ABSTRACT
This chapter contains reviews of some of the knowledge and the cognitive skills that children develop and acquire during the years of childhood, including reading, writing, arithmetical computation, remembering, reasoning, drawing, metacognition, categorising into concepts, and their ideas about music, persons, socio-economic systems, science, stories, maps and so on. I provide here only a brief outline of each topic with references to the material from which my outline is derived; readers must consult these references to get anything like a comprehensive picture. I have not attempted to integrate the separate bodies of research which have produced the descriptions I summarise here, nor to go beyond description to explanation. Nor have I dealt with every skill or area of knowledge which has appeared in the literature. Particularly in the section reviewing studies of children’s concepts of this, that and the other, I have focused on areas where there was a reasonable quantity of work of reasonable quality, which I found relevant to the concerns of the rest of the book, and have omitted some areas because I found too high a proportion of atheoretical and insensitive description. Some research of high quality and great importance is omitted because it has generally been thought of as outside the category of ‘cognition’, and to have included it would have widened the topic beyond what I could justify. Children’s spoken language is the main body of work I would have dealt with if I had been able to be comprehensively inclusive, but I did not because there had to be limits to what ‘the development and acquisition of cognition in childhood’ included, and the language literature and the cognition literature have been to a considerable extent separate. Finally, the selection of material has necessarily been dependent on what I came across: doubtless there have been many brilliant studies which I simply failed to notice, and some I failed to understand, which are therefore not dealt with here.
