Development and Learning

Introduction
 Development refers to changes over time that follow an orderly pattern and enhance survival. These
changes are progressive rather than sudden and occur over the course of the life span rather than at
only one point in time.
 Learning and maturation may be thought of as components of development.
 This chapter focuses on cognitive development
 Many developmental theories postulate that cognitive development involves construction of
knowledge as a function of the individual’s experience.
I- Beginnings of the scientific study of development
A- Historical foundations
 In the latter half of the nineteenth century, schools of education were established in greater numbers
at major colleges and universities. The challenge was to train teachers to deal with large numbers of
students from diverse backgrounds.
B- Philosophical foundations
 The writings of educational philosophers and critics also helped to establish the scientific study of
development and improvement of education.
 Rousseau: Teachers should establish one-to-one relationships with students and consider their
individual needs and talents on arranging learning activities. Above all, learning should be satisfying
and self-directed; children should learn from hands-on experience and not be forced to learn.
 Pestalozzi: education should be for everyone and learning should be self-directed rather than rote.
He stressed the emotional development of students and which could be enhanced through close
relationships between teachers and learners.
 Froebel: Children were good and needed to be nurtured starting an early age.
 The initial need for studies on children development stemmed from immigration and industrialization
and led to the “Child Study Movement”.
C- Child Study Movement
 The first to establish “Child Study” as a scientific discipline was G. S. Hall.
 Hall gives a broad and ill-defined definition of the “Child Study Movement (CSM)”
 The need for this study stemmed from the reason that teaching and child raising would improve
through proper understanding of children. The goal was to assist in education
 Prior belief: knowledge of children can be acquired by teaching. CSM advocates believed that such
knowledge should be acquired before teaching.
 From this perspective, teachers must know well the subject matter to be taught and the nature and
capacity of the minds in which it is to be rooted.
 The CSM helped to establish schools of education in universities with strong ties to public schools.
 Understanding child development was also important to parents.
 CSM had also a research agenda due to its closeness to psychology. It consisted in understanding
children better through testing by using questionnaires, naturalistic observations, aptitude and ability
testing and psychological studies of vision and perception. (This explains the positivist prominence if
research in education in its early stages.
 Contributions of CSM:
o Baby biography: observe a single child over a lengthy period of time and noting detailed
accounts of children actions, responses, verbalizations and highlighted changes in the
processes of developments. This research used naturalistic observations.

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 o Children became legitimate research participants and new journals were created
o CSM also affected teachers’ training (teachers’ preservice training.
o Teaching benefited from teachers’ education programs
o CSM movement filled an important public void.
 The CSM had humanizing effect on educational practice
 Critique:
o Many studies on children had suspect validity because of weaknesses in methods used and
assessment instruments [Does the underlying assumption of the development theory
(development is construction of knowledge according to personal experience) contrast with
positivist research??]
o Focus too broad like Functionalism in Psychology
o Because it tried to accomplish too much, it accomplished little very well.
o The rise of behaviorism further contributed to its demise
o However, it left contributions in the fields of Psychology, Education and Counseling.
o In the 1920s, CSM was replaced by “Behaviorism”.
II- Perspectives on Human Development
A- Issues relevant to learning
 Many agree with the definition of development but differ in the underlying theories of development.
 Nature vs. Nurture:
o Environmental (good teaching) and hereditary influences interacted to affect development
o Conversely, conditioning theorists take an extreme environmental view: the right conditions
produce learning. Heredity provides the necessary physical and mental prerequisites needed
to respond to stimuli in the environment.
o Conclusion: If we assume that development is hereditary, then learning will proceed at its
own rate and others cannot do much about it. If we assume that the environment makes a
difference, then we can structure it to foster development.
 Stability vs. change
o Are developmental periods fixed or have more flexibility?
o If developmental periods are fixed, only certain types of learning are possible at a given time.
o Other theories contend that children should have more latitude to learn at their own pace. A
key issue here is how to assess readiness for learning
 Continuity vs. discontinuity
o Behavioral theories posit continuous development: As behaviors develop, they form the basis
for acquiring new ones
o Piaget’s theory describes a process of discontinuity: Changes from one mode of thinking to
another may differ abruptly and children will differ in how long they remain at a particular
stage.
o Educationally speaking, discontinuity is more difficult to plan for because activities that are
effective now need to be changed as students’ thinking develop.
o Continuous views allow for a better-ordered sequence of curriculum.
 Passivity vs. Activity
o Does development progress in a natural fashion or can varied experiences promote it?
(about teaching)
o If activity is important, then lessons need to incorporate hands-on activities (check Noam
Chomsky on learning)
 Structure vs. Function
o Structural theories: Development consists of changes in structures and each structural change
follows preceding ones.
o Behavior is an incomplete reflection of one’s structure.

