Infancy and Childhood Final

What is Jean Piaget’s Theory called?

Cognitive Learning Theory

What Age does the Pre-Operational Stage take Place?

2-7 Years Old

What Type of Thinking Occurs in the Pre-Operational Stage?

Symbolic Thought

What Happens in the Pre-Operational Stage

Children begin to think symbolically, but they are egocentric. They lack logical thinking and live their lives in fantasy. They might think that inanimate objects are alive.

What Age does Concrete Operational Stage take Place?

7-11 years old

What Type of Thinking Occurs in Concrete Operational Stage?

Logical Thought

What Happens in Concrete Operational?

Children become more logical in their thinking.

They can begin to sort things and mentally reverse actions

Begin to think about others thoughts and feelings more realistically

What Age is Formal Operational and what Type of Thinking Occurs

11 Plus and Scientific Reasoning

What is Erik Erikson’s Theory Called?

Psychosocial Development Theory

What Takes Place in the Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt Stage and What Age?

18 months- 3 years

Toddlers begin to explore their environment and begin asserting dominance in tasks like dressing themselves, potty training, and choosing foods

If caregivers encourage these efforts, children feel a sense of autonomy- confidence in their ability to handle challenges 

Overly critical or controlling caregivers can make the child doubt their abilities, leading to shame and doubt.

What Virtue is Gained from Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt

Will

What Age does Initiative vs Guilt Take Place?

3-5 Years

What Happens During the Initiative vs Guilt Stage?

Children devise new games, imagine different roles, and learn to plan and execute activities

Encouragement fosters initiative- a willingness to try new things

Criticism or discouragement can produce guilt, making children feel they are a nuisance or that their ideas are unacceptable

What Virtue is Gained in Initiative vs Guilt?

Purpose

What Age is Initiative vs Inferiority?

5-12 Years

What Happens in Initiative vs Inferiority 

Support from Teachers and Parents helps them develop industry- confidence in skills and productivity 

Without such support, or when faced with persistent failures, children risk feeling inferior and unmotivated

Virtue Gained from Industry vs Inferiority

Competence

What is Urie Brofenbrenner’s Theory Called?

Ecological Systems Theory

Microsystem

Things children are in direct contact with

The interactions the child has with these people and environments directly impact development 

Parents, siblings, teachers

Classmates, peer group, close friends

Sports teams, clubs

Healthcare providers

Neighborhood Playmates

Mesosystem

Parent-teacher communication

Family-peer group interactions

School-neighborhood interactions

Family-healthcare provider relationships 

Interactions between different friend groups

Religious community-family connections

The mesosystem involves interactions between different microsystems in the childs life

Exosystem

Parent’s workplaces

Extended family

Local community organizations

School board decisions

Social services and support systems 

Public transportation  

Parents friends

While not directly interacting with the child, the exosystem still influences the microsystems

Macrosystem

Cultural norms and expectations

Healthcare systems

Gender roles and expectations

Religious or philosophical ideologies

The macrosystem focuses on how cultural elements affect a childs development, consisting of cultural ideologies, attitudes, and social conditions that children are immersed in

Chronosystem

Major historical events (pandemics, wars)

Climate Change

Time

Educational Reforms

The chronosystem relates to environmental changes over a child’s lifetime. These changes may be predictable, such as staring school, or unpredictable such as experiencing parental divorce

What is the Name of George A Miller’s Theory?

Information Processing Theory

What is the Information Processing Theory?

The information processing theory consists of stages or boxes that represent the stages of processing

Input: Processes are concerned with the analysis of the stimuli

Storage processes cover everything that happens to stimuli internally in the brain and can include coding and manipulation of the stimuli.

Output processes are responsible for preparing an appropriate response to a stimulus.

What is Lev Vygotsky’s Theory Called?

Sociocultural Theory

SocioCultural Theory

• Social interaction: Learning happens first between people before it becomes internal. Children develop thinking skills through guided conversations and shared activities with more knowledgeable others.

• Zone of Proximal Development: This “sweet spot” is the gap between what a child can do alone and what they can do with support. Growth occurs when teachers or peers provide just enough help to bridge that gap.

• Scaffolding: Temporary support helps learners master new skills. As understanding improves, the support is gradually reduced until the child can work independently.

• Language: Words act as tools for thought as well as communication. Talking with others—and later to oneself—helps children plan, reason, and solve problems.

• Culture: Each culture shapes how and what children learn. Tools, traditions, and social norms provide the framework for cognitive development.

