Indicator: Cognitive Competence (COG)

Children show cognitive competence and problem-solving skills through play and daily activities

Cognition is a term used to describe a broad group of mental abilities. These include attending and responding to similarities and differences, thinking, reasoning, problem solving, and remembering. Cognitive competence is usually inferred from children’s motor, communication, or social behaviors during their play and daily activities. The opportunities that children have to interact with people and objects within and across environments help them construct knowledge and understand the world around them. Learning opportunities contribute importantly to cognitive competence, particularly when these opportunities are organized around children’s interests and preferences.

Developing cognition involves understanding cause-and-effect relationships, solving problems, using symbols, engaging in pretend play and using memory in increasingly involved and sophisticated ways. Indicators of cognitive competence during infancy typically involve infants’ attention and actions as they explore and interact with their physical and social environments (sensorimotor activity). Examples include an infant shaking a rattle to hear a sound or moving around furniture to get a favorite toy. As children develop and gain additional experiences, indicators of their cognitive competence broaden. From late infancy on, young children are increasingly able to form basic mental representations of things and to mentally manipulate ideas and concepts. Their cognitive competence is demonstrated by their growing ability to understand and solve problems, to remember and apply what they know to familiar and new situations, and to generate new ideas. Although actions, in play and everyday activities, are still important indicators of cognition, language now becomes central as children become increasingly able to talk about what they know and what they are thinking and doing. Preschoolers begin to develop higher-level thinking and problem-solving skills, which are fostered when they are encouraged to reflect, predict, question, and form simple hypotheses.