EDU303 Midterm Preparation Short Notes by Muhammad

What do we understand about the field of child development?

What is developing and growing?

What are individual differences within a normative range of development?

Child Development

Child development is a field that studies the growth and development of the child. It is studied by many different kinds of experts, which include educationists, teachers, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, and social workers, etc. These experts work independently or together and try to understand the nature of child development. The goal is to understand, and provide insights to problems during development the child is going through.

Why Study Child Development?

Perhaps the most important reason to study child development is to understand how growth and development takes place in the child. This is a basic science question that satisfies the human curiosity; however there are practical benefits of doing so. Who benefits from this understanding? We understand that parents, teachers, educational experts, policy makers, and community in general benefits from this understanding. Experts that study child development address both basic and applied science questions, which are important for the study of development.

Critical Question

Question: In what ways is a child different to an adult, and in what ways the two are still the same?

Continuous or Staged Development

Experts in the field of child development ask if this change in development is continuous or discontinuous, i.e., broken down into stages? The answer lies in the fact how experts view this developmental process.

Naming Developmental Periods

For most of the experts in the field of Child Development, an individual growth may be continuous, but when studied it is broken down into stages. The concept of stages of development is not new and has been proposed by ancient thinkers, philosophers, theologians etc. Experts in the field of child development talk about growth and development both in general qualitative and quantitative terms. Many suggest that the individual changes qualitatively over time, backed by measurable quantitative changes. For example, children express lower levels of cognitive functioning when young compared to when they are older. Piaget and Inhelder (1969) not only observed this change in cognitive development but also were able to quantitatively document it with empirical experiments.

Developmental Periods

Experts divide periods of development into broad and smaller stages and classify them for easy use. When stages, where developmental change is minimal, are close development seems to be more continuous.

What is Developing?

1. Physical Development. Physical development involves the physical growth and development of the individual starting in the womb, through prenatal period all the way to late adolescence. Some of the changes that we see are: Allometric Development. Body proportions change over development. An infant 15 months old has a bigger head size compared to the body than an adult. The bodily proportions change over the developmental period (see figure below).

Brain Size: In the same fashion the brain also increases in size over development. By six years, its size is very close to what the adult brain is (see figure below). B. Cognitive Development: Biological maturation (like age) and, experience (like schooling) are needed together to develop the child intellectually or cognitively. Piaget and many of his colleagues worked on studying cognitive development in the growing child. Piaget went on to say that all cognitive structures are affected by an intertwined relationship between biological maturation and experience, and changed through many stages of cognitive development, like the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage etc., (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969/2000).

C. Intellectual Development: Does intelligence change with age? Or experience like going to school improves intelligence? Cahan and Cohen (1989) proposed both; however age had lower effect on intelligence than schooling. D. Language Development: Children’s vocabulary enriches rapidly. From about 11,000 words in 1st grade to about 80,000 words in 12th grade. In the same fashion grammar in children improves over time.

E. Emotional Development: Emotions like anger, fear, and happiness can be seen in the infant in a few months, however sadness develops after infancy. From day 1, infants are aware of emotions of others. They respond to other’s distress with their own distress. By about 1 year infants can draw emotional cues from others.

F. Social Development: Early social bonding comes about between infants and their mother. Later siblings and fathers start socially bonding with infants. In Western societies, there are fewer caregivers so infants and children have fewer social relations. This changes when children become older, and develop many social bonds. Healthy social development is based on reliable attachment the primary caregiver (Erickson, 1950; Bowlby, 1969).

G. Moral Development. Moral development in children occurs along with cognitive development. Around late childhood (8-10 years) children start differentiating between good and bad; although they may be driven by reward and punishment to do that. Conventional moral sense develops much later. All morality according to Kohlberg is universal. However, Kohlberg ideas have been challenged. Jensen argues morality is culturally driven.