Big Qs in developmental Flashcards
(17 cards)
1
Q
what are the challenges in developmental psychology?
A
- Nature vs nurture influences
- Gradual or step-like change
- Neural or cognitive processes
- Neurodivergence
- Complex and nested contexts – families, schools, peer groups, communities, cultures
2
Q
what is active and passive learning?
A
- Learning by doing, trial and error, intrinsic motivation
- Learning by observing or direct instruction
- Route of all learning: Feedback loop, persistent activation of learnt skills/concepts/facts
3
Q
how do we learn to read?
A
- Early experience of language is fundamental to later success
- learning to read at 3-4 through phonics
- encourage an interest in and familiarity with words
- “education arms race”/ risk of “schoolification”
- Child-led play-based preschools shown to have better outcomes than more academically focussed
- e.g., Finnish students score higher in reading comprehension than students from the UK and
the US at age 15 - reading ability is more closely linked to a child’s vocabulary than to their age
- spoken language skills are a high predictor of later literary skills.
- e.g., Finnish students score higher in reading comprehension than students from the UK and
4
Q
what are the key themes in learning to read?
A
- Simultaneously biological and cultural nature of mental
development - Capacity for active, independent learning – and reliance on and deference to authority of others
- Lack of consistency across different measures and different contexts
5
Q
what did Rousseau suggest?
A
- “Birth certificate of pedagogy”
- Child-oriented pedagogy based on age-related stages
- Focus on autonomous learning
6
Q
what is empiricism vs nativism?
A
- Children are born as a ‘tabula rasa’.
- What an individual is and will be is not predetermined, no innate abilities.
- Human development proceeds by association, repetition, imitation, reward and punishment.
- Environment and society shape child development.
/ - The myth of the ‘bon sauvage’.
- Education should be kept at minimum to allow the natural predispositions of each child grow naturally.
- Educators should keep children safe and help them to make their own discoveries.
7
Q
what did Piaget suggest about constructivism?
A
- infants are not born with innate capacities but gradually construct knowledge of the world and ability to represent reality mentally.
- Experience is represented in a series of schemas
- Assimilation: incorporation of information into an existing schema
- Accommodation: adaptation of an existing schema to new information
- 4 stages of development
8
Q
what are the criticisms of Piaget?
A
- Piaget underestimated children’s abilities and his tasks (object permanence, conservation) have been criticised
- Transitions from one stage to the next happen at different times for different domains
- The social world of infants and children is almost completely neglected
9
Q
what is Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory?
A
- Knowledge arises from social activity
- Language is crucial in learning processes, it helps to learn from “more knowledgeable others” and organises higher psychological functions
- The integration of speech and practical activity is fundamental in development
- The Zone of Proximal Development is the difference between what a child can do independently and what
they can achieve with help
10
Q
what is the difference between ‘little scientists’ vs ‘little anthropologists’?
A
- Cognitive construction of reality
- Learning through active self-discovery
- Learning only when developmentally ready
/ - Socio-cognitive construction of reality
- Learning through others’ guidance or instruction
- Cognitive development can be accelerated
11
Q
what is Piaget vs Vygotsky?
A
- Not the same dichotomy as Nativism vs Empiricism!
- Both posited that knowledge of the world is constructed through interaction with the environment
- Disagreed on the role and primacy in development of language: language or thought first
- Social interactions are at the core of Vygotsky’s approach
- Stages of development are at the core of Piaget’s approach
12
Q
what is child as a construct?
A
- The way children are seen has changed a lot over the decades:
- From top-down to bottom-up, from “small adults” to fundamentally different from adults, from deficient/blank slate to born with innate cognitive capacities, from passive recipients to active learners, from objects to subjects of research…
- The debate on how to educate children has gone on for centuries and entails radically different views
13
Q
what are the many theoretical approaches?
A
- level of analysis
- Genetic
- Neuropsychological
- Socio-cultural
- Evolutionary
- Cognitive
- Early/classical theories before “cognitive revolution”:
- Behaviourism: John Watson, B.F. Skinner
- Developmental process as maturation: Stanley G. Hall, Arnold Gesell
- Sociogenesis and social heredity: James Mark Baldwin
- modern theories
- Ecological theory
- Embodied cognition
- Nativism/core knowledge
14
Q
How does it change through development?
A
- Present at birth? Disappears at some point?
- Any early behavioural proxies /indices/precursors?
- How does social or physical environment affect this phenomenon?
15
Q
what are the developmental cascades?
A
- Development is constructed by the system’s own history, its current activity and constraints under which it operates
16
Q
Development as an epigenetic phenomenon?
A
- Dynamic Systems Theory as a metatheory – can be widely applied to many domains, and employed as a specific theory, e.g., motor development (e.g., Thelen & Smith, 1994)
17
Q
what is the bioecological systems theory?
A
- Critique of over-emphasis on lab research:
- “study of the strange behaviour of children in strange situations for the briefest possible period of time” (1974)
- Emphasis on dynamic interactions between environment and heredity Interactions with four nested systems:
- microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem
