Chapter 1 - History, Theory, and Research Strategies Flashcards
Child development
an area of study devoted to understanding constancy and change from conception through adolescence
Developmental science
an interdisciplinary field which includes all changes we experience throughout the lifespan
Research conducted in child development is _______ and __________
Much of the research being conducted in child development is applied and is interdisciplinary
Domains of Development
- Physical: changes in body size, proportions, appearance, functioning of body systems, perceptual and motor capacities, and physical health 2. Cognitive: changes in intellectual abilities, including attention, memory, academic and everyday knowledge, problem solving, imagination, creativity, and language 3. Emotional and social: changes in emotional communication, self-understanding, knowledge about other people, interpersonal skills, friendships, intimate relationships, and moral reasoning and behaviour
Periods of Development
- The prenatal period: conception to birth 2. Infancy and toddlerhood: birth to 2 years 3. Early childhood: 2 to 6 years 4. Middle childhood: 6 to 11 years 5. Adolescence: 11 to 18 years 6. Emerging adulthood: 18 to 25 years
The prenatal period: conception to birth
Most rapid time of development
Infancy and toddlerhood: birth to 2 years
- • Dramatic changes in brain and body
• Emergence of a wide array of motor, perceptual and intellectual capabilities
• Beginnings of language
• First intimate ties to others
• Infancy: year one
• Toddlerhood: year two
• Attachment extremely is important during this stage
Early childhood: 2 to 6 years
• Body becomes longer and leaner • Motor skills are refined • More self-controlled and self sufficient • Make believe play • Language shows much growth • Morality becomes evident • Ties with peers
Middle childhood: 6 to 11 years
• • (Apprenticing themselves) across cultures at this age start engaging in activities designed to prepare them for adult life.
- Master responsibilities that resemble adult ones
- Improved athletic ability
- Participation in organized games with rules
- More logical thought prosses
- Better at following rules
- Literacy
- Master at fundamental reading, writing, math
- Advances in understanding of self, morality and friendship
Adolescence: 11 to 18 years
- Not hard and fast start and end date – start at sexual maturity, ends when you take your full adult place in society
- Physical changes – more adult like
- Sexual maturity
- Change in formal education – more future directed
- Abstract thinking
- Idealistic
- Preparation for adult roles
- Autonomy
- Personal values and goals
What do Theories do
• provide organizing frameworks for our observations • serve as a basis for practical action
Theory
an orderly, integrated set of statements that describes, explains, and predicts behaviour
basic issues in child development
Continuity Versus Discontinuity
One Course of Development Versus Many
Nature Versus Nurture
Active Versus Passive
Continuity Versus Discontinuity
- Concerns whether a particular developmental phenomenon represents a smooth progression throughout the life span (continuity) or a series of abrupt shifts (discontinuity)
- Qualitative v Quantitative changes
- Is the difference entirely new abilities or just amount and complexity of the same abilities?
- Stages or slope of development
- Stability v plasticity– how a trait is the same or changing across development
Nature Versus Nurture
- Involves the degree to which genetic or hereditary influences (nature) and experiential or environmental influences (nurture) determine the kind of person you are
- Formulas to determine the degree of nature and nurture this are not good because they require them to be separable
One Course of Development Versus Many
Universal stages or context dependent development
Resilience Four Factors
The ability to adapt effectively in the face of threats to development 1. Personal characteristics – intelligence, socially valued talents, temperament, emotional control, 2. Parental relationship – warmth, appropriate expectations, monitoring, organized home environment 3. Social support outside family – strong bonds with caring adult, 4. Community resources and opportunities – good schools, available health care, social services, libraries, recreation centers, activities outside of school, community involvement.
In the medieval times
Childhood was considered a different stage of life and not just little adults. • Children dressed differently from adults. Looser more comftable clothing. • Manuals existed offering advice on child care; health, feeding, clothing, games • Laws recognized that children needed protection from mistreatment • Courts were more lenient with youths than with adults • Contradictory religious depictions existed, portraying children as innocent or as in need of purification
In the sixteenth century Reformation
The Puritan belief in original sin led to a dominant view of children as evil and stubborn • Children were dressed in stiff clothing to hold them in adult like postures • Children were beaten • Parents had a hard time sticking to extreme puritan practices dew to love and affection
In the seventeenth century Enlightenment
a period of ‘enlightenment’ brought new views of children and childrearing. Human dignity, respect, more humane treatment. • John Locke - Tabula rasa (blank slate) • Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the noble savage
John Locke
o Tabula rasa (blank slate) o Parents as rational tutors, carful instruction, good example, and rewards o Apposed physical punishment o Kindness and compassion not harshness o Theories of continuous, nurture, many path, focused development that has high plasticity at later ages. o He saw kids as having little impact on their own development. o Ahead of his time
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
o noble savage – naturally endowed with a sense of right and wrong o harmed by adult training o four stages of development – infancy, childhood, late childhood, adolescence o Discontinuity, nature (maturation), one path
Maturation
A genetically determined, naturally unfolding course of growth. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Toward the turn of the twentieth century Scientific Beginnings
Study of child development rapidly evolved. Improved methods of research and theories. Darwin o theory of recapitulation o contributed to developmental theories G. Stanley Hall o founder of the child-study movement G. Stanley Hall With Arnold Gesell o launched the normative approach Binet and Simon o the first successful intelligence test
Darwin
• Darwin noted that early prenatal growth is strikingly similar in many species • Others form theory of recapitulation based of Darwin’s observations • Darwin’s focus on the adaptive value of both physical and behavioural characteristics has contributed to developmental theories
G. Stanley Hall,
founder of the child-study movement Influenced by Darwin’s ideas of evolution
G. Stanley Hall With Arnold Gesell
launched the normative approach Gesell – parenting advice, children are naturally knowledgeable about their own needs and parents should respond to their cues
normative approach
Measures of behavior are taken on large numbers of individuals and age related averages are computed to represent typical development.
