Child Development

• Developmental psychology


  The field of study that examines how children and adolescents change over time
• Nature and nurture


  • Roles in child development
• Continuity and discontinuity


  • In child development
• Universality and socio-cultural context


  • In development
• Importance of studying childhood development


  For teachers
• History of ideas


  • Innate capacity versus tabula rasa that inform the different developmental schools
• Types of research design

  • Qualitative
  • Quantitative
  • Naturalistic observation
  • Cross-sectional
  • Longitudinal
  • Correlational
  • Experimental
• Empiricist approach


  Relates more closely to nurture
• Rationalist approach


  Relates more closely to nature
• Tabula rasa


  The belief that the mind is a blank slate at birth
• Innate capacity


  The belief that we are born with certain innate abilities
• Continuity and discontinuity in child development

  • Development passes through changes and at each phase major qualitative changes occur that alter them fundamentally
• Plasticity


  • Developmental stages where children are open to changes
  • Sensitive/critical periods - open to more specific types of changes i.e. language
• As time passes, a child develops through the accumulation of quantitative changes
• Empiricism


  The belief that knowledge comes from sensory experience
• Rationalism


  The belief that knowledge comes from reason and innate ideas
• Plato believed that knowledge was innate - we are born with it
• Aristotle believed a new born's mind was blank and the environment/experience wrote on it
• Behaviourism


  • The impact the environment has on the child
  • Empirical
  • Blank slates
• Nativism


  • Language acquisition for example – not language itself, but the capacity to learn it