Child Development – KVCC Docs

What is Constructionism

Constructionism is a problem-based instructional theory that holds that knowledge is best built through shared, tangible experiences. In the process of learning, Constructionism holds that people learn most effectively by making things. Constructionism connects closely with experiential learning. In Constructivism, children build their cognitive tools in interaction with external reality.

Effective Strategies

All learning activities should relate to a more comprehensive assignment. This is key, as it shows students that the activities apply to more aspects of life. Consequently, they will probably find the activities useful.

Sleep Loss, Learning Capacity and Academic Performance

This is a summary of Sleep Loss, Learning Capacity, and Academic Performance
Authors: Giuseppe Curcio, Michele Ferrara, Luigi De Gennaro
Affiliations: Department of Psychology, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’; Department of Internal Medicine and Public Health, University of L’Aquila
Publication: Sleep Medicine Reviews, Vol. 10, Publisher: Elsevier Ltd.

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This is a clinical review examining how sleep loss affects students’ ability to learn and perform academically, drawing on both naturalistic studies that correlate sleep habits with school outcomes and experimental studies that directly manipulate how much sleep students get.

Sleep deprivation

The paper opens by establishing that sleep serves multiple functions, including learning and memory consolidation, and that these functions get disrupted when sleep is lost. Sleep deprivation produces measurable declines in neurocognitive and psychomotor performance.

Multiple Intelligences After Twenty Years

This is a summary of Multiple Intelligences After Twenty Years
Howard Gardner, Invited Address, American Educational Research Association, April 2003

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Gardner uses this address to trace where the theory of multiple intelligences came from and where it stood twenty years after “Frames of Mind”.

The theory’s roots

He starts with the theory’s roots. As a young pianist deeply involved in the arts, Gardner noticed that academic psychology largely ignored artistic ability. Finding a place for the arts in psychology became an early professional goal, which led him to co-found Project Zero at Harvard in 1967, an organization he ran for 28 years.

A second influence came from studying neurologist Norman Geschwind’s research on stroke and brain-damaged patients. Gardner was struck by cases where damage produced counterintuitive symptom patterns, such as patients who lost the ability to read words but kept the ability to read numbers.

Infants and Toddlers Exploring Mathematics

This is a summary of Infants and Toddlers Exploring Mathematics
Eugene Geist, Young Children

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This article makes a case that math learning starts well before preschool. Geist argues that everyday infant and toddler behaviors, such as dumping blocks, banging drums, and filling cups, are early forms of mathematical thinking. He structures the piece around specific behaviors, explains the underlying math concept for each, and gives teachers concrete ways to build on them.

Exact matches

Sorting blue blocks into a pile shows classification, but at this age, children can only make exact matches. They can’t yet hold two attributes at once, like round and blue versus square and blue. This early classification skill eventually feeds into measurement, patterning, algebra, and geometry. Teachers can support it by offering blocks and toys in varied shapes, colors, and sizes, observing what children do, and naming attributes out loud: “You made a big pile of blue blocks.”

Parenting Styles: The Four Styles of Parenting

This is a summary of Parenting Styles: The Four Styles of Parenting
Author: Kendra Cherry
Publication: About.com Psychology

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This article summarizes Diana Baumrind’s foundational research on parenting styles and how later psychologists built on it, then walks through what each style tends to produce in children.

Baumrind studied more than 100 preschool-age children in the early 1960s using naturalistic observation, parental interviews, and other methods. From that research, she identified four dimensions that define how parents raise children: disciplinary strategies, warmth and nurturance, communication style, and expectations around maturity and control.

Based on how parents scored across these dimensions, she originally proposed three distinct parenting styles. Maccoby and Martin later added a fourth style in 1983.

Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Limits of Social Constructionism

This is a summary of Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Limits of Social Constructionism
Author: David Peterson, Sociology Department, Northwestern University

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This paper pushes back on both strong social constructionism and strong nativism, using the concept of number as its test case. Peterson argues that neither side has it right on its own and proposes a more precise framework for sorting out where culture actually shapes cognition and where it doesn’t.

Social processes

The sociology of knowledge generally holds that meaning comes from social processes like tradition, ritual, and institution, not from objects themselves or from individual minds working in isolation. This idea traces back to Durkheim, who argued that basic categories of thought, things like time, space, number, and causality, come from society itself rather than from pure experience or from an innate rational structure.