Student

development
 Development
• Development refers to long-term personal
changes that have multiple sources and multiple
effects.

• We call the change “learning” instead of

development. The difference between learning
and development is a matter of degree.
• When a child learns to name the planets of the solar system, for
example, the child may not need a lot of time, nor does the
learning involve a multitude of experiences.
• Students’ development matters for teachers, but the
way it matters depends partly on how schooling is
organized.

• If you teach multiple grade levels, then your need for

developmental knowledge will be more obvious
because you will confront wide age differences on a
daily basis.
 Physical development
during the school years
• Although it may be tempting to think that physical
development is the concern of physical education
teachers only, it is actually a foundation for many
academic tasks.

• In all grades, it is important to have a sense of

students’ health needs related to their age or maturity,
if only to know who may become ill, and with what
illness, and to know what physical activities are
reasonable and needed.
 Trends in height and weight
• Typical height and weight for well-nourished, healthy
students are shown in table.

Age Height (cm) Weight (kg)

2 85 7.0
6 115 20.0
10 135 31.0
14 162 52.0
18 169 60.5
 Puberty and its effects on
students

• A universal physical development in students is puberty,

which is the set of changes in early adolescence that bring
about sexual maturity.

• At about the same time that puberty accentuates gender,

role differences also accentuate for at least some teenagers.

• Some girls who excelled at math or science in elementary school may

curb their enthusiasm and displays of success at these subjects for fear
of limiting their popularity or attractiveness as girls. Some boys who
were not especially interested in sports previously may begin
dedicating themselves to athletics to affirm their masculinity in the
eyes of others.
 Health and illness
• By world standards, children and youth in economically
developed societies tend, on average, to be remarkably
healthy. Even so, much depends on precisely how well-
off families are and on how much health care is available
to them.
• Children from higher-income families experience far
fewer serious or life-threatening illnesses than children
from lower-income families.
• Whatever their income level, parents and teachers often
rightly note that children—especially the youngest ones
—get far more illnesses than do adults.
 Cognitive development: the
theory of Jean Piaget
• Cognition refers to thinking and memory processes,
and cognitive development refers to long-term
changes in these processes.
• One of the most widely known perspectives about
cognitive development is the cognitive stage theory
of a Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget.
• Piaget created and studied an account of how
children and youth gradually become able to think
logically and scientifically.
 The sensorimotor stage: birth to age 2
• The sensorimotor stage is first, and is defined as the period when
infants “think” by means of their senses and motor actions.

• The infant’s actions allow the child to represent (or construct

simple concepts of) objects and events. The representation acquires
a permanence lacking in the individual experiences of the object,
which are constantly changing. Because the representation is stable,
the child “knows”, or at least believes, that toy animal exists even if
the actual toy animal is temporarily out of sight. Piaget called this
sense of stability object permanence, a belief that objects exist
whether or not they are actually present. It is a major achievement
of sensorimotor development, and marks a qualitative
transformation in how older infants (24 months) think about
experience compared to younger infants (6months).
• During much of infancy, of course, a child can only
barely talk, so sensorimotor development initially
happens without the support of language.

• It might therefore seem hard to know what infants are

thinking, but Piaget devised several simple, but clever
experiments to get around their lack of language, and
that suggest that infants do indeed represent objects
even without being able to talk (Piaget, 1952).
 The preoperational stage: age 2 to 7
• In the preoperational stage, children use their new ability to
represent objects in a wide variety of activities,but they do
not yet do it in ways that are organized or fully logical. One
of the most obvious examples of this kind of cognition is
dramatic play, the improvised make-believe of preschool
children. If you have ever had responsibility for children of
this age, you have likely witnessed such play.

Ashley holds a plastic banana to her ear and says:

“Hello, Mom? Can you be sure to bring me my baby doll? OK!” Then she
hangs up the banana and pours tea for Jeremy into an invisible cup. Jeremy
giggles at the sight of all of this and exclaims: “Rinnng! Oh Ashley, the
phone is ringing again! You better answer it.” And on it goes.
• They are thinking on two levels at once—one
imaginative and the other realistic.