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 o Structural theories label the different periods of development as stages
o Functional theories: types of functions and processes that a child is able to do at a particular
time.
o Behavior is given more weight because behavior reflects functions
o Although most children end-up with the same basic competencies, the order and rate of
development of functions can vary.
B- Types of developmental theories
 Five primary classes of theories
o Biological Theories: Children proceed through a set sequence of invariant stages of
development in roughly the same time. Development is determined by genetics.
o When any (biological) norms are misused as readiness criteria they can retard educational
progress.
o Current biological work focuses on the extent that cognitive, behavioral and personality
characteristics have genetic predispositions.
o Researchers continue to explore how genetics and environmental factors interact to influence
development.
o Psychoanalytic theories: emphasizes the fulfillment of needs which differ as a function of
developmental level
o Development is viewed as progressive changes in personality which emerges as children
seek to satisfy their needs.
o Children interact with their environments to fulfill needs and their successes in resolving
conflicts associated with need fulfillment influence personality.
o Psychoanalytic theories emphasize the role of innate factors (needs) in development.
o As with other stage theories, stage progression from child to child often is so uneven
that using theories to explain development is difficult. (According to the author, most of
the theories used so far to explain development are plagued with problems)
o Behavioral theories: Development can be explained by the same principles that explain
other behaviors
o The primary mechanism of learning is shaping of new behavior through differential
reinforcement of successive approximations to the target behaviors.
o Major changes in behavior emanate from the environment which provides the stimuli to
which children respond and the reinforcement and punishment as consequences of their
actions.
o Behavioral theories downplay the role of personal factors associated with learners.
o Cognitive theories: Started with the work of Piaget
o Cognitive theories are constructivist: children take information and formulate (construct
understanding?) their own knowledge.
o Cognitive theories are interactional because they explain development in terms of interactions
between personal, behavior and environmental factors.
o Social cognitive theory also stresses that much learning occurs vicariously (indirectly)
through observation of others.
o Contextual theories: Social and cultural factors affect development.
o Societal practices play a major role in development
o Contextual theories emphasize the altered nature of social patterns and how these lead
children into different interactions with peers and adults. Cognitive development occurs
largely as a consequence of these interactions.
o Contextual theories are vague in their predictions of how changes in some aspects may affect
development and vice versa.

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C- Structural theories
Development involves changes in cognitive structures. Information that is learned can help to alter the
structure.
 Psycholinguistic theory: Language can be differentiated into 2 levels: an overt surface structure that
involves speech and syntax and a covert deep structure that includes meaning.
 A single deep structure can be represented by multiple surface structures
 The deep structures are assumed to be part of the individual’s genetic makeup.
 Language development involves the progressive capability of mapping surface structures onto their
corresponding deep structures. (Chomsky’s structural approach)
 Another view (Moerk) postulates that significant others in the child’s environment fulfilled the LAD
functions by assisting language development. Modeling (mothers’ language) related to the speed of
language acquisition.
 Moerk noticed that mothers performed all the functions ascribed to the LAD
 Moerk’s account is functional rather than structural because it accounts for language acquisition in
terms of the functions played by significant others in the environment.
 Classical Information Processing Theory: This model assumes that the computer is a useful
metaphor for the human mind.
 Developmental change occurs in the capacity and efficiency of processing.
 Through the use of strategies such as rehearsal and organization, older learners compared with
younger ones are able to hold more information in working memory, relate better to information in
LTM and have more extensive memory networks.
 The model assumes that information is processed in linear, serial fashion.
III- Piaget’s theory of cognitive development
A- Developmental processes
 Cognitive development depends on 4 factors: biological maturation, experience with the physical
environment, experience with the social environment and equilibration (a biological drive to produce
an optimal state of equilibrium (or adaptation) between cognitive structures and the environment.
(describes the cognitive balancing of new information with old knowledge)
 The component processes of equilibration are assimilation and accommodation.
o Assimilation: fitting external reality to the existing cognitive structures
o Accommodation: changing internal structures to provide consistency with external reality
 Assimilation and accommodation are complimentary processes.
 Stages: Commented [FK1]: 1- Can adults think in the concrete
operational stage when thinking of a new unfamiliar subject?
o The pattern of operations that children can perform may be thought of as a level or stage
o Stages are discrete and quantitatively different and separate 2- What about the effects of culture on the stages: since
o The development of cognitive structures is dependent on preceding development Piaget’s theory acknowledges the influence of the
environment in the cognitive development of children, how
o The age at which one may be in a particular stage will vary from person to person. would culture weigh on this matter?
 Sensorimotor stage: (0-2)
o Understanding is rooted in present action
o The equilibration process is operational as children actively construct knowledge
o Schemata are constructed and altered
 Preoperational (2-7)
o Children can imagine the future and reflect on the past
o Unable to think in more than one dimension at a time
o Children demonstrate irreversibility: once things are done they cannot be changed
o Difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality
o Children become less egocentric

