Early Childhood Studies: Child Perspective Study Assignment Analysis

This essay delves into the realm of early childhood studies, meticulously examining child perspectives on learning and cognitive development. The assignment begins by analyzing two key articles, exploring how young children learn mathematical concepts, and contrasting these ideas with Piaget's theories. It then examines the role of manipulatives in fostering mathematical understanding. The essay further investigates different learning theories, specifically behaviorism and cognitivism, highlighting their socio-cultural origins and contexts. It then applies Bruner's theory of cognitive representation, illustrating the enactive, iconic, and symbolic stages with a classroom scenario. Finally, the assignment compares and contrasts the theories of Bruner and Vygotsky, evaluating their strengths and limitations, particularly in the context of early childhood education. The essay underscores the importance of language, social interaction, and culturally relevant experiences in shaping a child's intellectual growth.

Running Head: Early Childhood Studies
Assignment
Title: Early Childhood Studies
Module: Child Perspective Study I
University:……………………………………..

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Question 1
a. The article of Kami (1982) focuses on encouraging independent thought in children while
learning mathematics and not just producing the right answers (representation). The main
emphasis of the arithmetic should be to understand the process involved in evaluating the
answers (abstraction). The article considers the workbook based programmed approach
undesirable in mathematics because they aim to find correct answers instead of initiating
the thinking process. Moreover in these workbooks, the teacher decides the correct
answer reducing the involvement of child’s thinking. The article elaborates this concept
and also recommends measures to change the existing practice. It is very important for
the child to share his perspective or point of view with others. It is a great idea to promote
learning if the teachers stop evaluating the answer sheets of the children and promote the
exchange of views in honest way and indulge in discussions. The children can be enabled
to think logically by confronting the ideas of their friends in smaller groups. They can
defend their statements with elaborate discussions. The teachers as facilitators can
observe the progress in thinking process of the children instead of just emphasizing on
writing the correct answers. It is observed that the children often cannot explain the
process in which they have reached the final answer. When they are asked about how
they reached the solution, they simply get frightened and start erasing the answers with
the erasers. Such practices show lack of clarity of concepts and doubtfulness in their
minds.

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According to this article, young children learn mathematics by elaborating the logico
mathematical knowledge and coordinating between the simple relationships (like
difference or similarity between the objects) made by the child earlier during the learning
process. The child uses empirical abstraction to focus on particular property of the object
while ignoring the others; and reflective abstraction for specifying the relationships
between the objects. The child also acquires social knowledge by the input from the
surrounding people. When the child tries to satisfy his teacher by just producing the
written answers, he does not use his own reason to remember sums and think about the
numbers. It is the most mechanical, dependable and mindless counting method. Most of
the times child tries to memorize the sums.
The article ‘Manipulatives-When are they useful?’ analyzes the importance of
manipulatives (like tangrams, counters, board and cards) in best possible way to stimulate
the thinking process in children. The article recommends of these manipulatives to
encourage the children to think, to establish spatial relationships between the objects and
use their own reasoning to understand the mathematical concepts. These manipulatives
will help the children in moving away from traditional practice of just habitually
repeating the things to be learned. It will stimulate thinking for solving a particular
problem.
b. These two readings emphasize on stimulating thinking process in the minds of children
rather than just following the teacher’s answers or just representation of the answers. The
theories are related to operational stage of the child after birth. Gray & MacBlain (2012)
postulated that the children can make associations even before the birth (Gray &

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McBlain, 2012, p.1). It elaborates the cognitive development taking place in the body
during early years of life and continue to develop progressively in further stages of brain
development. Piaget considers the role of development and age in thinking process. Older
children think in mature way than the younger ones. Piaget said the development process
takes primary role in stimulating learning in children.
c. Children’s mathematical learning should be based on ‘learning by doing’ and self
exploratory concepts rather than simply memorizing the sums. It will undoubtedly
improve the basic problem solving skills in children. They will be more interested in
spending time solving the process of arithmetic problem rather than just representing the
answers dictated by the teacher.
My early childhood classroom practice also involved charts and boards however the
whole process of solving a sum was never elaborated in so detail. The practice of
enabling the children to understand the each stage of process as shown in the articles, can
be very helpful for the children to depict the errors at any stage of the problem solving.
The children will be more confident and capable of solving arithmetic problems in a more
specified way.
Question 2. Learning can be defined as an approach which unites the personal experiences with
the environmental influences for attaining the skills, attitudes, knowledge and the behaviors
(International Bureau of Education, 2018). According to Shunk (1991), the learning can be
defined as an acquired change of behavior. The theories elaborate on how the children personally

