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)

• 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.

Key Concepts

• 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