Education
...Why do children seem to struggle at certain level for months, and then show a big jump in performance over a couple of weeks? What can teachers do to hasten these jumps in performance?
• Why do some children at a certain age pick up skills easily while others work hard but just do not get it?
• Why do children who have picked up a skill in one area have trouble doing similar tasks in other areas?
Key Themes in Developmental Psychology
- Nature/Nurture
- Organismic (active)/Mechanistic (passive)
- Continuity/Discontinuity
• Quantitative vs. Qualitative
Most developmental psychologist believe that nature and nurture combine to influence development, biological factor play a stronger role in some aspects of development, such as physical development, and environmental factors playing a stronger role in others, such as moral development.
The continuous theory of development suggests that at a fairly early age, children are capable of thinking and acting like adults, given the proper experience and education. Continuous theories emphasize the importance of the environment
Discontinuous perspective assumes that children progress through a set of predictable and invariant stages of development. Discontinuous theories of development focus on inborn factors rather than environmental influences to explain change over time. Environmental conditions may have some influence on the pace of development, but the sequence of developmental steps is essentially fixed.
Continuous Versus Stagelike cognitive development.
Figure 2. The course of development as described by continuity and discontinuity (stage) theorists.
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a biologist who originally studied mollusks (publishing twenty scientific papers on them by the time he was 21) but moved into the study of the development of children's understanding, through observing...
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