Includes the following chapters:
CHAPTER 1: Theories and Methods
CHAPTER 2: Heredity, Environment, and the Brain
CHAPTER 3: Prenatal and Postnatal Health and Development
CHAPTER 4: Perceptual and Motor Development
CHAPTER 5: Cognitive Development
CHAPTER 6: Language Development in Infancy and...
CHAPTER 1: Theories and Methods
● Goals: describe explain and thus improve (apply) the lives of children and
parents
● Basic vs Applied Science
● Quantitative: Gradual change
● Qualitative: Period of transitioning
1. What is a way in which child development is quantitative?
2. What is a way in which child development is qualitative?
● Individual differences
● Developmental Onset: the approximate age when specific skills emerge
○ example: puberty can change from child to child, language can change
● Rate of Change: the course of change over time, including how fast/slow
● The form of skills: what behavior looks like in children with diverging
experiences
● Developmental Stability: whether children who are relatively high or low on a
particular behavior or characteristic at a certain point in time are also relatively
high or low on the same behavior or characteristic at later times
● Plasticity: the capacity to adapt to changing environment and experiences
○ leads to instability
● A common tool:
○ growing charts
■ the absolute weight relative to others
■ focusing on the curve (development relative to oneself)
● sometimes kids don’t stay on the curve
■ “rate of change matters more than absolute value”
● There is often developmental stability
● Nature AND Nurture
○ nature: biological endowment
○ nurture: environmental and experimental influencing development
○ development is the product of a complex, continual interplay between
biology and environment
○ Aristotle: total experience ~ Locke
○ Plato: innate knowledge ~ Rousseau
● Developmental Cascades: changes of one kind can have cascading effects,
setting other kinds of changes in motion, both immediately and at later ages
● Developmental Domain
● Cascades over time & across domains
○ Children’s language play a role in their emotional development
○ Locomotion (crawling & walking) can lead to learning new words
●
, FOUNDATIONAL THEORIES
Evolutionary Theory:
● Darwin, survival of the fittest, natural selection
● Specific behaviors in children confer evolutionary benefits
● Child’s environment influences otherwise universal, biological tendencies
○ Attachment to caregivers => depends on the caregiver
● Bullying: a bully’s behaviors make little sense to an outsider, they may yield
adaptive benefits for the aggressor
Psychodynamic Theories:
1. Psychosexual Stages:
➢ Freud
➢ Emphasis on children’s biological drives, particularly the sex drive
➢ How well children satisfy their drives depend on the behaviors they
learn from their caregivers (environment)
➢ Children have to learn how to satisfy their drives socially and
psychologically accepted
➢ id, ego, superego
2. Psychosocial Stages:
➢ Erik Erikson
➢ People confront specific challenges in their search for an identity at
different stages in the life course
➢ At every stage, people experience unique internal conflicts of who they
are
➢ Children might work on resolving psychosocial conflicts through play by
acting out society’s demands and expectations, such as when a child
pretends an adult doll scolds a child doll for not cleaning her room
These are both qualitative changes!
Behaviorism:
● John Watson
● A scientific approach explaining people’s behavior as learned through
conditioning
● Reaction against psychodynamic theories focusing on unobservable conflicts,
underlying features, and largely untestable predictions
Classical Conditioning:
● Albert & rat (crying)
● examples: infant opening her mouth when the mother sits on the feeding chair
Operant Conditioning:
● B.F. Skinner
● Behaviors increase or decrease depending on whether they are rewarded or
punished
● Skinner Box, positive (reward) vs negative reinforcement (negative removed)
, Constructivism:
● Jean Piaget
● Two people react to same scenarios differently most of the time so not
everything can be environmental
● Need to understand “child’s mind”
● Children’s active role
● He both described and explained children’s behavior
● 4 Qualitative Stages:
○ Sensorimotor (0-2 years):
■ Infants schemas are limited to their sensory and motor inputs
○ Preoperational (2-7 years):
■ Capable of mental representation, object permanence, deferred
imitation, symbolic play
○ Concrete Operational (7-11):
■ logical and organized thinking but it is limited to concrete things
○ Formal Operational (11+):
■ abstract and hypothetical thinking
● Moving through stages:
○ Assimilation
○ Disequilibrium vs Equilibrium
○ Accomodation
Sociocultural Theory:
● Lev Vygotsky
● agrees with Piaget but thinks Piaget skipped social interactions
● children learn through interacting with knowledgeable adults, such as parents
and teachers, and in doing so master more challenging tasks than they would
when acting alone
CONTEMPORARY THEORIES
Nativism & Core Knowledge Theories: represent innate and domain specific
representational structures
❖ Chomsky - Language
❖ Babies differentiating between small and large objects
❖ CORE KNOWLEDGE:
➢ objects
➢ actions
➢ number
➢ space
➢ agency
The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:
Guaranteed quality through customer reviews
Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.
Quick and easy check-out
You can quickly pay through credit card or Stuvia-credit for the summaries. There is no membership needed.
Focus on what matters
Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!
Frequently asked questions
What do I get when I buy this document?
You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.
Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?
Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.
Who am I buying these notes from?
Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller go126. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.
Will I be stuck with a subscription?
No, you only buy these notes for $7.99. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.
