Theories of development PDF

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Summary

Key themes across theories (what is a theory/aims to do); place of empirical studies
Psychoanalytic (Freud and Erikson)
The ecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner) and the cultural context of development
Learning (classical conditioning; operant conditioning; Bandura’s social cogni...

Description

Theories of development Overview theories of development  Psychoanalytic (e.g. Freud, Erikson)  Ecological and systems (e.g. Bronfenbrenner)  Cognitive (e.g. Piaget, Vygotsky)  Learning (e.g. Watson, Skinner, Bandura) Theories of development  Psychoanalytic (e.g. Freud, Erikson)  Learning (e.g. Watson, Skinner, Bandura)  Cognitive (e.g. Piaget, Vygotsky)  Ecological and systems (e.g. Bronfenbrenner) Psychoanalytic  Development is fundamentally stage-like with each stage centred on a particular form of tension or a particular task that must be (re)solved

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Large emphasis on the importance of early child and care-giver interactions; formative role of early experiences

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Behaviour is governed by unconscious as well as conscious processes

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Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) + Erik Erikson (1902-1994)

Freud’s psychoanalytic theory: Development strongly linked to maturation (getting older, chronologically). Personality has a structure which develops overtime Develops from id (source of libido-basic unconscious) – ego - supe Freud’s stages of development  Based on which part of the body is most sensitive at different ages  Oral (Birth – 1 Year) – Oral needs must be met through sucking (breast or bottle)  Anal (1 – 3 Years) – Children enjoy control over passing urine and faeces, potential for conflicts over anal control Phallic (3 – 6 Years) – Oedipus and Electra conflicts develop, to avoid  this the child adopts the same-sex parents characteristics (superego formed)

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Latency (6 – 11 Years) –l instincts, libido dies down, child’s superego strengthens new social values acquired from adults and same-sex peers Genital (Adolescence) –impulses reappear. If the other stages went well then this stage leads to marriage and child rearing

Erikson’s psychosocial stages  Stage-like development, accepting much of Freud  Less of a focus on the maturational influence on progression through stages  Progression through the stages as driven by common cultural demands placed on children at particular ages  Acknowledges more of the lifespan nature of development  ‘Normal’ development not universal and must be understood in relation to specific cultures  Successful development will depend on interactions with people and objects in the world Erikson’s psychosocial theory  The psychosocial development theory is based on eight stages of development

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Early stages provide the foundations for later stages

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Series of challenges/crises; if not resolved may cause problems in later stages

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It is the resolution of that conflict, along a continuum from positive to negative, that determines healthy or maladaptive outcomes at each stage  For example, if an adolescent does not establish their own identity, they will have difficulty in relationships as an adult

Erikson’s psychosocial theory  The eight stages of development: 1. Basic Trust vs. Mistrust (birth-1 year) 2. Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt (1-3 years) 3. Initiative vs. Guilt (3-6 years) 4. Industry vs. Inferiority (6-11 years) 5. Identity vs. Role Confusion (Adolescence)

6. Intimacy vs. Isolation (Young Adulthood) 7. Generativity vs. Stagnation (Middle Adulthood) 8. Ego Integrity vs. Despair (Late Adulthood) Stage 1 – Basic Trust vs. mistrust  Birth - 1 year

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Significant social influence:  Parents (especially mother)/primary caregiver Main tasks:  To develop a life-long sense of trust or mistrust (self and others); trusting others when appropriate to do so To promote positive resolution:  Good quality of care - warm, consistent and reliable (consistency and regularity in care)

Stage 2 – Autonomy vs. shame/doubt 1 – 3½ years

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Significant social influence:  Parents/ primary caregivers Main tasks:  To develop a sense of independence; achieving self-control without a loss in self-esteem To promote positive resolution:  Parenting - patience, tolerance, firmness, no over-protection; a supportive environment

Stage 3 – Initiative vs. guilt

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3/4 - 6 years

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Significant social influence:  Parents, primary  caregivers and teachers Main tasks:  To develop confidence in self-starting and self-guidance; balancing initiative and guilt; internalising rules and standards To promote positive resolution:

