Four Developmental Domains

In early childhood research, there are four developmental domains that researchers highlight: Physical, psychosocial, creative, and cognitive. In this paper, I will be exploring the four developmental domains using Nicolson et al (2002) who defines and provides examples of these four domains and associated concepts in her book “Through the Looking Glass.” Furthermore, I will be concentrating on the cognitive development of preschool age children (4-5 years old). The first developmental domain is physical development. Physical development sheds light on the growth of the body, brain, and motor development. With that said, keep in mind other variables, such as genetic makeup, that can play a major role in a child’s growth. For example, Nicolson
For example, if a parent gave child one a whole graham cracker and child two received the same cracker but broken in two, child one would proceed to ask why child two received more crackers. As a result of limited reasoning abilities, it is the job of adults, such as parents and teachers, to interact, nourish, and guide a child so their reasoning development can grow. Furthermore, as a child grows, he/she begins to classify a large number of objects. Nicolson (2002) states, “[a child’s] mental flexibility enables them to select classifying attributes that guide their sorting and then abandon these attributes and begin again. For example, a teacher gives a child a number of different colored and shaped blocks. The child sorts them first by shape and then by color. Another concept associated with classification is seriation, which is arranging and organizing objects by one characteristic (i.e. sorting the blocks by color). Number development also comes into play as a child’s number development process begins; for a preschool age child, the number development would be to visually and mentally understand the number count represents the total number of
Recognition and recall memory begins in early childhood. An example of recognition and recall memory would be a child hearing a song and doing the dance most associated with the song . In the scholarly article, Children’s Memory for General and Specific Learning Episodes, experimenters explore the relationship cues of generality that may affect a child's’ memory. Researchers found that generic language does affect young children more than older children. “We found that young children remember properties presented generically and using category labels more than equivalent properties… young children also exhibited better memory for the people displaying properties when learning about individuals, rather than categories,” (Riggs et al, 2014, p. 1658). In other words, children were able to recognize and recall an overall whole of an individual rather than specific details. For example, a child might remember that Bob wore a red shirt but can’t remember that Bob’s favorite color is red. Furthermore, the study also found that older children remembered specific details (i.e. that Bob's favorite color is red). This study plays a great role in the study of recognition and recall of memory in early