• This dual processing of experience makes dramatic

play an early example of metacognition, or reflecting
on and monitoring of thinking itself.
 The concrete operational stage:
age 7 to 11
• In this stage, for example, a child may unconsciously follow the
rule: “If nothing is added or taken away, then the amount of
something stays the same.” This simple principle helps children
to understand certain arithmetic tasks, such as in adding or
subtracting zero from a number, as well as to do certain
classroom science experiments, such as ones involving judgments
of the amounts of liquids when mixed. Piaget called this period
the concrete operational stage because children mentally
“operate” on concrete objects and events. They are not yet able,
however, to operate (or think) systematically about
representations of objects or events. Manipulating representations
is a more abstract skill that develops later, during adolescence.
• Concrete operational thinking differs from
preoperational thinking in two ways, each of
which renders children more skilled as students.

• One difference is reversibility, or the ability to

think about the steps of a process in any order.

• The other new feature of thinking during the

concrete operational stage is the child’s ability to
decenter, or focus on more than one feature of a
problem at a time.
 The formal operational stage:
age 11 and beyond
• In the last stages, the child becomes able to reason
not only about tangible objects and events, but also
about hypothetical or abstract ones. The individual
can “operate” on “forms” or representations.
With students at this level, the teacher can pose hypothetical (or contrary-to-
fact) problems: “What if the world had never discovered oil?”

• To answer such questions, students must use

hypothetical reasoning, meaning that they must
manipulate ideas that vary in several ways at once,
and do so entirely in their minds.
 Social development: relationships,
personal motives, and morality
• Social development refers to the long-term changes in
relationships and interactions involving self, peers, and family. It
includes both positive changes, such as how friendships develop,
and negative changes, such as aggression or bullying.

• The social developments that are the most obviously relevant to

classroom life fall into three main areas:

1. changes in self-concept and in relationships among students and

teachers,
2. changes in basic needs or personal motives, and
3. changes in sense of rights and responsibilities.
 Erik Erikson: eight psychosocial crises of development
Psychosocial crisis Approximate Description
age  
Trust and mistrust Birth to one year Development of trust between caregiver
and child
Autonomy and shame Age 1-3 Development of control over bodily
functions and activities
Initiative and guilt Age 3-6 Testing limits of self-assertion and
purposefulness
Industry and inferiority Age 6-12 Development of sense of mastery and
competence
Identity and role Age 12-19 Development of identity and
confusion acknowledge of identity by others
Intimacy and isolation Age 19-25+ Formation of intimate relationships and
commitments
Generativity and Age 25-50+ Development of creative or productive
stagnation activities that contribute to future
  generations
Integrity and despair Age 50+ Acceptance of personal life history and
forgiveness of self and Others
 Abraham Maslow: a hierarchy of
motives and needs
• Abraham Maslow's theory frames personal needs or
motives as a hierarchy, meaning that basic or “lower-
level” needs have to be satisfied before higher-level
needs become important or motivating.

• In its original version, Maslow’s theory distinguishes

two types of needs, called deficit needs and being
needs (or sometimes deficiency needs and growth
needs).
  Physiological needs

Deficit Needs Safety and security needs

Love and belonging
needs
Being Needs Cognitive needs
  Aesthetic needs
Self-actualization needs
 Deficit needs: getting the basic
necessities of life
• Deficit needs are the basic requirements of physical
and emotional well-being. First are physiological
needs—food, sleep, clothing, and the like.
A student who is not getting enough to eat is not going to feel much
interest in learning!

• Once physiological needs are met, however, safety

and security needs become important.
A child from an abusive family, for example, may be getting enough to
eat, but may worry chronically about personal safety.
 Being needs: becoming the
best that you can be
• Being needs are desires to become fulfilled as a
person, or to be the best person that you can possibly
be.

• They include cognitive needs (a desire for knowledge

and understanding), aesthetic needs (an appreciation
of beauty and order), and most importantly, self-
actualization needs (a desire for fulfillment of one’s
potential).
 Moral development: forming a sense of
rights and responsibilities
• Morality is a system of beliefs about what is right and good
compared to what is wrong or bad. Moral development
refers to changes in moral beliefs as a person grows older and
gains maturity.

• Moral beliefs are related to, but not identical with, moral
behavior: it is possible to know the right thing to do, but not
actually do it.