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 Parenting – patience, tolerance, firmness, no over-protection; not highly controlling or punitive Stage 4 – Industry vs. inferiority  6 - 11 years/puberty

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Significant social influence:  Parents, caregivers  and teachers Main tasks:  To develop a sense of achievement and competence - through mastering cognitive and social skills To promote positive resolution:  Parents and teachers encourage good efforts and give positive feedback on children’s work

Stage 5 – Identity vs. role confusion

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Adolescence to early adulthood

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Significant social influence:  Parents, teachers and peers  Main tasks:  To establish an identity – to answer the key question of “Who am I?”, and to make choices  To promote positive resolution:  Adolescents should be given freedom to explore options in life Stage 6 – Intimacy vs. isolation  Young Adulthood

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Significant social influence:  Mate and intimate friends  Main tasks:  To search for a ‘soul mate’, someone to share your life with  To promote positive resolution:  One must first establish a sense of identity before true intimacy can be found Stage 7 – Generativity vs. stagnation  Middle Adulthood

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Significant social influence:  Younger generation Main tasks:  To help and guide the younger generation To promote positive resolution:  Having made good decisions in previous stages (!)

Stage 8 – Ego integrity vs. despair Late Adulthood

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Significant social influence:  Humanity Main tasks:  To reflect on one's life To promote positive resolution:  Having made good decisions in previous stages (!)

Ecological systems approaches  Focus on social and cultural climate

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Importance of relationships between individual and the environment

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Studying the multiple relationships and interactions that a child encounters over their lifetime

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Bronfenbrenner: stressed the process and interrelatedness of personcontext interactions  The bioecological model Person (child): Acknowledges the relevance of biological and genetic aspects of a person (child) but more focus on the personal characteristics that individuals bring with them to a social situation

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Process: Enduring forms of interaction in the immediate environment are referred to as proximal processes, for example reading, child-child activities and solitary play

The bioecological model

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Context: involves four inter-related systems  Microsystem – any environment in which the developing person (child) spends a lot of time engaging in activities and interactions such as home, school or peer group  Mesosystem – the interrelations among microsystems (home and school for example)  Exosystem – important contexts in which the developing person (child) is not actually situated but has an indirect influence on their development (e.g. Parents workplace)  Macrosystem – context encompassing any group whose members share value or belief systems, resources, hazards, lifestyles etc.

The bioecological model  Micro-time occurring during the course of a specific activity or interaction  meso-time the extent to which activities and interactions occur with some consistency in the developing person’s (childs) environment macro-time (chronosystem from earlier versions of his theory),  historical context and change Understanding Bronfenbrenner  Pause & Consider:  What is the:  Microsystem  Mesosystem  Exosystem  Macrosystem  Chronosystem Cognitive development approaches  Cognition: the act of acquiring knowledge

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Cognitive development:  How thinking and problem solving develop  How cognitive activities contribute to development in general  So, concerned with the development of cognition rather than personality

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A child's actions on the environment become of central importance and how experiences are internally processed

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Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Swiss psychologist & Lev Vygotsky (18961934) Russian Psychologist are seen as key figures here

Cognitive development approaches  Piaget and Vygotsky key early theorists:  Both examined cognitive development, how we think, perceive, remember and learn  Both concerned with how children derive meaning about the world  Both thought we learn through interacting with the environment  Differences:  Piaget focussed more on the individual and biological explanations of knowledge acquisition  Vygotsky focussed more on the social. Influenced by the works of Marx and Hegel and the idea that ‘historical changes in society and material life produce changes in ‘human nature’’ (Vygotsky, 1978 p7) Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development  “Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered for himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely” (Piaget 1970, p715)

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Children develop physically over time, so it is assumed that their thinking abilities develop over time too. Pass through stages of cognitive development.

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Piaget’s suggests the way that children think changes as they get older and these changes are mainly driven by biological processes.

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All children seem to go through the same kinds of sequential discoveries about the world  same sort of mistakes e.g. conservation of liquid  Active process of adapting to the environment  explores, manipulates and examines the objects and people in the world Fixed sequence of four major stages

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The mechanisms of cognitive development Schema

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Is a chunk of organised knowledge about the world (mental representation)  e.g. a schema for “nurse”

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Infants born with a number of reflexes  e.g. a ‘sucking schema’.