Physical Development- Infants

-Growth

-Teething

-Feeding

-Crawling

-Development of Motor Skills

-Gross Motor Development: Control over actions that help infants get around in the environment

-Fine Motor Development: Actions that are smaller in motion

-Similar to infant growth, the development of when infants develop both gross and fine motor skills in also widely ranged

-Dynamic systems theory of motor development: Repetition is important!

-Fine Motor Development: Reaching and grasping

Cognitive Development-Infants

-Sensorimotor stage

-Schemes, adaptation, organization

-Assimilation vs Accommodation:

Assimilation is when new information is integrated into existing mental structures (schemas) without changing them, while accommodation is the process of changing or creating new schemas to fit new information that doesn't fit existing ones. Both are key parts of cognitive development and learning, according to Jean Piaget's theory of adaptation. Assimilation is like adding new, similar items to a container, while accommodation is like getting a new, different-sized container.

-Newborn reflexes = building blocks

-Circular reaction: Repetitive actions infants use to learn about their bodies and the world

Social and Emotional Development- Infants

-Arousal States = Emotions in newborns, attraction to pleasant stimulation

-First emotions: Happy, surprise, fear, sad, and angry

-Expression through crying, facial expressions, and body movements

-Regulation of Emotions

Physical Development-Toddlers

-Physical development slows down, motor development slows down

-Increase in growth with intellectual, social, and emotional changes

-80% of brain development occurs by age 3

-Gross Motor Development: Tricycle riding, walking, running, climbing, jumping, kicking a ball

-Fine Motor Development: Clap hands together, put objects/toys into containers, waves hi/goodbye, scribbles with a crayon, can grasp spoon and cup independently.

Cognitive Development-Toddlers

-Deferred and Inferred imitation:

• What it is: The ability to reproduce a behavior after a significant delay, showing that an individual has stored and can recall previously learned information.

• How it works: An individual observes an action, internalizes it, and then reproduces it at a later time, which can range from minutes to months.

• Cognitive significance: It is a key indicator of cognitive development, showing an ability to form mental representations of actions and is considered a foundation for more complex symbolic thought.

• Example: A child watches an adult press a button to turn on a light. A week later, the child presses the button on their own to turn on the light, demonstrating deferred imitation.

-Symbolic Understanding: Using a banana and pretending its a phone

Social and Emotional Development

-Recognize own reflection in mirror and smile/ laugh

-Begin to say no

-Imitate adults actions and words

-Show affection

-Show frustration

-Share food with others

-Start to pretend

-Begin to feel jealous when not the center of attention

-Start to show some interest in independence

-Understand and respond to commands

Developmental Milestones Early Childhood-Physical

-Growth curve starts to plateau

-Body proportions begin to change

-Balance and coordination

-Handedness: An individuals preference for using one hand over another

-Brain development: memory, representation, problem solving, attention, and perception

-Brain growth in early childhood is significant

-Grows to 90% of adult size

-Gross Motor Development: Shift in body muscle strength, walking becomes more smooth and steady, larger muscle movements occur, can coordinate uses of multiple muscle systems, begin to start shifting their weight during physical activity.

-Fine Motor Development: Getting dressed, drawing/writing, eating

Developmental Milestones Early Childhood- Cognitive

-Advances in mental representation:

Examples of mental representations

• Mental arithmetic: When you calculate 2+2 , you are working with mental representations of the numbers and the operator.

• Recalling a phone number: You might mentally repeat a phone number to yourself before dialing it.

• Visualization: Athletes use visualization to mentally rehearse a skill, which engages the same brain regions as visual perception.

• Language and thought: The word "love" is a mental representation that allows us to think and communicate about the abstract concept, even though it lacks a physical form.

-Sociodramatic and make believe play

-Pretend play = IMPORTANT!

-Dual Representation:

For example, a young child learns to understand a small-scale model of a room not just as a toy, but also as a symbol for the real room, allowing them to find a hidden object based on its location in the model. This concept is fundamental to cognitive development, as it is necessary for activities like reading, using maps, and understanding pictures.

