Development

• Piaget's 4 stages of development

  • Sensorimotor (0-2 years)
  • Pre-operational (2-7 years)
  • Concrete operational (7-12 years)
  • Formal operational (12+ years)
• Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)


  • Children utilize skills they were born with (e.g. sucking, looking, etc.)
  • Object permanence - knowing something exists even if it's out of sight
• Pre-operational stage (2-7 years)


  • Symbolic play - using symbols to represent objects and other ideas
  • Egocentrism - unable to see the world from any other viewpoint but your own
  • Animism - believe objects can act as if they are alive
  • Centration - focusing on one idea of a situation
  • Irreversibility - not understanding that an action can be reversed
• Concrete operational stage (7-12 years)


  • Difficulty understanding morality (general principles about what is right/wrong)
  • Abilities include Seriation, classification, reversibility, Conservation and decentration
• Formal operational stage (12+ years)


  • Children learn more sophisticated rules of logic
  • They can analyse their environment and make decisions, deductions
• Schema


  Plans/patterns that are formed based on what we experience. Mental structures give us frameworks to understand the world
• Fixed mindset(Dweck)


  Believing your abilities are fixed and unchangeable
• Growth mindset(Dweck)


  Believing practice and effort can improve your abilities
• Intelligence is developed through building schemas via adaptation and the 4 stages of cognitive development
• Assimilation is incorporating new experiences into existing schemas
• Accommodation is when a schema no longer works and has to be changed to deal with a new experience
• Equilibrium is when a child's schemas work for them and explain all that they experience. They are in a state of mental balance
• Piaget and Inhelder's 3 mountains task aims to see what age children began to take the perspective of another person and how egocentrism affects their reasoning
• Mountain tast results

  Pre-operational children struggled to match the viewpoint to the doll, concrete operational children could understand that the doll had a different viewpoint
• Strengths of Piaget's theory


  • Applications in teaching, reliability has agreeing research (the 3 mountains task)
• Weaknesses of Piaget's theory


  • Subjectivity/bias (his own observations), lack of validity
• Person praise(Gunderson)


  Praising the individual rather than what they are doing
• Process praise(Gunderson)

  Praising what is being done, not the individual
• Entity theory


  A belief that behaviour or ability results from a person's nature
• Incremental theory


  The belief that effort drives behaviour and ability, which we can change
• Medulla oblongata

  • connects the upper brain to the spinal cord and controls automatic/ involuntary responses
• To help sensorimotor development


  Open ended play (e.g. playdough)
• To help pre-operational development


  Models, objects and visual aids such as drawings and diagrams, whilst instructions are kept short
• To help concrete operational development


  Asked to focus on more than one aspect of an issue
• To help formal operation 


  Discuss abstract concepts and complex questions involving mental reasoning
• Adaptation uses assimilation and accomidation to make sense of the world
• Wilinghams learning theory

  • Factual knowlegde has to come first before skills can be developed
  • Learning relies on practice and effort
  • Knowledge frees up space in our working memory to allow us to use mental skills such as problem solving
• Framework


  A basic understanding of ideas and facts that is used when making decisions
• Gunderson aimed to see if children are affected by different types of parental praise given in a natural environment
• Gundersons method included:

  • Following a group of children over a long period of time
  • Then asking them about intelegence
• Kolbergs theory of moral development

  • pre-conventional morality (0-9)
  • conventional morality (most young people and adults)
  • post-conventional morality (only 10% reach this level)
• Pre-conventional morality


  Stage 1 = Child obeying to avoid punishment

  Stage 2 = self interest, "whats in it for me?"
• Conventional morality

  Stage 3 = being seen as good and following social rules

  Stage 4 = maintaing social order by obeying authority
• Post-conventional 


  Stage 5 = there can be differences in morality between indivduals

  Stage 6 = right and wrong actions beyond individual laws