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These schemas develop over time and become more complicated  (action to symbolic). Operations

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Are rules created about the world by combining schemas  e.g. Shaking a rattle would be the combination of two schemas (grasping and shaking).

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These operations develop as the child’s brain matures.

The mechanisms of cognitive development  Through the processes of assimilation and accommodation, actions become progressively adapted to the world.

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Assimilation: a child tries to understand new information in terms of their existing schemas.

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Accommodation: when a child adapts existing schema in order to understand new information that doesn’t appear to fit.

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Equilibration: the 3rd part of the adaptation process proposed, involving the periodic restructuring of schemes to create a balance between assimilation and accommodation

Example... Assimilation = baby uses innate feeding schema to suck on all nipples 

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Equilibrium = child can deal with world

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New situation = baby beaker encountered

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Disequilibrium = sucking schema not appropriate

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Accommodation = baby has to modify its feeding schema so it can use beaker Equilibrium = child can deal with world

Piaget – Child as ‘little scientist’  Development (through stages) precedes learning.  All children show qualitatively different levels of comprehension and reasoning at different ages  We learn when we are faced with situations that do not fit into our existing mental schema

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Assimilation – Incorporating new info into an existing schema Accommodation – Changing an existing schema

Vygotsky – Child as ‘little apprentice’ Learning precedes development Socio-cultural context is important – learn through interaction Less emphasis on stages Development moved on when confronted with tasks just outside current level of ability  The gap between what we know and what we have the potential to know = the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

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Learning takes place in the ZPD through active instruction from a more knowledgeable person (teacher or peer) causes us to internalise (through language) new information and skills (scaffolding).

Vygotsky & ZPD

Social Transmission  Children learn through social transmission  Learning as a ‘cognitive apprenticeship’  Knowledge and skills passed from more able to less able  Young children are curious and actively involved in their own learning and the discovery and development of new understandings/schema Development of thinking Vygotsky (1987) studied the process of concept formation in children. E.g. Children were given wooden blocks of varying height and shape, with each block labelled with a nonsense symbol (e.g. ‘ZAT’ was used to label tall and square blocks). The children's task was to work out what these labels meant. Vygotsky believed that children went through three stages before achieving mature concepts

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Development of language and thought Information-processing theory  Not truly a cognitive-development theory, but does relate to Piaget’s developmental stages and development more generally  Goal: explain how the mind manages information  often using computer analogies  e.g. how we conceive memory:  encoding, storage and retrieval  sensory memory, short-term memory (working memory), long-term memory  Age-related and individual differences in information processing  e.g. number of ideas that can be processed in a child’s working memory is more limited than in adults/older children;  differences in the strategies children will use for remembering and solving problems (individual differences)

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Skinner – operant conditioning  frequency of a behaviour increases or decreases due to the consequences the behaviour produces  positive, reinforcement or negative, punishment

Social Learning Theory

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Evolved from behaviourism to explain development of social behaviour  Less vague than psychoanalytic theory?  More empirically testable?

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Social Learning Theory  Bandura (1977): Modelling (imitation or observational learning) a powerful source of development .  Bandura’s social cognitive theory – observation & modelling  Bridging the gap between learning theory and cognitive developmental theory by emphasising important cognitive (mental) elements in observational learning.  modelling can be a vehicle for learning abstract information as well as concrete skills  Acknowledged later that children gradually become more selective regarding what and who they imitate – as they acquire attitudes, values and convictions about themselves.  They thus exert control over their own learning and behaviour, not simply sponges Points to consider  When evaluating approaches you could think about:      

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Influence of the environment over/underemphasised Influence of the individual over/underemphasised Vague or empirically testable? Evidence? Can children regress? Universally applicable – can they account for cultural variations or atypical development?

Applications:  National curriculum?  Peer to peer working?  Steiner schools, Montessori schools? Home schooling?  Child well-being?  Developmental problems? Behavioural problems?  Children’s exposure to media?...