Problem--Solving skills
Problem-solving skills become more elaborate and complex as children pass through early childhood. Although children are not yet in school, an environment that explicitly demands more focused problem solving, many are enrolled in child care centers or preschools, which often present children with educational tasks that include elements of problem solving. Furthermore, during some form of resolution. Whether it is completing a simple puzzle or figuring out how to arrange blocks to make a bridge over a road, preschoolers often find themselves in circumstances in which they have to think through some options in order to achieve specific goals.
Representation One of the most basic capacities required for problem solving is the ability to use symbols--images, numbers, pictures, maps, or other configurations that represent real objects in the world. Piaget argued that children are unable to think with symbols---that is, use representations---until near the end of the sensorimotor stage of development at about eighteen months of age. Others, however, have challenged this position and argue that representational capacities are evident much earlier in infancy. Jean Mandler has pointed out that a number of early abilities that infants display support this thesis. For example, infants begin to use gestures to stand for objects or events prior to age one year. Similarly, young infants' apparent knowledge about the physical properties of objects, described in Chapter 6, suggests that they must hold some internal representation of them.
Although infants may have basic representational capacities, toddlers and older children far more readily recognize that external symbols of real objects in the world can be used to further their problem-solving efforts. For example, Judy DeLoache asked two-and three-year-olds to search for a small toy hidden in a scale model of a room. Next, the children were brought into a life-size room that corresponded to the scale model they had just seen. Could they find the real-lift toy that corresponded to the smaller replica in the previous segment of the experiment? If they saw a small Snoopy toy under a miniature couch, would they look for a large. An important cognitive skill that emerges at about age three is the understanding that a model may represent a real-life event. Representation is a fundamental skill necessary for problem solving.
Snoopy under the couch in the life-size room? The three-year-olds could find the hidden object on more than 70 percent of the trials. But the two-year-olds could do so on only 20 percent of the trials. Later, when both age groups were asked to locate the toy back in the scale model, they did so with few errors. Thus the search failures of two-year-olds in the life-size room were not due to memory problems. DeLoache believes that two-year-olds have difficulty with dual representation; that is, with understanding that a scale model can be both an object in its own right and a representation of a life-size room. By age three, however, children have the cognitive capacity, flexibility, and conceptual knowledge to appreciate that a symbol, such as a model, can "stand for" a real-life event. In other words, children gain representational insight.
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