Download CHild Growth Notes on history and developmental theorists

Child Development Theorist
Why Do We Need to Know This?
Child Growth and Development
• Better parenting
• Know what a child’s needs are
• Recognize at risk children
• Society is better when children are
treated well.
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)
Theories
in
Early Childhood
Development
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
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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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
• 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
• 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.
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”
– Development of norms of growth and
behavior that provides guidelines to help
parents determine whether children's
behavior is typical
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.
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
Pavlov's classical experiment
B.F.Skinner
• Operant conditioning
• Behavior is reinforced over a period
of time
• Will make desirable behavior more
frequent
• Punishment reduces frequency
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.
• 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.
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
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
• 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
• Motivation.
• With all this, you’re 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.
Cognitive Theory
• Focusing on the maturational factors
affecting understanding
• Cognitive theory is interested in how
people understand
• Aptitude and capacity to learn
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
• 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)
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.
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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.
• Stage A period in a child's
development in which he or she is
capable of understanding some things
but not others
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
• 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
• 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.
• 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
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
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
• 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
• “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.
Research in Child
Development
• There are many ways to study
children
• Those studies determine the validity
of a theory
Descriptive Study
• In social sciences, descriptive
research usually takes one of two
forms:
– 1) survey research
– 2) observational research
• Have objectives instead of hypotheses
Cross Sectional Study
• Studies different children at the
same time (age difference)
– Representative sample
– Asking all students at Nipmuc what
their earliest memory is…will 8th grade
have different memories than 12th?
Longitudinal Study
• Same children over a long period of
time
– Framingham Heart Study
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)
Experimental
• Control group
• Experimental group
– Treat experimental group differently to
see what changes might occur