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 o Lack of conservation (Conservation refers to the ability to determine that a certain quantity
will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size)

 Concrete operational (7-11)

o Children’s language and basic skills acquisition accelerate dramatically
o Children begin to show some abstract thinking
o Reversibility in thinking is acquired along with classification and seriation
 The formal operational stage:
o Children are able to think about hypothetical situations
 Mechanisms of learning:
o Cognitive development can occur only when disequilibrium or cognitive conflict exists.
Thus an event must occur that produces disturbance in the child’s internal structures
(schemata) so that the child’s beliefs do not match the observed reality. Equilibration seeks to
resolve the conflict through assimilation and accommodation.
o Environmental factors are extrinsic to development; they can influence development but not
direct it.
o Learning occurs when children experience cognitive conflict and engage in assimilation or
accommodation to construct or alter internal structures.
o The conflicts should not be too great because this will not trigger equilibration Commented [FK2]: What happens if the conflict is great??
o When children are taught to use cognitive processes more effectively, they often can perform
tasks at higher cognitive levels.
 Implications for instruction
o Understand cognitive development: Teachers should try to ascertain levels and gear their
teaching accordingly.
o Keep students active: children need rich environments that allow for active exploration and
hands-on activities.
o Create incongruity: Material should not be readily assimilated but not too difficult to
preclude accommodation
o Provide social interaction: Teachers must design some activities that provide social
interactions. Learning that others have different points of views can help make children less
egocentric.
IV- Bruner’s theory of cognitive growth
 Bruner’s views represent a functional account of human development and have important
implications for teaching and learning
A- Cognitive growth and knowledge representation
 The development of human intellectual functioning…is shaped by a series of technological advances
in the use of mind.
 These technological advances depend on increasing language facility and exposure to systematic
instruction.
 Cognitive processes (thoughts and beliefs) mediate the relationship between stimulus and response
so that learners can maintain the same response in a changing environment or perform different
responses in the same environment, depending on what they consider adaptive
 People represent knowledge in three ways (not structures)
o Enactive representation: involves motor responses or ways to manipulate the environment
o Iconic representation: refers to action-free mental images. It allows one to recognize objects
o Symbolic representation: uses symbol systems to understand abstract concepts
o It is the last mode od knowledge to develop and quickly becomes the preferred mode
o The primary advantage of the symbolic mode is that it allows learners to represent and
transform knowledge with greater flexibility and power than is possible with the other modes.
o