• It is also not the same as knowledge of social conventions,

which are arbitrary customs needed for the smooth operation
of society. Social conventions may have a moral element, but
they have a primarily practical purpose.
 Kohlberg’s morality of justice
Moral stage
Preconventional Level:
Stage 1: Obedience
punishment
Stage 2: Market exchange
Conventional Level:
Stage 3: Peer opinion
Stage 4: Law and order
Postconventional Level:
Stage 5: Social contract
Stage 6: Universal principles
Definition of what is “good”
Action that is rewarded and not
and punished
Action that is agreeable to the child
and child's partner
Action that wins approval from
friends or peers
Action that conforms to community
customs or laws
Action that follows social accepted
ways of making decisions
Action that is consistent with self-
chosen, general principles
 Preconventional justice: obedience
and mutual advantage
• The preconventional level of moral development coincides
approximately with the preschool period of life and with
Piaget’s preoperational period of thinking. At this age the child
is still relatively self-centered and insensitive to the moral
effects of actions on others. The result is a somewhat short-
sighted orientation to morality.

• Initially, the child adopts an ethics of obedience and

punishment—a sort of “morality of keeping out of trouble”.
The rightness and wrongness of actions is determined by
whether actions are rewarded or punished by authorities such
as parents or teachers.
• Eventually the child learns not only to respond to
positive consequences, but also learns how to
produce them by exchanging favors with others.

• The new ability creates Stage 2, an ethics of market

exchange. At this stage the morally “good” action is
one that favors not only the child, but another person
directly involved.
 Conventional justice: conformity to
peers and society
• As children move into the school years, their lives expand to
include a larger number and range of peers and(eventually) of
the community as a whole.

• The change leads to conventional morality, which are beliefs

based on what this larger array of people agree on—hence
Kohlberg’s use of the term “conventional”.

• At first, in Stage 3, the child’s reference group are immediate

peers, so Stage 3 is sometimes called the ethics of peer
opinion.
• Eventually, as the child becomes a youth and the
social world expands even more, he or she acquires
even larger numbers of peers and friends.
• He or she is therefore more likely to encounter
disagreements about ethical issues and beliefs.
Resolving the complexities lead to Stage 4, the ethics
of law and order, in which the young person
increasingly frames moral beliefs in terms of what the
majority of society believes.
• Now, an action is morally good if it is legal or at least
customarily approved by most people, including
people whom the youth does not know personally.
 Postconventional justice: social contract
and universal principles
• As a person becomes able to think abstractly (or
“formally”, in Piaget’s sense), ethical beliefs shift
from acceptance of what the community does believe
to the process by which community beliefs are
formed.

• The new focus constitutes Stage 5, the ethics of

social contract. Now an action, belief, or practice is
morally good if it has been created through fair,
democratic processes that respect the rights of the
people affected.
• In principle (and occasionally in practice), a society could
decide democratically to kill off every member of a racial
minority, for example, but would deciding this by due
process make it ethical?

• The realization that ethical means can sometimes serve

unethical ends leads some individuals toward Stage 6, the
ethics of self-chosen, universal principles.

• At this final stage, the morally good action is based on

personally held principles that apply both to the person’s
immediate life as well as to the larger community and
society.
 Gilligan’s morality of care

• Morality of care, or system of beliefs about human

responsibilities, care, and consideration for others.
Gilligan proposed three moral positions that represent
different extents or breadth of ethical care.

• Unlike Kohlberg, Piaget, or Erikson, she does not

claim that the positions form a strictly developmental
sequence, but only that they can be ranked
hierarchically according to their depth or subtlety.
Moral position
Position 1: Survival orientation
Position 2: Conventional care
 
Position 3: Integrated care
Definition of what is morally
good
Action that considers one's
personal needs only
Action that considers others' needs
or preferences, but not one's own
Action that attempts to coordinate
one's own personal needs with
those of others
• The most basic kind of caring is a survival orientation, in
which a person is concerned primarily with his or her own
welfare.

• A more subtle moral position is caring for others, in which a

person is concerned about others’ happiness and welfare, and
about reconciling or integrating others’ needs where they
conflict with each other.

• The most developed form of moral caring in Gilligan’s model

is integrated caring, the coordination of personal needs and
values with those of others. Now the morally good choice
takes account of everyone including yourself, not everyone
except yourself.