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intake, process and acquire the knowledge while learning. Main five theories of learning include
Behaviorism, Cognitive Psychology, Constructivism, Social Learning Theory, and Experiential
Learning (MacLeod, 2018).
The two main perspectives (as discussed in Gray & MacBlain, 2015) can be taken as
Behaviorism and Cognitivism.
Behaviorism: The main behaviorist thinkers are Pavlov, Thorndike and Skinner who postulated
that learning is a manipulation of behavior of the child occurring due to the external stimulus.
This manipulated behavior shows acquisition of learning. The behaviorists consider the classical
and operant conditioning as a universal process of learning. The change can either rewarded or
punished. This Theory is based on Stimulus Response (Thompson, 2012). Reward represents
desirable behaviors and reinforces the change (Burgoyne, 2003). It promotes the repetition of
that behavior. The punishment restricts the child from doing the behavior again. The behaviorism
relies on the observable behaviors. The research data can be easily researched and quantified in
this theory. For example the computer games have been important factors which encourage the
positive or negative reinforcement in children. However they also have certain negative
reinforcers like increase in the obstacles, health decline and failure to achieve a good score. The
Theory of behaviorism has been found helpful in development of various teaching strategies like
Programmed texts, Skinner’s teaching machine and early audio visual materials.
In behaviorism the environment of learning also plays an important role (Barkeyley University
of California, 2018). The early childhood environment should be positively encourage the
learning in children minimally using the negative reinforcers.

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Cognitivism: The theory emphasizes that the learning takes place internally from the mental
activities such as thinking, motivation, memory and reflection. Learning is largely based on the
child’s determination, capacity and motivation for learning (Craik & Tulving,1975). This Theory
is based on flow of knowledge (Thompson, 2012). It considers the knowledge transfer from a
learned person (teacher) to the students who are still learning it. The children receive it,
understand it, accumulate it and relate it to their previous knowledge. The children can
efficiently retrieve the learned concepts whenever they intend to do that. The cognitivism focuses
on the idea of extending the knowledge and modifying it rather than appending the new
knowledge. It involves fundamental relationship with the Piaget’s concept and age dependent
cognitive development to illustrate the mental abilities of different children. Effective learning in
this theory requires a right balance between the transmission of knowledge and facilitation of
child’s own knowledge and experience while solving a mathematical problem (Carlton, 2012).
The games which provide free decision making environment to the children such as puzzles, are
great examples promoting cognitivism (Ertmer & Newby, 2013).
Question 3: According to Jerome Burner the three stages of cognitive representation involves
enactive, iconic and symbolic representation. The enactive stage shows the knowledge
representation in form of actions. The iconic stage visually summarizes the knowledge and the
symbolic representation stage makes use of different words and personal experiences to illustrate
the child’s own understanding level of knowledge. The three stages can be used effectively to
describe the scenario.
Enactive Stage: The students are getting prepared to go for a walk in the school. The teacher
starts a rhyme by spelling the first line of the rhyme taking the names of the children and asks the

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children what will they see during the walk. The children just imagine the things what they can
see and speak up those things while completing the rhyme. The students speak the names of
things on the basis of their acquired knowledge and encoding it. They directly manipulate the
objects to match the last word of the teacher’s rhyme. The children can successfully manipulate
the future events related to going for a walk. They imagine the things on their own and tell the
teacher. Their internal representation of things is based on their earlier storage of information.
Iconic stage: It uses internal representation of the things children imagine they can see in their
walk based on the mental image of those things in children’s mind. They visually spell the name
s of those things by using their imaginations and representing those imaginations in form of
appropriate words.
Symbolic Stage is mostly seen in children more than seven years and uses to store the
information in form of symbols like language (Hurst, 2018). The enactive stage is also seen in
the kids of age 0-1 years however the children of preschool age as shown in the scenario would
certainly have acquired the essential skills of this stage as they seem to be in the 1-6 years age
group. The students are good at their language skills and can recall the rhyming word so we may
consider that the students have also attained the symbolic stage of development. The language
skills help the children in developing the concepts. They can efficiently code the stimuli and
make the children free from just identifying and interpreting the pictures or images. The
constructivist theory of Bruner is important in transforming the learning skills of the children
from initial level of enactive stage to the symbolic stage as they grow in age.
In this scenario the children can successfully respond to the teacher’s statement with their name

