Developmental Psychology Notes

Early Brain Development

  • Midbrain, Forebrain, and Hindbrain (3-4 weeks):
    • The forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain initially develop.
  • 5 Weeks:
    • The forebrain and hindbrain split into two cavities.
    • The forebrain divides into anterior (front) and posterior (behind) sections.
    • The hindbrain splits through the middle, forming the cerebellum, medulla, and pons.
    • The midbrain does not divide.
    • The forebrain is responsible for processing information related to complex cognitive activities, sensory and associative functions, and voluntary motor activities.
  • Cerebellum:
    • Visible around 6 weeks.
    • Controls movement, coordination, and balance, which develop significantly over time as the cerebellum grows physically.
    • Manages motor commands sent from the Central Nervous System (CNS).
    • Involved in responses such as fear and processing sensory information.
  • Medulla:
    • Forms at 20 weeks old.
    • Connects the brain to the spinal cord; incomplete development prevents signals from being sent from the brain to the rest of the body.
    • Located in the hindbrain, in front of the cerebellum.
    • Controls involuntary responses like sneezing and breathing.

Piaget's Stages of Development

  • Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 Years):
    • Infants use senses and movements to gather information about the world.
    • They learn by linking what they see, hear, touch, taste, or smell to the objects they are using.
    • Around 6 months, they develop object permanence.
    • Helping Sensorimotor Development:
      • Provide a lot of stimulation and materials to practice skills and build schemas.
      • Offer different smells, tastes, sights, sounds, and textures.
      • Use bright colors.
      • Singing and rhythm can stimulate children and help in language development.
  • Pre-operational Stage (2 to 7 Years Old):
    • Symbolic Function Stage (2-4 years):
      • Symbolic Play.
      • Children begin to use words as symbols for objects, which marks the beginning of language development.
      • Egocentrism.
      • Animism.
    • Intuitive Thought Stage (4 to 7 years):
      • Start of reasoning.
      • Children ask many questions as they realize they know a lot and want to know more.
      • Centration.
      • Irreversibility.
    • Helping Pre-operational Development:
      • Children must "do" things to keep building schemas rather than watching someone else do it.
      • Encourage learning by discovery through interacting with their environment, not by being told things.
      • Individual learning is encouraged and developed.
  • Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 12 Years Old):
    • Children apply rules and strategies to help their thinking and use concrete objects to aid understanding.
    • Seriation.
    • Classification.
    • Reversibility.
    • Conservation.
    • Decentration.
    • Helping Concrete Operational Development:
      • Ask children to concentrate on more than one aspect of an issue.
      • Assume children can understand different viewpoints from their own.
  • Formal Operational Stage (12+ Years):
    • Control over thoughts.
    • Ability to think about how time changes.
    • Understanding that things have a sequence (school to college to work).
    • Morality.
    • Helping Formal Operational Development:
      • Discuss abstract concepts and ask complex questions involving mental reasoning.
      • They realize they belong to different groups with different norms and can explore such norms to see that different people have different ideas from their own (friend vs daughter).
      • Studying different subjects, e.g., science and art, to distinguish the different ways of thinking about the world.

Implications for Teaching (Robert Slavin, 2005)

  • Process > getting the right answer, focusing on thinking.
  • Discovery learning: allow children to engage freely with their environment rather than just learning facts.
  • Teaching should accept that children do not like adults and have different rates of development.
  • Classroom learning should be catered to each individual’s learning pace and style.
  • Whole-class teaching is not recommended.

Piaget’s Theory: Cognitive Development and Intelligence

  • Children develop through adaptation.
    • Schemas:
      • Plans and patterns are formed based on experiences.
      • Mental structures give us frameworks to understand the world.
      • Example: Classroom schema – whiteboard, desks, chairs.
    • Assimilation:
      • Incorporating new experiences into existing schemas.
      • Example: A child develops a schema for birds flying, sees an airplane, and calls it a bird.
    • Accommodation:
      • A schema no longer works and must be changed to deal with a new experience.
      • Example: A child understands that birds are alive and airplanes are not, so they change the schema that everything that flies is a bird.
    • Equilibrium:
      • When a child’s schemas work for them and explain all they experience, allowing them to reach a state of mental stability.
      • Example: The ‘bird’ schema is changed. Airplanes are included, and the child understands that they are metal and carry passengers, thus moving from disequilibrium into a state of equilibrium.

