Child Development: Understanding Cognitive, Physical & Social Growth
Child Development
Tenets of Development
- Development depends on heredity and the environment.
- Development proceeds in a relatively orderly and predictable manner.
- Children develop at different rates.
- Factors influencing human intellectual development include: Experience, Learning, and Maturation.
Putting Piaget’s Theory into Perspective
- The stages that affect all types of tasks aren’t universally valid.
- Piaget underestimated the abilities of young children.
- He overestimated the abilities of older learners.
- Children’s logical abilities depend more strongly on knowledge and experience in a specific area than Piaget suggested.
- Piaget’s work was essentially context-free and failed to adequately consider the influence of culture on development. Culture determines children’s experiences, values, language, and their interactions with adults.
Key Processes in Development
Assimilation: Incorporating experiences into existing mental frameworks (schemes).
Accommodation: Modifying existing schemes or creating new ones in response to experiences.
Adaptation: Adjusting schemes and experiences to maintain equilibrium.
Organization: Creating and using schemes to make sense of experiences.
Equilibrium: A cognitive state where we can explain new experiences using existing understanding.
Disequilibrium: When we cannot explain new experiences using existing understanding.
Importance of Disequilibrium:
- Motivates children to solve contradictions to re-establish equilibrium.
- This new equilibrium resolves contradictions and represents a higher level of understanding.
Vocabulary
Development: Changes occurring in humans from infancy to adulthood.
Physical Development: Changes in body shape, size, and function.
Personal, Social, and Emotional Development: Changes in personality, social interactions, and emotional regulation.
Cognitive Development: Changes in thinking due to learning, maturation, and experience.
Maturation: Genetically controlled, age-related changes.
Schemes: Mental frameworks representing our understanding of the world.
Social Experience: The process of interacting with others.
Conservation: Understanding that quantity remains constant despite changes in shape or arrangement.
Centration: Focusing on the most obvious aspect of an object or event, neglecting other important aspects.
Transformation: Mentally recording the process of change from one state to another.
Reversibility: Mentally retracing the process of change back to a previous state.
Egocentrism: Believing that others perceive the world the same way as oneself.
Classification: Grouping objects based on common characteristics.
Seriation: Ordering objects based on increasing or decreasing attributes (e.g., size, weight).
Transitivity: Inferring a relationship between two objects based on their relationship with a third object.
Play
Theories of Play
Pre-Social Play: Using toys to prepare for future adult activities.
Purpose of Play: Stimulates physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development. Rewards children for learning cognitive and behavioral skills.
Types of Play
Exploration Play: Infants explore their environment through crawling, inspecting, and playing.
Parallel Play: Children play alongside each other but not together.
Instigative Play: Infants engage in activities instigated by others (e.g., peek-a-boo).
Social Play: Play becomes more complex, and others become interactive partners.
Free Play: Unstructured play, such as rough-housing, that helps children learn frustration tolerance and emotional regulation.
Formal Play: Games with rules, such as tag.
Creative Play: Pretend play that involves manipulating symbols and fostering imagination.
Language Development
First Month: Reflexes
3-7 Months: Babbling
1 Year: Holophrastic speech (one-word sentences)
18 Months: Two-word sentences, telegraphic speech
2 Years: Complex sentences
2-7 Years: Learning to speak and develop syntax
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)
Preoperational Stage (2-4 years)
- Conservation: Lack of understanding that quantity remains constant despite changes in appearance.
- Centration: Focusing on the most obvious aspect of an object or event.
- Transformation: Difficulty understanding the process of change.
- Reversibility: Difficulty mentally reversing a process of change.
- Egocentrism: Inability to see things from another’s perspective.
Concrete Operational Stage (6-11 years)
- Classification: Ability to group objects based on common characteristics.
- Seriation: Ability to order objects based on increasing or decreasing attributes.
Formal Operational Stage (12 years and onward)
- Thinking Abstractly
- Thinking Symbolically
- Thinking Hypothetically