1. Child Development Theorist
Why Do We Need to Know This?
Child Growth and Development

2. Better parenting
Know what a child’s needs are
Recognize at risk children
Society is better when children are treated well.

3. Historical Context Childhood is a fairly new concept
Previously parents did not attend to childhood needs
14th -17th century children were viewed as inherently evil
18th century parents were intrusive
“harsh rigorous training could make them acceptable to society” (Black,12)

4. Theories in Early Childhood Development

5. Sigmund Freud Psychosocial
Certain drives and instincts emerge at various times
Through various biological systems
Mouth
Anus
Sexual organs
Now thought to be too simplistic

6. Erik Erikson Psychosocial Development
Erikson sees maturation as a series of psychosocial conflicts, each level of conflict must be resolved before the child can move to the next level.

7. Trust vs. Mistrust Autonomy vs. Doubt Birth-18 months
Children require security (through physical comforts and affection)
Autonomy vs. Doubt
18 mths-3 years
Children must establish own individual identity in relation to others.

8. Industry vs. Inferiority
Initiative Vs Guilt
3-6 years
Children realize their own responsibilities and become aware of interpersonal conflicts.
Industry vs. Inferiority
7-11 years
Children's determination to achieve success, often in concert with others.

9. Identity vs. Role Confusion
11-18 years
Children involved in discovering personal, cultural and social identity.
Intimacy vs. Isolation
Young Adulthood
Young Adults strive to form strong friendships and to achieve love and companionship. Failure to form an identity during adolescence may now result in difficulty forming intimate

10. Generativity vs. Stagnation
Adulthood
Generativity includes such responsibilities
As raising and caring for children
Productivity in one's work.
Adults who cannot perform these tasks become stagnant
And often depressed

11. Ego integrity vs. Despair
Maturity
Older adults achieve ego integrity if they can look back on their lives and view life as productive and satisfying.
Disappointment leads to despair.

12. Arnold Gesell Maturation
“Suggests that the patterns of growth and development are genetically predetermined cannot be influenced by environmental stimulation or training to any degree”

13. Development of norms of growth and behavior that provides guidelines to help parents determine whether children's behavior is typical

14. Behavioral Theory
Behavioral theories of development focus on how environmental interaction influences behavior
Are based upon the theories of theorists such as Pavlov, and Skinner
These theories deal only with observable behaviors
Development is considered a reaction to rewards, punishments, stimuli, and reinforcement.

15. Ivan Pavlov Classical conditioning
Two events that are paired and it established the same response to either
Extinguish- to stop a behavior over time by not reinforcing it

16. Pavlov's classical experiment

17. B.F.Skinner Operant conditioning
Behavior is reinforced over a period of time
Will make desirable behavior more frequent
Punishment reduces frequency

18. Components of Operant Conditioning
A reinforcer is any event that strengthens or increases the behavior it follows. There are two kinds of reinforcers:
Positive reinforcers are favorable events or outcomes that are presented after the behavior.
Negative reinforcers involve the removal of an unfavorable events or outcomes after the display of a behavior.
In both of these cases of reinforcement, the behavior increases.

19. Punishment is the presentation of an adverse event or outcome that causes a decrease in the behavior it follows. There are two kinds of punishment:
Positive punishment involves the presentation of an unfavorable event or outcome in order to weaken the response it follows.
Negative punishment occurs when an favorable event or outcome is removed after a behavior occurs.

20. Albert Bandura Social Learning Theory
Learning can occur by watching children
Modeled behavior
Being a good Role model will influence a child
Negative influences will also cause behavior changes

21. Steps involved in the modeling process
Attention.  If you are going to learn anything, you have to be paying attention
Retention.  Second, you must be able to retain -- remember -- what you have paid attention to

22. Reproduction.  You have to translate the images or descriptions into actual behavior. 
So you have to have the ability to reproduce the behavior in the first place

23. Bandura mentions a number of motives
Motivation. 
With all this, you’re still not going to do anything unless you are motivated to imitate, i.e. until you have some reason for doing it. 
Bandura mentions a number of motives
past reinforcement, traditional behaviorism
promised reinforcements (incentives) that we can imagine
vicarious reinforcement -- seeing and recalling the model being reinforced.

