Download or read book Conceptual Change in Childhood written by Susan Carey and published by Bradford Books. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are children fundamentally different kinds of thinkers than adults? Or are the cognitive differences between young children and adults merely a matter of accumulation of knowledge? In this book, Susan Carey develops an alternative to these two ways of thinking about childhood cognition, putting forth the idea of conceptual change and its relation to the development of knowledge systems.Conceptual Change in Childhood is a case study of children's acquisition of biological knowledge between ages 4-10. Drawing on evidence from a variety of sources, Carey analyzes the ways that knowledge is restructured during this development, comparing them to the ways that knowledge is restructured by an adult learner, and to the ways that conceptual frameworks have shifted in the history of science. Susan Carey is Professor of Psychology at MIT.
Download or read book Conceptual Change in Childhood written by Susan Carey and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are children fundamentally different kinds of thinkers than adults? Or are the cognitive differences between young children and adults merely a matter of accumulation of knowledge? In this book, Susan Carey develops an alternative to these two ways of thinking about childhood cognition, putting forth the idea of conceptual change and its relation to the development of knowledge systems. Conceptual Change in Childhood is a case study of children's acquisition of biological knowledge between ages 4-10. Drawing on evidence from a variety of sources, Carey analyzes the ways that knowledge is restructured during this development, comparing them to the ways that knowledge is restructured by an adult learner, and to the ways that conceptual frameworks have shifted in the history of science. Susan Carey is Professor of Psychology at MIT.
Download or read book Words Thoughts and Theories written by Alison Gopnik and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998-09-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Words, Thoughts, and Theories articulates and defends the "theory theory" of cognitive and semantic development, the idea that infants and young children, like scientists, learn about the world by forming and revising theories, a view of the origins of knowledge and meaning that has broad implications for cognitive science. Gopnik and Meltzoff interweave philosophical arguments and empirical data from their own and other's research. Both the philosophy and the psychology, the arguments and the data, address the same fundamental epistemological question: How do we come to understand the world around us? Recently, the theory theory has led to much interesting research. However, this is the first book to look at the theory in extensive detail and to systematically contrast it with other theories. It is also the first to apply the theory to infancy and early childhood, to use the theory to provide a framework for understanding semantic development, and to demonstrate that language acquisition influences theory change in children.The authors show that children just beginning to talk are engaged in profound restructurings of several domains of knowledge. These restructurings are similar to theory changes in science, and they influence children's early semantic development, since children's cognitive concerns shape and motivate their use of very early words. But, in addition, children pay attention to the language they hear around them and this too reshapes their cognition, and causes them to reorganize their theories.
Download or read book How Children Learn the Meanings of Words written by Paul Bloom and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-01-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do children learn that the word "dog" refers not to all four-legged animals, and not just to Ralph, but to all members of a particular species? How do they learn the meanings of verbs like "think," adjectives like "good," and words for abstract entities such as "mortgage" and "story"? The acquisition of word meaning is one of the fundamental issues in the study of mind. According to Paul Bloom, children learn words through sophisticated cognitive abilities that exist for other purposes. These include the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic structure, and certain general learning and memory abilities. Although other researchers have associated word learning with some of these capacities, Bloom is the first to show how a complete explanation requires all of them. The acquisition of even simple nouns requires rich conceptual, social, and linguistic capacities interacting in complex ways. This book requires no background in psychology or linguistics and is written in a clear, engaging style. Topics include the effects of language on spatial reasoning, the origin of essentialist beliefs, and the young child's understanding of representational art. The book should appeal to general readers interested in language and cognition as well as to researchers in the field.
Download or read book Conceptual Development written by Ellin Kofsky Scholnick and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a key issue in current cognitive theories - the nature of representation. Each chapter is characterized by attempts to frame hot topics in cognitive development within the landscape of current developmental theorizing and the past legacy of genetic epistemology. The chapters address four questions that are fundamental to any developmental line of inquiry: How should we represent the workings and contents of the mind? How does the child construct mental models during the course of development? What are the origins of these models? and What accounts for the novelties that are the products and producers of developmental change? These questions are situated in a historical context, Piagetian theory, and contemporary researchers attempt to trace how they draw upon, depart from, and transform the Piagetian legacy to revisit classic issues such as the child's awareness of the workings of mental life, the child's ability to represent the world, and the child's growing ability to process and learn from experience. The theoretical perspectives covered include constructivism, connectionism, theory-theory, information processing, dynamical systems, and social constructivist approaches. The research areas span imitation, mathematical reasoning, biological knowledge, language development, and theory of mind. Written by major contributors to the field, this work will be of interest to students and researchers wanting a brief but in-depth overview of the contemporary field of cognitive development.
