Reasoning as a Pedagogical Strategy in Infant-Addressed Talk in Early Childhood Education Centres: Relationships with Educators’ Qualifications and Communicative Function

Experiments with young infants provide evidence for early-developing capacities to represent physical objects and to reason about object motion. Early physical reasoning accords with 2 constraints at the center of mature physical conceptions: continuity and solidity. It fails to accord with 2 constraints that may be peripheral to mature conceptions: gravity and inertia. These experiments suggest that cognition develops concurrently with perception and action and that development leads to the enrichment of conceptions around an unchanging core. The experiments challenge claims that cognition develops on a foundation of perceptual or motor experience, that initial conceptions are inappropriate to the world, and that initial conceptions are abandoned or radically changed with the growth of knowledge. Show more

This study evaluates a model for considering domain-general and domain-specific associations between teacher-child interactions and children's development, using a bifactor analytic strategy. Among a sample of 325 early childhood classrooms there was evidence for both general elements of teacher-child interaction (responsive teaching) and domain-specific elements related to positive management and routines and cognitive facilitation. Among a diverse population of 4-year-old children (n = 1,407) responsive teaching was modestly associated with development across social and cognitive domains, whereas positive management and routines was modestly associated with increases in inhibitory control and cognitive facilitation was associated with gains in early language and literacy skills. The conceptual and methodological contributions and challenges of this approach are discussed. Show more