Praxis PLT: Early Childhood flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Zone of proximal development

Vygotsky's concept describing the gap between what a child can accomplish independently and what the child can accomplish with guidance from a more capable person.

Conservation

Piaget's understanding that quantity, mass, or volume stays the same despite changes in appearance; typically develops in the concrete operational stage around age seven.

Egocentrism

Piaget's term for a young child's difficulty taking another person's physical or mental perspective, evident in preoperational thought and reduced by concrete operational reasoning.

Scaffolding

Temporary, graduated support provided by a teacher or peer that is withdrawn as the learner gains competence, allowing the learner to complete a task not yet possible alone.

Initiative versus guilt

Erikson's psychosocial stage of early childhood, roughly ages three to six, in which children assert purpose through play and exploration or develop guilt from excessive restriction.

Industry versus inferiority

Erikson's school-age stage, roughly six to twelve, in which children seek competence through productive work and risk feelings of inadequacy when efforts are criticized.

Preoperational stage

Piaget's stage from about two to seven years, marked by symbolic representation and language growth but limited by egocentrism and lack of conservation and reversibility.

Kohlberg preconventional level

The first level of moral reasoning, in which behavior is judged by avoiding punishment and serving one's own interests rather than by shared rules or principles.

Behavioral objective

A written instructional goal naming an observable student performance, the conditions under which it occurs, and the criterion that indicates acceptable mastery.

Bloom's revised taxonomy

A hierarchy of cognitive objectives ordered remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create, used to align instruction and assessment with intended thinking levels.

Cooperative learning elements

Positive interdependence, individual accountability, promotive interaction, explicit social skills, and group processing; all five are required for genuine cooperative learning.

Wait time

The pause of roughly three to five seconds after asking a question, which increases response length, participation, and the use of higher-order reasoning.

Differentiated instruction

Planned variation of content, process, or product in response to student readiness, interest, or learning profile, delivered within a common curriculum rather than through separate tracks.

Task analysis

The process of breaking a terminal skill into ordered prerequisite subskills so instruction proceeds from entry-level components to the complete performance.

Higher-order questions

Questions requiring analysis, evaluation, or creation rather than simple recall, prompting students to connect, justify, or generate rather than retrieve information.

Formative feedback

Information given during learning that is specific, timely, and focused on the task or process, allowing the student to close the gap toward the goal.

Validity

The extent to which an assessment measures the knowledge or skill it claims to measure and supports the intended interpretation of scores.

Reliability

The consistency of assessment scores across occasions, forms, or raters; necessary but not sufficient for validity.

Criterion-referenced score

A score interpreted by comparing a student's performance to a defined standard or set of objectives rather than to the performance of other students.

Norm-referenced score

A score interpreted by comparing a student's performance to that of a representative norm group, often reported as a percentile rank or standard score.

Standard error of measurement

An estimate of the average variation between an observed score and a student's true score, used to construct confidence intervals around test results.

Percentile rank

The percentage of students in the norm group who scored at or below a given score; it is not the percentage of test items answered correctly.

Analytic rubric

A scoring guide that lists separate criteria and performance levels, scoring each criterion independently so students receive diagnostic feedback on specific dimensions.

Accommodation versus modification

An accommodation changes how a student accesses content or assessment without altering the standard; a modification changes the content, level, or expected performance.

Professional learning community

A collaborative team of educators with a shared mission who examine student data together and take collective responsibility for improving learning outcomes.

Action research

A systematic cycle in which a teacher poses a question about practice, collects and analyzes local data, implements a change, and evaluates the results.

FERPA

The federal law protecting education records; parents generally may inspect records, and directory information may be disclosed only with notice and opt-out opportunity.

IDEA parental consent

The requirement that parents give informed written consent before a child's initial evaluation or special education placement; parents are members of the IEP team.

Mandated reporting

The legal duty of educators to report suspected child abuse or neglect directly to designated child protective authorities, regardless of internal school notification.

Distractor analysis

A test-taking strategy of eliminating options that are true but off-target, contain absolutes, or answer a different question than the stem asks.

Constructed-response structure

Name the concept, define it accurately, apply it to the scenario, and state the instructional implication, covering every required part of the prompt.

'Best' response items

Questions where several options are defensible; the correct choice is the one that most directly and completely resolves the problem stated in the stem.