Chapter 5: Cognitive Development in Social Context: Implications for Early Childhood Education

Human beings are born with an extraordinary ability to learn. This ability is fundamental to the dramatic changes in children’s understanding of and engagement with the world during infancy and childhood. Research on cognitive development seeks to describe these changes and much of this research has focused on how children think or solve problems on their own. Although this research has provided extensive information about age-related cognitive abilities, it has provided less insight into two other important and related aspects of cognitive development: how cognitive change occurs and how children think when they are with other people.

Children spend much of their time playing and working alongside other people. These experiences provide children with many and varied opportunities for learning that affect the nature and course of cognitive development. The social world provides children with knowledge about the world along with direction and support in the development of skills that are used to guide intelligent action. In other words, cognitive development is socially constituted, both in terms of what children think about and how children learn to use cognitive abilities to carry out goal-directed actions.