COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN
One rainy morning, as I observed in our laboratory preschool,
Leslie, the children’s teacher, joined me at the back of the room.
“Preschoolers’ minds are such a blend of logic, fantasy, and faulty
reasoning,” Leslie reflected. “Every day, I’m startled by the maturity
and originality of what they say and do. Yet at other times, their
thinking seems limited and inflexible.”
Leslie’s comments sum up the puzzling contradictions of early
childhood cognition. Hearing a loud thunderclap outside, 3-yearold Sammy exclaimed, “A magic man turned on the thunder!”
Even after Leslie explained that thunder is caused by lightning,
not by a person turning it on, Sammy persisted: “Then a magic
lady did it.”
In other respects, Sammy’s thinking was surprisingly advanced. At
snack time, he accurately counted, “One, two, three, four!” and
then got four cartons of milk, one for each child at his table. But
when his snack group included more than four children, Sammy’s
counting broke down. And after Priti dumped out her raisins,
scattering them in front of her on the table, Sammy asked, “How
come you got lots, and I only got this little bit?” He didn’t realize
that he had just as many raisins; his were simply all bunched up in
a tiny red box. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN.
To understand Sammy’s reasoning, we turn first to Piaget’s and
Vygotsky’s theories and evidence highlighting the strengths and

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