Chapter 2 – Theories and issues in child development
Theory of development: a scheme or system of ideas that is based on evidence and attempts to explain,
describe, and predict behaviour and development
- Bring order to what might otherwise be a chaotic mass of information
o Minor – deal only with very specific, narrow areas of development
o Major – attempt to explain large ears of development
Motor development
Motor milestone: the basic motor skills acquired in infancy and early childhood, such as sitting unaided,
standing, crawling, and walking
- Based on research: motor skills are learned both during infancy and throughout life
o Motor development cannot be accounted for by any maturational theory
- Development of motor skills has very important implications for other aspects of development
- Changes affect emotional and social development communication, appreciation of height and an
understanding of distance and space
At birth infant has a number of well-developed motor skills: sucking, looking, grasping, breathing, crying
– skills are vital for survival
Maturational theories
Arnold Gesell: motor development proceeded from the global to the specific in two directions
- Direction 1: cephalocaudal trend: development that proceeds from head to food along the length of
the body
- Direction 2: proximodistal trend: development of motor control in infancy which is form the centre of
the body outwards the more peripheral segments
Maturation alone shapes motor development – development is controlled by a maturational timetable linked
particularly to the central nervous system and also to muscular development
Myrthle McGraw (1945) One of the first to question Gesell’s hypothesis
- Tested pairs of twins: one member of each pair received enriched motor training and found that in
the trained twin motor development was considerably accelerated when compared with the
untrained twin
Purely maturational account of motor development can be largely dismissed
- Fact that motor skills develop in a regular sequence does not prove a genetic cause
- Maturational theory does not account for the considerable individual differences in the acquisition of
various motor skills
Dynamic system theories
A theoretical approach applied to many areas of development which views the individual as interacting
dynamically in a complex system in which all parts interact
- All new motor development is the result of a dynamic and continual interaction of three major
factors:
o Nervous system
o Capabilities and biomechanics of the body
o Environmental constraints and support
Cognitive development
Piaget’s theory of development – constructivist theory
- State of developmental psychology before Piaget
o Behaviourism: knowledge of an organism is limited exclusively to what we can observe, and
a position that avoided discussion of what goes on inside the mind
o Psychoanalysis: the theoretical view, first developed by Freud, that much of our behaviour is
determined by unconscious factors
Both child is seen as passive recipient of their upbringing, development results
form such things as the severity of toilet training, and of rewards and punishments
- Fundamental aspects of human development according to Piaget
o Children are active in shaping their own development
Children’s behaviour and development is motivated largely intrinsically (internal)
rather than extrinsically
, o Cognitive adaptions: children are developing cognitive awareness of the world. As a result of
cognitive adaptions they become better able to understand their world
- Piaget’s theory = example of Organismic world view (chapter 1): portrays children as inherently
active, continually interacting with the environment, in such a way as to shape their own
development
Adaption: assimilation and accommodation always occur together during infancy
- Assimilation: the process through which children incorporate new experiences into their pre-existing
schemes, that is – they assimilate the new to their already existing schemes of thought.
