Chapter 5: Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Sandra is informed by a pediatrician that her 4-year-old son Manuel has gained 6 pounds over the past year. Sandra should be

• alarmed, because Manuel has gained a lot of weight.

• concerned, because Manuel has gained less weight than has become common at this age.

• positive and make changes to Manuel's diet.

• content, because this is normal for Manuel's age.

Identify a characteristic of autobiographical memory.

• It involves memory of significant events and experiences in the lives of others.

• It allows people to do routine work without requiring conscious thought.

• It involves memory of significant events and experiences in one's life.

• It is limited to information that is retained for up to 30 seconds if it is not rehearsed.

Which of the following determines the categories for underweight, normal weight, overweight, or obese?

• weight

• average calories consumed daily

• waist-to-hip ratio

• body mass index

Many young children from low-income families suffer from a lack of all of the following, EXCEPT

• iron.

• vitamins.

• protein.

• carbohydrates.

Piaget's preoperational stage is so named because he believed that children in this stage of development

• cannot yet perform reversible mental actions.

• cannot yet form stable concepts.

• are unable to reason.

• cannot operate electronic devices like televisions.

Which of the following scenarios best represents Vygotsky's view of mental and behavioral development?

• A teacher assigns challenging tasks that students must complete on their own.

• An instructor helps students with laboratory work, showing the student show to do things they cannot yet do on their own.

• A teacher waits patiently for students to come up with good answers and assesses their learning capabilities.

• An instructor systematically offers standardized tests to students to evaluate their mental abilities on varying subjects.

Using rehearsal, we can keep information in short-term memory for a much longer period. In this context, rehearsal means

• preparing for a memory-span test.

• doing mental exercises daily to keep one's mind sharp.

• repeating information after it has been presented.

• taking regular memory-span tests.

Three-year-old Zelda always asks questions like "Where Daddy is going?" and "What Mommy is doing?" This indicates that she has yet to learn the auxiliary-inversion rule and to apply the rules of

• pragmatics.

• morphology.

• syntax.

• phonology.

In the context of cognitive development in early childhood, which of the following is true of pragmatics?

• It refers to relating a word to its referent quickly.

• It is the awareness that changing an object's appearance does not change its basic properties.

• It refers to focusing one's attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others.

• It is the appropriate use of language in different contexts.

Dorothy is enrolled in a preschool where she spends much of her time in unstructured activities. She plays with the toys she chooses, and her teacher acts as a facilitator rather than a director. Which of the following approaches is Dorothy's preschool using?

• the kindergarten approach

• the Rogerian approach

• the Montessori approach

• the child-oriented approach