Download or read book Reconsidering Conceptual Change Issues in Theory and Practice written by Margarita Limón and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-05-08 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an important account of the state of the art of both theoretical and practical issues in the present-day research on conceptual change. Unique in its complete treatment of the questions that should be considered to further current understanding of knowledge construction and change, this book is useful for psychologists, cognitive scientists, educational researchers, curriculum developers, teachers and educators at all levels and in all disciplines.
Download or read book The Origin of Concepts written by Susan Carey and published by Oxford Series in Cognitive Dev. This book was released on 2011 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of children's cognitive development.
Download or read book Intentional Conceptual Change written by Gale M. Sinatra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-01-30 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a distinguished, international list of scholars to explore the role of the learner's intention in knowledge change. Traditional views of knowledge reconstruction placed the impetus for thought change outside the learner's control. The teacher, instructional methods, materials, and activities were identified as the seat of change. Recent perspectives on learning, however, suggest that the learner can play an active, indeed, intentional role in the process of knowledge restructuring. This volume explores this new, innovative view of conceptual change learning using original contributions drawn from renowned scholars in a variety of disciplines. The volume is intended for scholars or advanced students studying knowledge acquisition and change, including educational psychology, developmental psychology, science education, cognitive science, learning science, instructional psychology, and instructional and curriculum studies.
Download or read book Race in the Making written by Lawrence A. Hirschfeld and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race in the Making provides a new understanding of how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal power. Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived from observations of physical difference nor does it develop in the same way as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding and representing human kinds. The book also challenges the conventional wisdom that race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common set of abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and cultural specificities may be associated with them. Starting from the commonplace observation that race is a category of both power and the mind, Race in the Making directly tackles this issue. Through a sustained exploration of continuity and change in the child's notion of race and across historical variations in the race concept, Hirschfeld shows that a singular commonsense theory about human kinds constrains the way racial thinking changes, whether in historical time or during childhood. After surveying the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeld presents original studies that examine children's (and occasionally adults') representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into the emergence and elaboration of racial thinking.
Download or read book Ready Set SCIENCE written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2007-10-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What types of instructional experiences help K-8 students learn science with understanding? What do science educators, teachers, teacher leaders, science specialists, professional development staff, curriculum designers, and school administrators need to know to create and support such experiences? Ready, Set, Science! guides the way with an account of the groundbreaking and comprehensive synthesis of research into teaching and learning science in kindergarten through eighth grade. Based on the recently released National Research Council report Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8, this book summarizes a rich body of findings from the learning sciences and builds detailed cases of science educators at work to make the implications of research clear, accessible, and stimulating for a broad range of science educators. Ready, Set, Science! is filled with classroom case studies that bring to life the research findings and help readers to replicate success. Most of these stories are based on real classroom experiences that illustrate the complexities that teachers grapple with every day. They show how teachers work to select and design rigorous and engaging instructional tasks, manage classrooms, orchestrate productive discussions with culturally and linguistically diverse groups of students, and help students make their thinking visible using a variety of representational tools. This book will be an essential resource for science education practitioners and contains information that will be extremely useful to everyone �including parents �directly or indirectly involved in the teaching of science.
Download or read book Cognition in Children written by Usha Goswami and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook aims to provide a selective, but representative, review of work in cognitive development, grouped around themes that are familiar from textbooks of adult cognition. The book focuses on the question of what develops, rather than on why it develops. The findings of a given experimental study what develops are generally fixed, but the interpretation of what particular findings mean why is fluid. Some of the experiments discussed in this book have alternative explanations, and every student interested in children's cognition is invited to develop their own ideas about what different studies mean.
Download or read book Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2015-07-23 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.
Download or read book Approaches to Studying World situated Language Use written by John C. Trueswell and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first steps toward merging the cognitive and social approaches to language processing.