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 B- Spiral Curriculum
 That knowledge can be represented in different ways suggests that teachers ought to vary
instructional presentations depending on learners’ developmental levels.
 Bruner emphasized teaching as a means of prompting cognitive development (unlike Piaget, the
environment (teaching) influences cognitive development).
 Instruction needs to be matched to children’s cognitive capabilities
 Bruner is well known for his controversial proposition that any content can be taught in
meaningful fashion to learners of any age.
 Concepts initially should be taught in a simple fashion so children can understand them and
represented in a more complex fashion as they grow older
 Students should address topics at increasing levels of complexity as they move through the
curriculum rather than encountering a topic only once.
 Bruner’s theory is constructivist because it assumes that at any age, learners assign meaning to
stimuli and events based on their cognitive capabilities and experiences with the social and physical
environments.
V- Contemporary themes in development and learning
 Recently, cognitive information processing focuses in functions rather than on structures
A- Developmental changes
 Attention
o Sustained attention is difficult for young children
o Teachers should warn students of the attentional demands required to learn
 Encoding and Retrieval
o As information processing capacity expands, better cognitive processes can be applied
o Most of a child’s basic cognitive processes are well in place by early childhood. From this
point onward, developmental changes primarily involve learning how to make better and
more efficient use of existing perceptual and attentional (cognitive) processes.
o Automaticity: Automatic attention means that children gradually eliminate attention as an
active cognitive process: when attention becomes automatic, less cognitive effort is needed in
the early stages of information processing and thus children can put forth effort where it is
needed.
o Children also improve in their knowledge and use of encoding strategies. Rehearsal appears
early an improves as children become older.
o Concerning Retrieval, older children use better strategies than younger ones.
o Metacognition:
 Metacognitive understanding expands greatly between the ages of 5 and 10.
 Metacognition means: monitoring levels of understanding, asking themselves
questions about what they have read, summarizing information.

B- Developmentally appropriate instruction

 Instruction that is developmentally appropriate is matched with children developmental levels.
 Knowledge is never transmitted automatically, the construction of knowledge and the integration
with current mental structures are the means whereby learning proceeds. Good instructional methods
consist of discovery learning and small-group projects.
 Social environment is important: when interacting with others, children receive ideas and opinions
that conflict with their own; this sets the equilibration process into motion and learning is achieved.
 Conflict is created when the material to be learned is just beyond student’s present understandings.
This creates a zone of proximal development with which learning can occur through cognitive
conflict, reflection and conceptual reorganization.
 Active exploration and hands-on activities.

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 C- Transitions in schooling
 Transitions are important, because as with any major change, they can produce disruptions in
routines and ways of thinking but also because of students’ developmental levels at the time they
occur.
 Transitional variables and development must interact in reciprocal fashion
 Transition to middle school is problematic because it occurs at a significant period of physical
change.
 Some researchers contended that such structural and curricular produce changes in students’
achievement related beliefs and motivation often in a negative direction.
VI- Familial influences
 Some of the key familial influences on development and learning are SES, home environment and
parental involvement
 SES:
o SES comprises capital (resources and assets), human or nonmaterial resources (education)
and social resources (those obtained through social networks and connections).
o There is much correlational evidence showing that poverty and low parental education relate
to poorer development and learning.
o Undoubtedly, family resources are critical
o Developmental theorists agree that the richness of experiences is central to cognitive
development.
o Another key factor is socialization. Socialization influences in lower SES homes may not
match or prepare students for these conditions.
o SES is related positively to school achievement and is unfortunately one of the best predictors
of school dropout.
o The predictive value of SES varies by group. SES is a stronger predictor of academic
achievement for white students than for minority students.
o Large families maybe harmful to cognitive developments in deprived conditions.
o Greater parental support and better home resources are associated with achievement and
motivational benefits for children
 Home environment:
o Richness of home environments usually matches SES
o The effects of the home environment on cognitive development seem most pronounced in
infancy and early childhood.
o Important home factors that foster the development of intelligence include mother’s
responsiveness, discipline style, child involvement, organization present in the home,
availability of stimulating materials and opportunities for interaction.
o Parents who provide a warm and responsive home environment tend to encourage children’s
explorations and stimulate their curiosity and play, which accelerate intellectual development.
o Peer influence rose during childhood and peaked around grades 8 and 9 after which it
declined somewhat in high school.
o Early adolescents are especially vulnerable to peer pressures.
o Although parents do not have total control over the crowds with which their children
associate, they can exert indirect influence by steering them in appropriate directions.
 Parental involvement
o There is substantial evidence that parental influence continues to be strong well past infancy.
o Parent involvement effects seems stronger by group (white vs. minority)
o Parents can be influential in launching their children onto particular trajectories involving
them in groups and activities.
o Research showed that parents’ expectations for their children’s academic successes bore a
positive relation to their actual cognitive achievements.

