Child Development Theorist

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Child Development Theorist

• Why Do We Need to Know This?
• Child Growth and Development

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• Better parenting
• Know what a childs needs are
• Recognize at risk children
• Society is better when children are treated well.

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Historical Context

• Childhood is a fairly new concept
• Previously parents did not attend to childhood
  needs
• 14th -17th century children were viewed as
  inherently evil
• 18th century parents were intrusive
• harsh rigorous training could make them
  acceptable to society (Black,12)

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Theories inEarly Childhood Development
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Sigmund Freud

• Psychosocial
• Certain drives and instincts emerge at various
  times
• Through various biological systems
• Mouth
• Anus
• Sexual organs
• Now thought to be too simplistic

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Erik Erikson

• Psychosocial Development
• Erikson sees maturation as a series of
  psychosocial conflicts, each level of conflict
  must be resolved before the child can move to the
  next level.

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• Trust vs. Mistrust
• Birth-18 months
• Children require security (through physical
  comforts and affection)
• Autonomy vs. Doubt
• 18 mths-3 years
• Children must establish own individual identity
  in relation to others.

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• Initiative Vs Guilt
• 3-6 years
• Children realize their own responsibilities and
  become aware of interpersonal conflicts.
• Industry vs. Inferiority
• 7-11 years
• Children's determination to achieve success,
  often in concert with others.

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• Identity vs. Role Confusion
• 11-18 years
• Children involved in discovering personal,
  cultural and social identity.
• Intimacy vs. Isolation
• Young Adulthood
• Young Adults strive to form strong friendships
  and to achieve love and companionship. Failure to
  form an identity during adolescence may now
  result in difficulty forming intimate

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• Generativity vs. Stagnation
• Adulthood
• Generativity includes such responsibilities
• As raising and caring for children
• Productivity in one's work.
• Adults who cannot perform these tasks become
  stagnant
• And often depressed

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• Ego integrity vs. Despair
• Maturity
• Older adults achieve ego integrity if they can
  look back on their lives and view life as
  productive and satisfying.
• Disappointment leads to despair.

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Arnold Gesell

• Maturation
• Suggests that the patterns of growth and
  development are genetically predetermined cannot
  be influenced by environmental stimulation or
  training to any degree

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• Development of norms of growth and behavior that
  provides guidelines to help parents determine
  whether children's behavior is typical

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Behavioral Theory

• Behavioral theories of development focus on how
  environmental interaction influences behavior
• Are based upon the theories of theorists such as
  Pavlov, and Skinner
• These theories deal only with observable
  behaviors
• Development is considered a reaction to rewards,
  punishments, stimuli, and reinforcement.

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Ivan Pavlov

• Classical conditioning
• Two events that are paired and it established the
  same response to either
• Extinguish- to stop a behavior over time by not
  reinforcing it

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• Pavlov's classical experiment

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B.F.Skinner

• Operant conditioning
• Behavior is reinforced over a period of time
• Will make desirable behavior more frequent
• Punishment reduces frequency

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Components of Operant Conditioning

• A reinforcer is any event that strengthens or
  increases the behavior it follows. There are two
  kinds of reinforcers
• Positive reinforcers are favorable events or
  outcomes that are presented after the behavior.
• Negative reinforcers involve the removal of an
  unfavorable events or outcomes after the display
  of a behavior.
• In both of these cases of reinforcement, the
  behavior increases.

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• Punishment is the presentation of an adverse
  event or outcome that causes a decrease in the
  behavior it follows. There are two kinds of
  punishment
• Positive punishment involves the presentation of
  an unfavorable event or outcome in order to
  weaken the response it follows.
• Negative punishment occurs when an favorable
  event or outcome is removed after a behavior
  occurs.

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Albert Bandura

• Social Learning Theory
• Learning can occur by watching children
• Modeled behavior
• Being a good Role model will influence a child
• Negative influences will also cause behavior
  changes

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Steps involved in the modeling process

• Attention.  If you are going to learn anything,
  you have to be paying attention
• Retention.  Second, you must be able to retain --
  remember -- what you have paid attention to

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• Reproduction.  You have to translate the images
  or descriptions into actual behavior. 
• So you have to have the ability to reproduce the
  behavior in the first place

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• Motivation. 
• With all this, youre still not going to do
  anything unless you are motivated to imitate,
  i.e. until you have some reason for doing it. 
• Bandura mentions a number of motives
• past reinforcement, traditional behaviorism
• promised reinforcements (incentives) that we can
  imagine
• vicarious reinforcement -- seeing and recalling
  the model being reinforced.

