Chapter 2 pp part ii

Understanding and Studying Child Development

Part II

Chapter 2

2 | 2Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

COGNITIVE THEORIES: Piaget

• Cognition-based theories emphasize the role of mental processes such as memory, decision making, and information processing in influencing development.

• Piaget speculated that children of different ages use different kinds of thought processes.


COGNITIVE THEORIES: Piaget

• Intelligence is an active process; people acquire information by interacting with objects, ideas, and other people

• Children’s abilities to interact with the environment are based on their schemes – cognitive guides, or blueprints, for processing information– Infants use schemes based on their senses– Children use schemes based on appearance


COGNITIVE THEORIES: Piaget - Adaptation

• Children develop their problem-solving abilities through two continually occurring processes of adaptation:– Assimilation

• Directly processing information that fits a scheme

– Accommodation• Changing the scheme to fit the new

information


COGNITIVE THEORIES: Piaget - Stages of Development

• Intelligence undergoes dramatic changes over time, referred to as stages in cognitive development.

• Each stage is marked by specific types of thinking and problem-solving skills.– Sensorimotor– Preoperational– Concrete Operational– Formal Operational


COGNITIVE THEORIES: Piaget - Sensorimotor Stage

• Birth to 2 years• Learning occurs via

senses and motor skills

• Object permanence – the understanding that objects continue to exist even when the child cannot see them

Photo credit of Gabriela Martorell.


Preoperational Stage

• 2 to 7 years of age– Think in symbols– Are egocentric– Believe that everyone sees the world as

they do– Fooled by the appearance of an object;

their thinking is based on that appearance


COGNITIVE THEORIES: Piaget - Concrete Operational Stage

• 7 to 11 years of age– Use of logic to solve problems– Understand that things maintain their identity

even through their outward appearance may be changed


COGNITIVE THEORIES: Piaget - Formal Operations Stage

• Begins at 11 years of age– Application of logical principles to abstract

situations– Increased interest in broader social issues


COGNITIVE THEORIES: Vygotsky

• Proposed a theory of development based on the idea that children use psychological tools such as language, numbering systems, and maps to develop higher levels of thinking

• Social interaction as key determinant of development



• Learning occurs via interactions with more sophisticated others

• Zone of proximal development– The distance between what a child can do

unaided and what a child can do through interaction with skilled helpers



• Through their routine interactions, caregivers and teachers provide meaningful assistance to children in developing cognitive, social, and emotional skills

• These guidance messages become the silent inner speech that is used to guide behavior


COGNITIVE THEORIES:Information Processing Theory

• People have limited capacities for learning but can flexibly apply strategies to find ways around those limitations– The sensory register

• Briefly retain visual, auditory, and other information taken in through the senses

– Short-term memory • Holds information long enough for the person to

evaluate and selectively act on inputs

– Long-term memory• Unlimited capacity for storing information over long

periods of time


CONTEXTUAL THEORIES:

• To truly understand child development, one must study children in their historical, social, and cultural contexts.


CONTEXTUAL THEORIES: Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory

• The child’s experiences are viewed as subsystems within larger systems, or a set of nested structures

• Child interacts with the environment, those interactions are the engine of development


Brofenbrenner’s Ecological Model

• microsystem– immediate environment– i.e., toys, structure of the environment, roles

and relationships of family members

• mesosystem– connections among settings– includes the child and how these connections

affect the child– i.e., relationships at school affect home

relationships


Brofenbrenner’s Ecological Model

• exosystem– connections among settings– does not include child but indirectly affects

the child– i.e., parents’ job, friends, neighborhood

• macrosystem– larger society values, historical changes and

social policies



CONTEXTUAL THEORIES: Dynamic Systems Theory

• Complex systems form from basic and simple conditions without requiring a master plan for development

• The individual parts of a system – control parameters – interact in ways that eventually lead to advancement to a new level or a new form

• The rate-limiting component – is the last developing part of the system; this is when the system evolves into a new form


The Scientific Method

• Goal: finding the probable explanation

• Designed to produce results that are– objective– reliable – valid


The Scientific Method

• Steps– Formulating a hypothesis– Designing a study– Collecting evidence– Interpreting and reporting the evidence


Topics in Developmental Science

• Basic developmental research– Designed to answer broad, fundamental

questions

• Applied developmental research– Designed to solve practical problems


Research Strategies

• CASE STUDIES• CLINICAL INTERVIEWS• SURVEY STUDIES• NATURALISTIC STUDIES• CORRELATIONAL STUDIES• EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES


Case Studies

• In-depth examination of a single person

• May not be generalizable to others

• Often useful for unusual or rare conditions


Clinical Interviews

• Detailed interview with participant

• May be biased by participant telling experimenter what they think he/she wants to hear

• Participant must be language proficient

• Flexible method

• Offers insight


Survey Studies

• Involves responses to sets of structured questions

• Data is easy to obtain

• Self-presentation issues (participant may answer questions so interviewer may see them in a positive light)


Naturalistic Studies

• Observation of people in their natural environments

• People tend to behave normally

• Difficult to generalize from one setting to another

• No control over setting


Correlational Studies

• Are two variables related to each other?– Correlation coefficient

• Cannot establish causality – does one cause the other?

• Provides ethical means to study sensitive topics


Experimental Studies

• Used for determining causality – does one cause the other?

• Provides experimental control

• Involves creation of manipulated situation in a laboratory– Can lead to artificial responses from

participants


Measuring Change over Time

• Cross-Sectional Studies– Individuals of different ages are tested at the same

point in time, and the results from each age group are compared

• Longitudinal Studies– Tests the same group of individuals at different points

in time

• Cohort-Sequential Research Design– Children of different ages are involved and studied over

time





Measuring Children’s Behavior• Physiological measures

– Record responses of the body

• Behavioral measures– Direct assessment of behavior through observation

• Self-report– Asking people questions; usually questionnaire-based

• Projective measures– Indirectly assess individuals’ psychological states


Challenges in Research with Children

• self-report and projective measures cannot be used with infants and young children

• young children, even if verbal, may lack insight into their behavior

• testing infants is difficult

• ethical issues; particularly non-verbal children and their refusal to participate

Chapter 2 pp part ii

Documents

cognitive theories

contextual theories

child development

schemes cognitive guides

piaget intelligence

piaget stages

piaget adaptation children

theory of development