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 o Parental involvement is a critical factor influencing children’s self-regulation which is central
to the development of cognitive functioning.
o Some forms of parent involvement that make a difference are contacting the schools about
their children, attending school functions, communicating strong educational values to their
children, conveying the value of effort, expecting children to perform well in school and
monitoring or helping children with homework or projects.
o Researchers have investigated the role of parenting style on children’s development:
 Authoritative: provide children with warmth and support. They have high
expectations for achievement
 Authoritarian: strict and assert power. They are neither warm nor responsive
 Permissive: moderately responsive but lax in demands and tolerant of misbehavior
o Much research shows positive relation between authoritative parenting and student
achievement.
o An example of parental involvement and its impact on children’s cognitive achievement is
the School Development Program (SDP).
VII- Motivation and development
 Within any developmental period not everyone is motivated in the same way.
A- Developmental changes
 Children’s understanding of motivational processes changes with development. Young children tend

 to equate ability with outcome.

 Later ability and effort are disentangled and children understand that both can affect outcome.

 Children’s understanding of social comparison also changes (abilities instead of physical

characteristics)

 Motivation becomes more differentiated and complex and the levels of children’s motivation also
change with development.

 Young children are highly confident about what they can do but these perceptions typically decline
with development. This is not problematic as focusing one’s effort on what one feels confident about
learning or doing well can result in successes and a strong sense of self-efficacy.

 Whatever children feel competent to do, they work at and develop skills and their perceptions of
better performance increase self-efficacy

 Children become better able to sustain long term motivation

 With development, peers become more important influences on motivation and parental influence
decline in importance. Friends are important for learning and motivation.
B- Implications
 Motivation strategies might be modified depending on students’ developmental levels
 Short-term specific goals be used young children. A goal beyond the immediate context is apt to
have little or no motivational effect.
 Important to work with students on goal setting and help them break long term goals into subgoals
with timelines.

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  Goal setting and self-monitoring of progress are key motivational processes contributing to self-
regulation.
 Teachers present tasks to students that they should be able to master
 As tasks become tougher, teachers may want to warn students about the added difficulty
 Teachers must try to focus students’ comparisons on their own progress rather than on how their
performances compare with those of their peers.
 Keeping capability self-perceptions tied to progress is critical for motivation
VIII- Development and instruction
A- Case’ s model of instruction
 Case formulated a structural stage model of development to account for changes in cognitive
information processing capabilities.
 Stages are:
o Sensory motor (0 to 1.5): mental representations linked to physical movements
o Relational (1.5 to 5): relations coordinated along one dimension
o Dimensional (5 to 11): relations coordinated along two dimensions
o Abstract (11 to 18.5) use of abstract reasoning
 Structural changes are linked with the development of cognitive strategies and memory processes
 Cognitive development includes the acquisition of efficient strategies for processing information
 Development produces an increase in the size of WM. As strategies become more efficient, they
consume less WM space which frees space for acquiring new strategies.
 One first identifies the learning goal and the steps through which learners must proceed to reach the
goal.
 Instructional designers follow a novice-to-expert approach by comparing the performances and
reported thoughts of experts with those of novices.
B- Teacher-student interactions
 Feedback
 Teachers should provide performance feedback
 Re-teaching and leading students to correct answers are effective ways to promote learning
 Feedback informing students that answers are correct motivates because it indicates the students
are becoming more competent and are capable of further learning.

 Classroom climate:
o Teachers help to establish a classroom climate that affects interaction
o Democratic (collaborative) leadership style is effective
o Authoritarian style: strict with rigid rules and procedures can produce high achievements
but high anxiety levels and productivity drops off when the teacher is absent.
o Laissez-faire style: little classroom direction which means wasted time
o Democratic leadership encourages independence and initiative in students.
o Praise is important because it conveys positive teacher affect and provides information
about the worth of students’ behaviors.
o Many studies show also that praise seem to depend on developmental level, SES and
ability
o Criticism: provides information about undesirability of student behaviors
o Criticism might motivate students to learn because it contains positive self-efficacy
information.
o In general, however, teachers are better advised to provide positive feedback about ways
to improve performance than to criticize present performance.
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