The Child as Thinker

Descriptive children's cognitive skill and knowledge - reading, writing, maths, memory; children's reasoning; children's use of metaphors - metacognition, transfer, problem solving; children's musical cognition; children's drawings; children's spatial cognition; children's concepts of this, that and the other; childhood animism; children's concepts of bodies; individual differences in cognitive development - intelligence, cognitive style, creativity; models of cognition in childhood - metaphors, achievements and problems; Piaget's model of cognitive development; information processing models of cognitive development - Vygotsky; causes of change and variation in cognitive development - brains and cognitive development; genes and the physical environment in cognitive development; the social world and cognitive development; the school as a setting for the development and acquisition of cognition; teaching thinking; social influences on children's cognitive development; questions, problems and possibilities - problems of diagnosis; patterns of cognitive development; problems of explanation; constraints on cognitive development; cognition and emotion in development; imagination.