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Question 4: Jerome Burner’s Theory considers three stages of the cognitive development and
names them as Enactive (0-1 year), Iconic (1-6 year) and Symbolic stages (7 years and more).
Two main ideas of his theory are: (1) Bruner gives due importance to language development in
the process of learning. (2) Bruner considers the role of education to facilitate problem solving
and thinking skills in children.
Two main ideas of Vygotsky are: (1) Vygotsky gives greater importance to the culture and social
factors in influencing the intellectual development. (2) He also considers language as an
important attribute in the development of cognition (McLeod, 2018). Both the Vygotsky and
Jerome focused on the roe of adults in delivering instructional learning for the children (Culatta,
2019). Burner’s concept of scaffolding is similar to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. It
emphasizes on the planned and structured association between the teacher and the students and
mainly aims to help the child achieve his learning objective.
Four Strengths of Vygotsky’s Perspective are:
1. He says that the child’s intellectual development depends on the culture of child’s
environment and differs across different places (Vygotsky, 2018).
2. It stems from the extent the child interacts socially and takes part in social activities like
playing with the peers.
3. The thoughts emerge in the child before the knowledge and the language.
4. The role of learned adults or teachers is highly appreciated in this model.
Four Limitations of Vygotsy’s model are:

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1. The Vygotsy’s theory differs from Piaget in certain aspects. The Zone of proximal
development in Vygotsly’s model is not considered true and varies from child to child.
2. He did not give much importance to development related concepts.
3. He does not give much emphasis on the individual’s role in acquisition of the knowledge.
4. It gives main importance to social factors in cognitive development of the child (Thakur,
2016).
Four Strengths of Jerome Burner’s Theory
1. Mostly the theory is associated with the development of child and related concepts.
2. It directs that the teacher’s instructions need to be structured in the most effective way so
that the child could grasp it more easily.
3. Theory encourages the social learning as much as possible (Scaffolding).
4. Discovery Learning emphasizes on the concept that the children may construct their own
storage of information based on their experiences.
Four Limitations of Jerome Burner’s Theory are:
1. The Theory is not vast enough to include all the development concepts. It has generalized
all the development processes into just three stages.
2. It needs a large variety of resources which are very difficult to find in the classroom
generally.
3. The use of words and symbols cannot be always used to associate the scenario with the
information.

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4. The manipulatives may just stimulate thinking in children but cannot be used to explain
the complex mathematical problems. They can be useful in the enactive level in making
the students attracted towards the learning (Bruner, 2013).
Question 5
My current teaching philosophy is based on the practical correlation of the theoretical concepts
with the real life applications. The teaching approach has to be coordinated and student centric
rather than being instructional. Every child is unique in his potential, development and learning
pace. The learning environment needs to be stimulating to help them grow mentally, physically,
socially and emotionally. I will focus on developing a healthy and fear free environment for the
preschoolers where they can develop to their complete potential. The main aspects in learning
include learning by activities, decision making of children, developing curiosity in their minds,
practicing skills in safe area, with the addition of technology.
Piaget’s constructivism theory is based on providing an environment to encourage positive
learning experience in children (Cox, 2018). The child creates the knowledge by interacting with
the ideas and experiences of the real time activities they meet on daily basis at schools.
Hyun considers the role of enhancing the children’s learning by helping them make decision and
discovering their own solutions for the specified problems. It develops huge thinking skills of
students. In the traditional practices impart of knowledge was based on learning. However in the
current practice, the emphasis of the instructions is mainly student centric one. It is known as
Constructivist Teaching Learning approach. This approach considers the knowledge as non

Early Childhood Studies 11
transferrable entity and can be generated through the individual favorable environment. The role
of a teacher is as a facilitator who helps the children in developing their perspectives and ideas
for learning (Kadir, Asimiran & Roustaee, 2014).
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Carlton (2012). Cognitivism and Games. Retrieved from
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