Download or read book International Handbook of Research on Conceptual Change written by Stella Vosniadou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceptual change research investigates the processes through which learners substantially revise prior knowledge and acquire new concepts. Tracing its heritage to paradigms and paradigm shifts made famous by Thomas Kuhn, conceptual change research focuses on understanding and explaining learning of the most the most difficult and counter-intuitive concepts. Now in its second edition, the International Handbook of Research on Conceptual Change provides a comprehensive review of the conceptual change movement and of the impressive research it has spawned on students’ difficulties in learning. In thirty-one new and updated chapters, organized thematically and introduced by Stella Vosniadou, this volume brings together detailed discussions of key theoretical and methodological issues, the roots of conceptual change research, and mechanisms of conceptual change and learner characteristics. Combined with chapters that describe conceptual change research in the fields of physics, astronomy, biology, medicine and health, and history, this handbook presents writings on interdisciplinary topics written for researchers and students across fields.
Download or read book The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences MITECS written by Robert A. Wilson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-09-04 with total page 1106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences have offered multidisciplinary ways of understanding the mind and cognition. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) is a landmark, comprehensive reference work that represents the methodological and theoretical diversity of this changing field. At the core of the encyclopedia are 471 concise entries, from Acquisition and Adaptationism to Wundt and X-bar Theory. Each article, written by a leading researcher in the field, provides an accessible introduction to an important concept in the cognitive sciences, as well as references or further readings. Six extended essays, which collectively serve as a roadmap to the articles, provide overviews of each of six major areas of cognitive science: Philosophy; Psychology; Neurosciences; Computational Intelligence; Linguistics and Language; and Culture, Cognition, and Evolution. For both students and researchers, MITECS will be an indispensable guide to the current state of the cognitive sciences.
Download or read book Core Knowledge and Conceptual Change written by David Barner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We acquire concepts such as "atom," "force," "integer," and "democracy" long after we are born; these concepts are not part of the initial cognitive state of human beings. Other concepts like "object," "cause," or "agent" may be present early in infancy--if not innately. Processes of change occur throughout our conceptual development, which prompts two key questions: Which human concepts constitute innate, core knowledge? How do humans acquire new concepts, and how do these concepts change in development? Core Knowledge and Conceptual Change provides a unique theoretical and empirical introduction to the study of conceptual development, documenting key advances in case studies, including ground-breaking science on human representations of language, objects, number, events, color, space, time, beliefs, and desires. Additionally, it explores how humans engage in moral reasoning and causal explanation: Are humans born good and tainted by an imperfect world, or do we need to teach children to be moral? Could a concept like "freedom" be woven into the human soul, or is it a historical invention, constructed over generations of humans? Written by an eminent list of contributors renowned in child development and cognitive science, this book delves widely, and deeply, into the cognitive tools available at birth that are repurposed, combined, and transformed to complex, abstract adult conceptual representations, and should be of interest to developmental psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and students of cognitive science.
Download or read book Converging Perspectives on Conceptual Change written by Tamer G. Amin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceptual change, how conceptual understanding is transformed, has been investigated extensively since the 1970s. The field has now grown into a multifaceted, interdisciplinary effort with strands of research in cognitive and developmental psychology, education, educational psychology, and the learning sciences. Converging Perspectives on Conceptual Change brings together an extensive team of expert contributors from around the world, and offers a unique examination of how distinct lines of inquiry can complement each other and have converged over time. Amin and Levrini adopt a new approach to assembling the diverse research on conceptual change: the combination of short position pieces with extended synthesis chapters within each section, as well as an overall synthesis chapter at the end of the volume, provide a coherent and comprehensive perspective on conceptual change research. Arranged over five parts, the book covers a number of topics including: the nature of concepts and conceptual change representation, language, and discourse in conceptual change modeling, explanation, and argumentation in conceptual change metacognition and epistemology in conceptual change identity and conceptual change. Throughout this wide-ranging volume, the editors present researchers and practitioners with a more internally consistent picture of conceptual change by exploring convergence and complementarity across perspectives. By mapping features of an emerging paradigm, they challenge newcomers and established scholars alike to embrace a more programmatic orientation towards conceptual change.