Strengths and Limitations of Piaget's Theory

  • Strengths:
    • Practical applications: Discovery learning draws on Piaget’s ideas of focusing on the individual child’s stage of development. This allows the child to discover things at their own pace and build knowledge using schemas and can work according to their stage of development. This has heavily influenced the UK national curriculum, which shows how influential Piaget’s theory is.
    • It has generated a significant amount of further research that has supported the existence of stages and building knowledge through schemas. Research results often support his ideas (see the ‘three mountains’ task). His research demonstrates that adults and children think very differently and shows that children are not simply less competent thinkers.
  • Limitations:
    • Piaget’s theory did not look at the influence of social interactions or the cultural setting, which can affect the development of patterns of thought. Pierre Dasen (1994) found that Aboriginal children developed the ability to conserve at a later stage than Piaget’s Swiss sample did. This suggests that culture may affect cognitive development, and Piaget was too reductionist.
    • Piaget’s data came from his own interviews and observations with the children. His interpretations of situations and events may have been subjective, leading to some biases.

Dweck’s Mindset Theory

  • Mindset: a set of beliefs someone has that guides how someone responds to or interprets a situation
  • Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
    • Fixed Mindset:
      • Believing your abilities are fixed and unchangeable.
      • Praising a child for being good at something → ability is gifted and fixed at birth.
      • Not praised for something → they do not have the ability, and it is pointless even to try.
      • Stop taking on challenges.
      • Become depressed.
    • Growth Mindset:
      • Believing practice and effort can improve your abilities.
      • Praise children for effort → believe they can achieve something, and they keep trying.
      • Challenges become worthwhile, and feedback is taken notice of.
  • Key Points:
    • Children can develop a fixed mindset about a particular ability they think they do not have and give up because they think they will fail anyway since the ability is not “in them.”
    • Teachers also have fixed or growth mindsets, which affect how they respond to a child.
      • Fixed mindset → see children as lacking a particular ability.
      • Growth mindset → sees that a child can improve with perseverance.
  • Experimental Evidence:
    • Mueller and Dweck (1998):
      • Praising student’s ability led them to a fixed mindset, and they were unable to cope with setbacks.
      • Praising effort or use of strategy taught a growth mindset and led to students persevering more.
    • Yeager and Dweck (2012):
      • Low-achieving students who learned to use a growth mindset did better compared to a control group without that learning.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Dweck's Mindset Theory

  • Strengths:
    • Practical applications: It encourages teachers and parents to focus on praising efforts rather than ability in order to encourage children. Believing/being taught that people can change led to better school performance.
    • Supportive evidence of the research. For example, Mueller and Dweck found that praising students' abilities led to a fixed mindset, and praising effort led to a growth mindset in students, thus increasing the validity of the theory.
  • Weaknesses:
    • Many of the studies are done in artificial settings, so the results may not represent real life. Hence, the data may lack ecological validity. One exception is Gunderson (2013), which used a natural environment when gathering data on parent's praise.
    • Studying the mindset of a child may result in the child becoming the focus if there are problems with their progress, rather than the quality of what is being taught and how teaching is done, affecting the usefulness and completeness of the theory.

Willingham’s Learning Theory and the Effects of Learning on Development

  • Factual knowledge precedes skill.
    • Knowledge facts help when building the skill of problem-solving and reasoning.
    • Prior knowledge can free up space in our working memory to allow us more mental capacity for problem-solving and aids understanding.
    • What someone already knows leaves them more processing power to solve a problem and aids understanding.
  • Importance of practice and effort.
    • Practice and effort enable us to master knowledge and skills.
    • Practice and repetition → can do things automatically → free up working memory to learn new things.
      • Importance for building knowledge.
        • Practice → short-term memory → rehearsing → long-term memory → review and practice → can be stored for a longer time and is less likely to be forgotten.
    • Importance for building skills.
      • Skills need to be developed so that they become automatic and use little working memory space.
      • E.g., reading.
  • Strategies to Support
    • Cognitive Development (Teachers):
      • Use problems that are new and within the student’s ability but also require some effort.
      • Understand the student's likely stage of development when planning activities.
      • Remember that student’s abilities are variable and can change from day to day.
      • Consider factors other than the developmental level.
    • Physical Development:
      • Practice and effort!!
      • Focus on what movements are suitable and what order they need to be carried out.
      • Practise the movements in a fixed order to make muscle commands automatic.
      • Use conscious effort (e.g., slowly raising the bar when developing jumping skills).
    • Social Development:
      • Build on the ability to take the view of someone else (decentration).
      • Willingham disagreed with Piaget’s view that children are egocentric until they are about 7 years old; he thinks this can occur nearer to 18 months.
      • This allows the start of forming social relationships with others.
      • Demonstrate appropriate social behavior.
      • The child will use social learning (imitating behavior of others).
      • Help a child to stop impulsive behavior/understanding the consequences of an action.
      • In the classroom → using an organized classroom environment and removing anything that may trigger impulsive behavior.
      • Important to develop more suitable responses in social situations and building friendships.
      • Encourage practice that requires self-regulation (discipline).
      • Nature vs. nurture.
      • Delay giving a reward for a task to encourage a child to keep working at it, which requires them to have self-control.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Willingham's Learning Theory

