conducted an experiment to test the cognitive developments of a child named Nur Insyirah binti Norazwan, who happens to be the cousin to one of our group members. Nur Insyirah is a seven years old child, being the first child out of three siblings and lives in Kuching, Sarawak. Questions were given to the child and results were noted whether the child was able to understand and answer the questions provided or the other way around. A childs cognitive and emotional development basically depends on their environment and how their parents approach their needs. Parents play a huge role in childrens life. They often think that buying lots of toys and gadgets for their children is the way to encourage their childs development, when the most vital things that need to be given to their children are loads of love and attention. Showing children that they matter is the utmost essential aspect in assisting to improve a childs development.

Social and emotional developments in children occur based on different hereditary factors. Most children will be more comfortable with people they are familiar with, and will show fear and perhaps anger when coming across people they have never met or are unfamiliar with. This happens through experience of the children themselves. Besides, emotional progresses can be seen in children when they encounter problems with their school work for example, and leads to frustration and the feeling of dissatisfaction just because they feel that they fail to understand and process the cognitive skills needed to finish their work. This is related to socio-emotional processes, which are those that comprises deviations in psychosocial development, including emotional communication, self-understanding, relationships with others, and moral reasoning and behaviour. (Papalia, Olds, & Feldman, 2008). A babys smile in response to its mothers touch can be one of the proofs of the socio-emotional factors, which is involved in the physical nature of the touch and the babys reaction to it. The cognitive process allows for the baby understands that the smile is a premeditated action, while the socio-emotional process is involved in both the positive emotional feeling that is mirrored in the act of smiling and in the constructive link with another human being (Santrock, 2008). A child's psychological progress exhibits the intricacy of influences and functions as well as the diverse dissimilarities of the factors that disrupt it and the connections, be it within the stages of development or the transverses of it.

2.0THEORY

Piagetian Approach

According to Piaget, this period of cognitive development is referred to at the concrete operational stage. The Piagetian approach emphasizes more on mental thought processes. Specifically, there are three stages when cognitive growth occurred; organization, adaptation, and equilibrium. By following these three stages, the children can be tested on either they can understand the system of new knowledge that they are going to learn, adapt themselves to the new information regard their surrounding or seek balance for their cognitive processes. At this stage too, children can understand spatial notions, causality, categorization, can reason better, conservation as well as number and mathematics (Papalia, Olds & Feldman, 2007). Children can also concentrate better than they were younger, meaning now, have the ability to extract distractions and their memory improves more (Cherry, n.d.).

Information Processing Approach

This approach attempts to conduct the study on cognitive development by observe and examine mental processes involved in mental information processing (Papalia, Olds & Feldman, 2007). In this approach, we will also view on childrens improving memory ability in which they are able to store and retrieve more information when needed and are more refined in organizing that info (Oswalt, 2010). Moreover, this information processing somehow related to stimulus and response in order to observe whether the child can handle all the information that were told to them very well. By observing the childs response towards the stimulus, it will enable us to detect the children understanding and make them understand about their own mental processes and on how to enhance their learning better.

3.0CASE STUDY

To conduct the case study, we prepared series of questions that are related to our subject of choice and present them in a manner that is understandable to the child and yet fun.

For the first question, we asked the child if she understood the concept of a see-saw. We then, further amplify the concept of a see-saw in which the weight on both sides has to be equal for it to be balanced. Therefore we presented a diagram with certain weight was on one side of the see-saw and included choices for her to choose from where we asked her which added with which weight can result to a balanced see-saw.The second question was inspired from a video that we watched during lecture. Instead of using physical object, we sketched drawing (what was intended to be sticks or rulers or any rectangular object with height) with different unscaled measurements of rectangles and asked the child to arrange the drawing into ascending order in terms of height (shortest to tallest). For the third question, she was asked to categorize the drawings for instance, there were illustrations of desk, flower, and television. Then, the child required classifying them into respective categories.

The next activity allowed us to test the child linguistic capabilities we were informed that she is learning three languages as school. She was given words and was required to translate them.

4.0DISCUSSION

Based on the results, the children have surpassed four tests that were required to test her developmental process. For the first question, the children had been tested with a concept which was a concept of a see-saw. The question was given to test her logic, causality and mathematical ability. As for the result, we can identify that she has a strong logic, causality and mathematical ability (Papalia, Olds & Feldman, 2007) since she knew that weight plays an important roles in determining the balance of the see-saw, she knew every part have a different weight and to balance the see-saw, she needs a correct weight for both end of planks . For the second question, the children had been tested with a sketch of a different unmeasured shape of rectangles. She managed to arrange the different shape of rectangles in an ascending order and it proves that she has a strong spatial notions and reasoning (Papalia, Olds & Feldman, 2007). She managed to envisage which rectangles should be next and arranged them in an ascending order. She arranged them in accordance to what the question want and arranged them correctly in accordance to their respective height. For the third question, an illustration has been prepared to test her skills in categorization and concentration. She able to recognized and differentiates the items that have been categorized into different groups for example, the desk belongs to classroom and flowers belong to garden and so on. As a seven years old child, she categorized them in accordance to their group (Papalia, Olds & Feldman, 2007) and her memory ability has helped her to memorize which group should be in which category (Oswalt, 2010). For the fourth question, she was tested with a statement in a different language that requires her to translate it in a language that she understands. This question is proposed to test her linguistic ability. The results shown that her linguistic ability proves that she can understand what she was doing and handle all the information that has been given to her (Oswalt, 2010).

References

1. Oswalt, A. (2010). Attention, memory and meta-cognition. Retrieved from https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/attention-memory-and-meta-cognition/

2. Cherry, K. (n.d.). Cognitive development in middle childhood. Retrieved from http://psychology.about.com/od/early-child-development/a/cognitive-development-in-middle-childhood.htm

3. Papalia, E., Olds, S., & Feldman, R. (2008).Human development(8th Ed.). Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: McGraw-Hill.

4. Website :Piaget Stages of Development. From WebMD online website : http://webmd.com

5. How Kids Develop. From http://howkidsdevelop.com

6. Cognitive Development and the Education of Young Children, by Kelvin L. Steifert (University of Manitoba, 2004). From http://home.cc.unimanitoba.ca

APPENDIX