Understanding and Studying Child Development
Part II
Chapter 2
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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COGNITIVE THEORIES: Vygotsky
• 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
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COGNITIVE THEORIES: Vygotsky
• 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
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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
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CONTEXTUAL THEORIES:
• To truly understand child development, one must study children in their historical, social, and cultural contexts.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The Scientific Method
• Goal: finding the probable explanation
• Designed to produce results that are– objective– reliable – valid
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The Scientific Method
• Steps– Formulating a hypothesis– Designing a study– Collecting evidence– Interpreting and reporting the evidence
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Topics in Developmental Science
• Basic developmental research– Designed to answer broad, fundamental
questions
• Applied developmental research– Designed to solve practical problems
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Research Strategies
• CASE STUDIES• CLINICAL INTERVIEWS• SURVEY STUDIES• NATURALISTIC STUDIES• CORRELATIONAL STUDIES• EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES
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Case Studies
• In-depth examination of a single person
• May not be generalizable to others
• Often useful for unusual or rare conditions
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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
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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)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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