  • Strengths:
    • Practical applications: Willingham’s work can be applied to education and other situations to promote a child’s development in a positive way.
    • Other studies support Willingham’s work and his arguments against Piaget’s view that development is in stages. For example, Repacholi and Gopnik’s (1997) study provides experimental support, showing that young children were not as egocentric as Piaget thought. This cross-experimental evidence is therefore a strength, as experiments are carried out in a controlled way, increasing their internal validity.
  • Weaknesses:
    • Willingham did not really emphasize the importance of individual differences for learning, though some features of his theory relate to genes. For example, he suggested that self-regulation and impulsivity are, to some extent, inherited. Though the theory gives strategies to help development, such as children getting emotional and cognitive support from their parents, what is in someone's genes cannot be changed easily using strategies. His theory aims to give universal strategies for change even though he acknowledges genetic contributions.
    • Willingham’s theory comes from many areas of cognitive science and cannot be tested. For example, neuroscience, muscle theory, and cognitive development are all included, which is a problem as it means his ideas are not one singular theory that can be tested by gathering data.

Piaget and Inhelder's (1956) Three Mountains Task

  • Strengths:
    • The study has a standardized procedure. For example, each of the 100 children was asked to do the same 3 tasks (select a picture of the three mountains and place the doll in the correct viewpoint). This means that the data was collected in a consistent way; thus, the findings are reliable.
    • The study collected qualitative data, which provided a rich insight. For example, children were interviewed by questioning them as they were completing each task by asking them why they had made decisions to place the doll where they had. This helped the researchers understand that towards the end of the preoperational stage, they could start to see the viewpoints of others. This helps to understand that children develop in stages, which supports Piaget’s theory; thus, the study has internal validity.
  • Weaknesses:
    • The method lacks mundane realism. Hughes replicated Piaget’s study using a policeman doll and wooden intersection. When the task was made more “child-friendly,” children were able to complete the task showing they had overcome their egocentrism much earlier than Piaget suggested. This shows that due to issues with the methodology, Piaget underestimated the ability of children challenging the validity of his theory.
    • Other researchers have challenged Piaget’s findings. In Gopnik’s broccoli-goldfish study, they found children as young as 18 months demonstrated that they understood the researchers' preference for broccoli, showing they could decentre. This suggests that children overcome egocentrism much earlier than the concrete operational stage as suggested by Piaget. Hence, Piaget’s methodology may have been too complicated and caused the experiment to lack internal validity.

Gunderson et al. (2013) Parent Praise

  • Strengths:
    • Gunderson et al.’s (2013) study shows that Dweck’s findings in experimental studies, where the setting is artificial, are also found in a naturalistic environment. Gunderson et al. represented the natural environment by recording types of praise in the child’s home while they went about their typical day. Findings from the two different methods – experiment and observation – support one another and the theory itself. Thus, the results have ecological validity.
    • The double-blind technique was used, meaning the researchers who videotaped and transcribed the data or participating families did not know parental praise was the point of interest. This helped avoid bias in the gathering of data as they did not know what outcome to expect; thus, the results are objective.
  • Weaknesses:
    • The experiment lacks ethics, as the participants were deceived, as they were told the study was about child development, but it was actually about types of praise and the effect this has on the child. For ethical reasons, there should be as little deceit as possible in a study.
    • The parents may have changed their style of praise as they were being observed (although they did not know what aspect of their behavior was being observed). Hence, the data might not be natural and hence may lack internal validity.

Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development

  • Paragraph 1 (AO1):
    • According to Kohlberg, there are 6 stages of morality.
    • Stages 1 and 2 make up the pre-conventional morality, where people are focused on themselves and make moral decisions based on avoiding punishment and satisfying their own needs.
    • Stages 3 and 4, the conventional level, are when people start to view themselves as good members of society, follow social norms, and respect rules and authority.
    • The final stages 5 and 6 make up the post-conventional level, where people follow more abstract, universal moral principles.
  • Paragraph 2 (AO2):
    • In this case, xxx is at stage xx of the xx level as she …
  • Paragraph 3 (AO3):
    • A strength of Kohlberg’s theory is that it is supported by his research of 72 Chicago boys with hypothetical problems such as the Heinz dilemma. This showed how their moral reasoning changed in stages as they developed. This provides empirical evidence for xxx being in Stage xx.
    • However, a weakness with Kohlberg’s theory is that it is gender-biased as only males were used in his research, which means the theory has an androcentric bias. Therefore the theory may not explain the moral development of females/males such as xxxi. A further limitation is that both Kohlberg and Piaget used stories that were artificial and might not represent real thinking (they lack ecological validity). There were no real consequences in the stories from the decisions that were made. Therefore, the theory may not explain the development of xxx in the more natural context of xxx.