24. Cognitive Theory
Focusing on the maturational factors affecting understanding
Cognitive theory is interested in how people understand
Aptitude and capacity to learn

25. Jean Piaget Biologist who originally studied mollusks
His particular insight was the role of maturation (simply growing up) in children's increasing capacity to understand their world
Children cannot undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so

26. He proposed that children's thinking does not develop smoothly
instead, there are certain points at which it "takes off" and moves into completely new areas and capabilities
Transitions may take place at about 18 months, 7 years and 11 or 12 years.
Before these ages children are not capable (no matter how bright) of understanding things in certain ways (his theory)

27. Key Concepts
Adaptation: Adapting to the world through assimilation and accommodation 
Assimilation The process by which a person takes material into their mind from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence of their senses to make it fit. 
Accommodation The difference made to one's mind or concepts by the process of assimilation. 
Note that assimilation and accommodation go together: you can't have one without the other.

28. Classification -The ability to group objects together on the basis of common features. 
Class Inclusion- the understanding, more advanced than simple classification, that some classes or sets of objects are also sub-sets of a larger class.
There is a class of objects called dogs. There is also a class called animals. But all dogs are also animals, so the class of animals includes that of dogs 

29. Conservation The realization that objects or sets of objects stay the same even when they are changed about or made to look different. 
Decentration The ability to move away from one system of classification to another one as appropriate

30. Egocentrism The belief that you are the center of the universe and everything revolves around you
The corresponding inability to see the world as someone else does and adapt to it
Not moral "selfishness", just an early stage of psychological development 

31. Operation The process of working something out in your head.
Young children (in the sensorimotor and pre-operational stages) have to act, and try things out in the real world, to work things out (like count on fingers)
Older children and adults can do more in their heads. 
Schema (or scheme) The representation in the mind of a set of perceptions, ideas, and/or actions, which go together. 

32. Stage A period in a child's development in which he or she is capable of understanding some things but not others 

33. Piaget Stages of Cognative Learning
Stage Characterized by Sensori-motor  (Birth-2 yrs) 
Differentiates self from objects 
Recognizes self as agent of action and begins to act intentionally: e.g. pulls a string to set mobile in motion or shakes a rattle to make a noise 
Achieves object permanence: realizes that things continue to exist even when no longer present to the sense

34. Pre-operational (2-7 years)
Learns to use language and to represent objects by images and words 
Thinking is still egocentric: has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others 
Classifies objects by a single feature: e.g. groups together all the red blocks regardless of shape or all the square blocks regardless of color 

35. Concrete operational (7-11 years)
Can think logically about objects and events 
Achieves conservation of number (age 6), mass (age 7), and weight (age 9) 
Classifies objects according to several features and can order them in series along a single dimension such as size. 

36. Formal operational (11 years and up)
Can think logically about abstract propositions and test hypotheses systematically 
Becomes concerned with the hypothetical, the future, and ideological problems 
Critical Thinking is achieved

37. Constructivist Theory
Constructivism is the label given to a set of theories about learning which fall somewhere between cognitive and humanistic views
“Social constructivism", which emphasizes how meanings and understandings grow out of social encounters

38. Lev Vygotsky
Investigated child development and how this was guided by the role of culture and interpersonal communication.
Observed how higher mental functions developed through social interactions with significant people in a child's life, particularly parents, but also other adults

39. A second aspect of Vygotsky's theory
The idea that the potential for cognitive development depends upon the "zone of proximal development" (ZPD)
a level of development attained when children engage in social behavior
Full development of the ZPD depends upon full social interaction
The range of skill that can be developed with adult guidance or peer collaboration exceeds what can be attained alone

40. “Proximal" simply means "next"
“Proximal" simply means "next". He observed that when children were tested on tasks on their own, they rarely did as well as when they were working in collaboration with an adult
The process of engagement with the adult enabled them to refine their thinking or their performance
The common-sense idea which fits most closely with this model is that of "stretching" learners.

42. Research in Child Development
There are many ways to study children
Those studies determine the validity of a theory

43. Descriptive Study
In social sciences, descriptive research usually takes one of two forms:
1) survey research
2) observational research
Have objectives instead of hypotheses

44. Cross Sectional Study
Studies different children at the same time (age difference)
Representative sample
Asking all students at Nipmuc what their earliest memory is…will 8th grade have different memories than 12th?

45. Longitudinal Study Same children over a long period of time
Framingham Heart Study

46. Correlational Studies
Attempt to determine a relationship between two sets of measurements
Physical strength and peer group popularity of sixth grade boys (measure different variables on same individuals, same time)
Algebra aptitude in 8th grade and algebra aptitude in 10th grade (measure same variables on same individuals at 2 points in time)

47. Experimental Control group Experimental group
Treat experimental group differently to see what changes might occur