- Accommodation: the cognitive process through which children adapt to new experiences by
modifying their pre-existing schemes
o Schema’s: mental structures in the child’s thinking that provide representations and plans for
enacting behaviours
Assimilation + accommodation = functional invariants: processes that do not change during development
- Cognitive structures schemes – do change
The four stages of cognitive development
- Sensorimotor stage (infancy): thought is based primarily on perception and action and internalised
thinking is largely absent (0-2)
- Preoperational stage (early childhood): children under the age of approximately 7 years are unable
to coordinate aspects of problems in order to solve them (2-7)
o Egocentrism: one who finds it difficult to see things form another persons’ point of view
o Animism: tend to attribute life and life-like qualities to inanimate objects, particularly those
that move and are active
- Concrete operations stage (middle childhood): reasoning is said to become more logical, systematic
and rational in its application to concrete objects (7-11)
o Centration: the focusing or centring of attention on one aspect of a situation to the exclusion
of others
o Demonstrated in conservation task; task that examine children’s ability to understand that
physical attributes of objects, such as their mass and with, do not vary when the object
changes shape
- Formal operations stage (adolescence and beyond): the individual acquires the capacity for abstract
scientific thought. This includes the ability to theorise about impossible events and items (11+)
Many years before theory was to make an impact – because:
- Psychology was dominated by the theoretical school of thought know as behaviours, which offered
the mechanistic world view that the child is inherently passive until stimulated by the environment
and so the opposing view offered by Piaget took time to be accepted
- Piaget only ever wrote in French, which make his work less accessible
- Writings are often extraordinarily complex and difficult to understand
Information processing approach
- Information processing: the view that cognitive processes are explained in terms of inputs and
outputs and that the human mind is as system through which information flows
o Strategies: knowledge used to solve particular problems
Information processing = rooted in three 20th century innovations
1. The rapid and continuing advances in computer technology
2. View that an organism’s behaviour cannot be understood without knowing the structure of the
perceiver’s environment
3. Constructivism: Piaget’s theoretical view that infants are not born with knowledge about the world,
but instead gradually construct knowledge and the ability to represent reality mentally
Within information processing cognitive development proceeds in “bottom up”
- Bottom-up: a cognitive development process beginning with the input or uptake of information by
the child and building complex systems of knowledge for simpler origins
- Top-down: a cognitive development process in which the state of the system is specified or
presumed, and then working to discover its component and their development, a view more
consistent with nativist theory
, Perceive causality – temporal and physical proximity: perception of the causal nature of interactions
between objects and between people.
Object unity: when two parts of an object are visible but its centre is hidden by another object
Comparing information-processing approaches with Piaget’s approach
Similarities
- Both attempt to specify children’s abilities and limitations as development proceeds
- Both try to explain how new levels of understanding develop form earlier, less advanced ones
- Both share the focus of active participation by the child in their own development. Children learn by
doing, by trying new strategies and discovering the consequences and learn by directing their
attention appropriately
Differences
- Information processing theory places great emphasis on the role of processing limitations in limiting
children’s thinking and reasoning at any point in time. Piaget’s theory does not discuss processing
limitations, but rather discusses developmental changes in terms of the child gradually constructing
logical frameworks for thought.
- Information processing accounts see development as unfolding in a continuous fashion, rather than
qualitatively different stages as Piaget suggested.
Social-cognitive development
Vygotsky – Social interaction plays a fundamental role in cognitive development
- Gap between what the child knows and what they can be taught
Zone of proximal development (ZPD): the distance between the actual developmental level as determined
by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problems
solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more able peers.
Pavlov – Classical conditioning: a method of learning. In this form of conditioning, certain behaviours can
be elicited by a neutral (normally un-stimulating) stimulus because of its learned association with a more
powerful stimulus
Thorndike – law of effect: law or rule, which states that the likelihood of a action being repeated is
increased if leas to a pleasant outcome, and decreased if it lads to an unpleasant outcome
Psychoanalytic theories
Skinner’s behaviourism: operant conditioning: the training, or shaping, of an animal or human by reinforcing
them to producing the desired behaviour and or either ignoring or punishing undesirable behaviours in
order to stop them
- Differs from classical conditioning children operate on their environments. Skinner allowed more
flexible and generative patterns of behaviour
Bandura’s social learning theory: the application of behaviourism to social and cognitive learning that
emphasises the importance of observational learning, that is, learning by observation and then copying
(imitating) the observed acts
- Observational learning: situation in which people learn by observing others and then copying the
behaviour they observed
- Social cognitive theory: a theory that emphasises social factors in cognitive development
Ethology and evolution
Evolution: idea established by Charles Darwin. Most important unit in evolution is the gene, which si the
basic genetic material out of which chromosomes are formed
- Chromosomes: strands of DNA and protein that contain the genes and provide the genetic blueprint
for the animal or plant
- Ethological approaches: approaches which emphasis the evolutionary origins of many behaviours
that are important for survival, such as imprinting
o Imprinting: the young of precocial species of animals follow the first moving object they see.
Implications of ethology’s conception of behaviours:
- Require an external stimulus or target
- Time – critical period: limited period in which the young have to be exposed to a particular skill or
experience in order for it to be learned
Emotional development
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