-Egocentrism

-Animistic thinking

Social and Emotional- Early Childhood

-Emotional self regulation

-Greater understanding of what emotion is

-Self concept and self esteem development: Higher self esteem = higher initiative, Lower self esteem = higher guilt

-Peer relationships

-Gender typing: Any association of objects, activities, roles, or traits with one sex or the other in ways that conform to cultural stereotypes, beginning phases of gender identitity

-Language development: Fast mapping, 10,000 words by age 6, repetition is important, coining of new words

-Literacy and math skills

-Play styles are shifting to play that includes more socialization

-Increase in social skills

Physical Development- Middle Childhood

Growth curves differ greatly

-Trends in physical growth due to cultural advances or disadvantages

-Bones become stronger and longer, ligament growth slow

-All 20 primary baby teeth are lost

-Growth of facial bones to accommodate more teeth

-40% of synaptic connections are trimmed

-More complex, flexible, and adaptive behavior occurs

-Gross Motor Development: Flexibility, balance, agility, force

-Fine motor development: Writing, drawing, games or play objects (skill based), ability to draw 3D, attention to detail

Physical Development- Middle Childhood

Growth curves differ greatly

-Trends in physical growth due to cultural advances or disadvantages

-Bones become stronger and longer, ligament growth slow

-All 20 primary baby teeth are lost

-Growth of facial bones to accommodate more teeth

-40% of synaptic connections are trimmed

-More complex, flexible, and adaptive behavior occurs

-Gross Motor Development: Flexibility, balance, agility, force

-Fine motor development: Writing, drawing, games or play objects (skill based), ability to draw 3D, attention to detail

Cognitive Development-Middle Childhood

-Thought is more formal, logical, flexible, and organized

-Conservation

-Classification

-Seriation:

Seriation is the process of arranging objects or events in a specific, orderly sequence based on a characteristic like size, color, or time. It is a cognitive skill for children to develop logical thinking and a technique used in archaeology to establish a relative chronology of artifacts by ordering them based on stylistic changes over time. In statistics, it refers to finding the best linear arrangement of a set of objects.

-Spatial Reasoning:

Spatial reasoning is the ability to mentally visualize, manipulate, and understand the relationships between objects in two or three dimensions. This cognitive skill allows you to navigate, interpret maps, and understand diagrams by mentally rotating, shifting, and transforming objects in space. It is a crucial ability for fields like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), but it also plays a role in everyday tasks, such as packing a suitcase, assembling furniture, or following directions.

-Working memory and thinking speed continues to increase

-Executive function skills also continue to improve

-Genetics and environmental factors play a role

-Memory strategies

Social and Emotional Development- Middle Childhood

-Self-concept

-Emotional understanding

-Moral development

-Relationship building

-Influences of development

-Greater emotional competence

-More experience with self conscious emotions

-Better at emotional self regulation and emotional regulation recognition/understanding

Sigmund Freud’s Theory

Psychosexual Stages

John Locke’s Theory

Tabula Rasa- Kids are a blank slate

Alfred Binet’s Theory

Contributed to IQ-Alfred Binet's work on child development focused on creating a scientific method to measure a child's intellectual capabilities and identify those who needed extra educational support. His most famous contribution was the Binet-Simon Scale

Albert Bandura’s Theory

Social Learning Theory

G Stanley Hall’s Theory

Recapitulation Theory

Charles Darwin’s Theory

He believed that understanding child development was key to understanding human evolution. He theorized that many complex behaviors developed gradually over time, much like the evolution of a species.

Fredrich Froebel’s Theory

His Froebel play theory highlights that through structured play, children gain a deeper understanding of the world around them, fostering imagination, problem-solving, and independent thinking

Maria Montessori

The Montessori Method

The Four Planes of Development

Jean Jaques Rousseau’s Theory

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's child development theory, outlined in his book Emile,-Jacques Rousseau viewed child development as a series of stages, emphasizing that children are born inherently good and innocent and that education should be child-centered and experiential

Lawrence Kohlberg’s Theory

Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development

John Watson’s Theory

He believed development is a process of conditioning, shaped by associations, reinforcements, and punishments. Key ideas include that parents have complete control over a child's development through their control of the environment, and that even emotions and thoughts can be explained as physiological responses to stimuli.

Little Albert

Accommodation vs Assimilation

Assimilation is the process of integrating new information into existing cognitive structures or schemas.

Think of schemas as mental frameworks or blueprints that guide individuals in understanding and responding to various situations. Schemas are the building blocks of assimilation.

Accommodation is the cognitive process of modifying existing mental schemas or creating new ones when new information or experiences cannot be adequately interpreted through current mental frameworks.

This process occurs when assimilation alone is insufficient, requiring the learner to adjust their understanding to accommodate new information (Piaget, 1976).