Binet and Simon
- The government asked Binet to help place children in classes when they when to a public education system
- In the early 1900s, Binet and Simon developed the first successful intelligence test
- Interdisciplinary, worked with teachers
- In 1916, updated to the Stanford-Binet in the US
- Designed for school placement, but not always used that way
Mid-Twentieth-Century
where we see the development of some of the theories that continue to be influential today Psychoanalytic perspective o Freud o Erikson Behaviourism o John Watson o B.F. Skinner o Albert Bandura (Social learning theory) Cognitive-developmental theory o Piaget
Psychoanalytic perspective And the stages
Freud’s view of personality development, in which children move through a series of stages in which they confront conflicts between biological drives and social expectations. The way these conflicts are resolved determines psychological adjustment 1. Oral stage, birth-1 year 2. Anal stage, 1-3 years 3. Phallic stage, 3-6 years 4. Latency, 6-11 years 5. Genital stage, adolescence
Psychosexual theory
Freud’s theory, which emphasizes that how parents manage children’s sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years of life is crucial for healthy personality development
Freud’s theory of three components to the personality
• The id is present at birth, represents our basic biological needs and desires, and works on the hedonistic principle • The ego is present once we’re able to follow simple rules, is conscious and rational, and works on the reality principle • The superego is present once we internalize rules, develops through interactions with parents, and is no more reasonable than the id
Psychosocial theory And stages
Erikson’s theory, which emphasizes that at each Freudian stage, individuals not only develop a unique personality but also acquire attitudes and skills that help them become active, contributing members of society
1. Basic trust v mistrust, birth-1 year - balance
2. Autonomy v shame and doubt, 1-3 years –potty training
3. Initiative v guilt, 3-6 years – balance
4. Industry v inferiority, 6-11 years – how you feel you’re doing and not how you are doing objectively
5. Identity v role confusion, adolescence
6. Intimacy v isolation, emerging adulthood
7. Generativity v stagnation, adulthood
8. Integrity v despair, old age
Erikson was a neo-freudian but unlike Freud he saw that development occurs throughout the life span and the culture plays a role.
The Psychoanalytic Perspective Strengths And Weaknesses
Strengths • Emphasis on the individual’s unique life history as worthy of study and understanding • Has inspired a wealth of research on many aspects of emotional and social development Weaknesses • Strong commitment to the clinical approach has led to failure to consider other methods • Poor testability
Behaviourism
(If you can’t obersive it then you shouldn’t study it)
an approach that regards directly observable events—stimuli and responses—as the appropriate focus of study and that views the development of behaviour as taking place through classical and operant conditioning and observational learning
John Watson
- Behaviourism
- classical conditioning
- inspired by Pavlov
- Little Albert study – they were going to extinguished the fear because of an affair with research assistant
B.F. Skinner
- Behaviourism
- Didn’t work with kids he worked with rats
- operant conditioning
- effects of reward and punishment
Social learning theory
an approach that emphasizes the role of modeling, or observational learning, in the development of behaviour
• Albert Bandura, importance of cognition in our ability to learn from others
• Selecting what to imitate based on vicarious reinforcement and punishment, personal standards, and self-efficacy
• Children slowly become more selective on what they imitate
• Because of enfaces on thinking and the thought process of the child this theory can also be called “social-cognitive theory”
• Model general principals and not exact behaviors
Behaviourism and Social Learning Theory Contributions and Criticisms
Contributions • Applied techniques, such as behaviour modification Criticisms • Focuses too narrowly on reinforcement and modeling, to the exclusion of other aspects of children’s physical and social worlds • Underestimating children’s active contributions to their own development
Cognitive-developmental theory And stages
an approach introduced by Piaget that views children as actively constructing knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world and that regards cognitive development as taking place in stages • Sensorimotor stage, birth-2 • Preoperational stage, 2-7 • Concrete operational stage, 7-11 • Formal operational stage, 11 onwards Piaget believed that the structures of the mind adapts to better fit its external environment. He believed that children eventually reach an equilibrium their internal mental structures and the information they encounter in the everyday world. He used open ended clinical interviews where a child’s answer would determine the next question.
Cognitive-developmental theory Strengths And Weaknesses
Strengths • Piaget founded the field of cognitive development, and drew thousands of researchers to its study • He’s sparked research that has led to the formation of educational philosophies still used today Weaknesses • Underestimated the competencies of young children—training and familiarity matter more than he predicted • Insufficient attention to social and cultural influences • Is development truly stage-like?
Recent Theoretical Perspectives
• Information Processing • cognitive neuroscience • Ethology and Evolutionary Developmental Psychology • Evolutionary developmental psychology • Sociocultural theory • Ecological systems theory • Dynamic systems perspective
Theory in Child Development TABLE 2
Ethics in Child Research TABLE
Cross Sectional Comparisons DIAGRAM
Strengths and Limitations of Research Methods TABLE 1
Studying The Child TABLE
Theroys in Child Development
TABLE 1
Strengths and Limitations of Reasearch Mathods
TABLE 2
Piaget Stages
TABLE
