School Journal | Log 4 | Cognitive Skills (Before School)

In log 1 I had listed out 7 key skills that children seem to pick up during their first 5–6 years. In log 2 and log 3 I covered how they seem to develop motor skills and language skills. Now I shall attempt to understand a little bit about the cognitive skills that children pick up during the first 5–6 years of their life. I’m not sure what kind of cognitive skills are even picked up at this stage. But I shall use what I mentioned in log 1 as a sort of starting guideline.

Curiosity about the world, with an ability to apply some form of logic to solve simple problems (unclear on what nature and level of problems). Concept of basic numbers, counting and simple addition and subtraction.

As you might have come to expect, I asked google, “what cognitive skills are developed before school”. The AI generated answer rather helpfully went as follows.

Using this google answer as a base, I can ignore language and reading as skills that have been covered in the previous log. Further, it looks to me like memory and inductive / logical reasoning are the core skills needed to drive problem solving, and so I shall focus on the first 2. I shall also look at number counting more broadly as basic mathematical skills. I’m not yet sure what exactly to make of nature play. From the description it sounds closer to creativity or understanding of some basic worldly concepts.

Elements of Cognitive Development

I therefore went through some of the top articles thrown up by the google search. Many of the top results were about cognitive development in general, and not really what happens in early childhood and how. The few articles that I felt were useful in this context were:

• Hi mama .com article
• International school of Arizona .org article
• International school of Denver article

Putting some of these together, it seems like the following elements are involved in developing cognitive skills:

• Questions — Understanding questions, attempting to answer them, forming them and trying to have them answered seem to be an important early part of developing cognitive skills.
• Attention — Simply being able to control attention paid to stimuli or tasks is a key element for cognitive action. More specifically, it seems that children need to develop sustained attention, selective attention and directed attention. The meaning and advantages of these types of attention are rather intuitive.
• Processing of Stimuli — Another ingredient of cognitive development is the ability to process stimuli. The focus here seems to be mainly on auditory and visual processing. In particular children must learn how to break up, distinguish and understand what they hear and see.
• Memory — Memory is understandably a key element in any cognitive action. This involved development of both long term memory and working memory, which is a little like a hard drive vs RAM.
• Problem Solving / Logical Reason — The ingredients of problem solving are attention, processing and memory. In order to be able to then answer questions, children must develop some logical reasoning capabilities. This is the skill which is probably most directly related to cognitive development. One can think of this as being similar to understanding causation, some patterns and being able to predict repetition of results given the same scenario.
• Worldly Concepts — The previous elements seem to constitute the fundamentals of cognitive development. A child’s cognitive development is enhanced or broadened by their understanding of the world and ability to apply cognitive skills in more domains. For example, numeric skills of counting, addition and subtraction are useful in many scenarios as is an understanding of space, time, colours and shapes. More nuanced concepts of temperature, texture, taste, geography or emotions will further broaden the scope of cognitive skills. Because this element can be quite broad, in log 1 I had noted worldly concepts as a distinct skill from cognitive development. However the overlap is appreciable.

How Cognitive Skills are Developed

I will start off by assuming that cognitive skills, much like most other skills picked up during this phase of childhood are developed through some combination of:

• Exposure and immersion, providing children with small tasks and allowing them to get curious, question and try to solve problems
• Nursery and pre-school curricula probably have a lot of modules which are focused on developing the elements of cognitive skills
• Games and puzzles which are designed to intrigue and provide children with the opportunity to form a mental understanding of concepts while also exercising the elements of cognitive development

In order to validate this hypothesis, I asked google “how do children develop cognitive skills”. The AI generated response was pretty much in line with expectation. Significantly, not too much is said about activities focused exclusively on cognitive development. There is a great overlap with the activities which help promote either language skills or motor skills, suggesting that these activities will help across the board.

As with many of the skills picked up before school, I don’t believe that there is much value in me trying to recreate this learning process. Having documented this, I intend to understand the breakdown of the next few skills which children pick up before attending school.