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Cognitive Theory

• Focusing on the maturational factors affecting
  understanding
• Cognitive theory is interested in how people
  understand
• Aptitude and capacity to learn

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Jean Piaget

• Biologist who originally studied mollusks
• His particular insight was the role of maturation
  (simply growing up) in children's increasing
  capacity to understand their world
• Children cannot undertake certain tasks until
  they are psychologically mature enough to do so

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• He proposed that children's thinking does not
  develop smoothly
• instead, there are certain points at which it
  "takes off" and moves into completely new areas
  and capabilities
• Transitions may take place at about 18 months, 7
  years and 11 or 12 years.
• Before these ages children are not capable (no
  matter how bright) of understanding things in
  certain ways (his theory)

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Key Concepts

• Adaptation Adapting to the world through
  assimilation and accommodation 
• Assimilation The process by which a person takes
  material into their mind from the environment,
  which may mean changing the evidence of their
  senses to make it fit. 
• Accommodation The difference made to one's mind
  or concepts by the process of assimilation. 
• Note that assimilation and accommodation go
  together you can't have one without the other.

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• Classification -The ability to group objects
  together on the basis of common features. 
• Class Inclusion- the understanding, more advanced
  than simple classification, that some classes or
  sets of objects are also sub-sets of a larger
  class.
• There is a class of objects called dogs. There is
  also a class called animals. But all dogs are
  also animals, so the class of animals includes
  that of dogs 

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• Conservation The realization that objects or sets
  of objects stay the same even when they are
  changed about or made to look different. 
• Decentration The ability to move away from one
  system of classification to another one as
  appropriate

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• Egocentrism The belief that you are the center of
  the universe and everything revolves around you
• The corresponding inability to see the world as
  someone else does and adapt to it
• Not moral "selfishness", just an early stage of
  psychological development 

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• Operation The process of working something out in
  your head.
• Young children (in the sensorimotor and
  pre-operational stages) have to act, and try
  things out in the real world, to work things out
  (like count on fingers)
• Older children and adults can do more in their
  heads. 
• Schema (or scheme) The representation in the mind
  of a set of perceptions, ideas, and/or actions,
  which go together. 

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• Stage A period in a child's development in which
  he or she is capable of understanding some things
  but not others 

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Piaget Stages of Cognative Learning

• Stage Characterized by Sensori-motor  (Birth-2
  yrs) 
• Differentiates self from objects 
• Recognizes self as agent of action and begins to
  act intentionally e.g. pulls a string to set
  mobile in motion or shakes a rattle to make a
  noise 
• Achieves object permanence realizes that things
  continue to exist even when no longer present to
  the sense

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• Pre-operational  (2-7 years)
• Learns to use language and to represent objects
  by images and words 
• Thinking is still egocentric has difficulty
  taking the viewpoint of others 
• Classifies objects by a single feature e.g.
  groups together all the red blocks regardless of
  shape or all the square blocks regardless of
  color 

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• Concrete operational (7-11 years) 
• Can think logically about objects and events 
• Achieves conservation of number (age 6), mass
  (age 7), and weight (age 9) 
• Classifies objects according to several features
  and can order them in series along a single
  dimension such as size. 

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• Formal operational (11 years and up) 
• Can think logically about abstract propositions
  and test hypotheses systematically 
• Becomes concerned with the hypothetical, the
  future, and ideological problems 
• Critical Thinking is achieved

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Constructivist Theory

• Constructivism is the label given to a set of
  theories about learning which fall somewhere
  between cognitive and humanistic views
• Social constructivism", which emphasizes how
  meanings and understandings grow out of social
  encounters

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Lev Vygotsky

• Investigated child development and how this was
  guided by the role of culture and interpersonal
  communication.
• Observed how higher mental functions developed
  through social interactions with significant
  people in a child's life, particularly parents,
  but also other adults

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• A second aspect of Vygotsky's theory
• The idea that the potential for cognitive
  development depends upon the "zone of proximal
  development" (ZPD)
• a level of development attained when children
  engage in social behavior
• Full development of the ZPD depends upon full
  social interaction
• The range of skill that can be developed with
  adult guidance or peer collaboration exceeds what
  can be attained alone

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• Proximal" simply means "next". He observed that
  when children were tested on tasks on their own,
  they rarely did as well as when they were working
  in collaboration with an adult
• The process of engagement with the adult enabled
  them to refine their thinking or their
  performance
• The common-sense idea which fits most closely
  with this model is that of "stretching" learners.

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Research in Child Development

• There are many ways to study children
• Those studies determine the validity of a theory

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Descriptive Study

• In social sciences, descriptive research usually
  takes one of two forms
• 1) survey research
• 2) observational research
• Have objectives instead of hypotheses

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Cross Sectional Study

• Studies different children at the same time (age
  difference)
• Representative sample
• Asking all students at Nipmuc what their earliest
  memory iswill 8th grade have different memories
  than 12th?

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Longitudinal Study

• Same children over a long period of time
• Framingham Heart Study

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Correlational Studies

• Attempt to determine a relationship between two
  sets of measurements
• Physical strength and peer group popularity of
  sixth grade boys (measure different variables on
  same individuals, same time)
• Algebra aptitude in 8th grade and algebra
  aptitude in 10th grade (measure same variables on
  same individuals at 2 points in time)

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Experimental

• Control group
• Experimental group
• Treat experimental group differently to see what
  changes might occur