EDUC 1- Child and Adolescent Learner and Learning Development

Unit 2- Theories of Development and Learning

The Stages of Human Life Cycle

 Infancy
 Adolescence
 Adulthood

The 12 Stages of the Human Life Cycle

1. Pre-birth: Potential 7. Adolescence: Passion

2. Birth: Hope 8. Early Adulthood: Enterprise
3. Infancy: Vitality 9. Midlife: Contemplation
4. Early Childhood: Playfulness 10. Mature Adulthood: Benevolence
5. Middle Childhood: Imagination 11. Late Adulthood: Wisdom
6. Late Childhood: Ingenuity 12. Death and Dying: Life

Sigmund Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development

His theory of psychosexual development includes 5 distinct stages/

 Oral Stage (birth to 18 months)
 Anal Stage (18 months to 3 years)
 Phallic Stage (ages 3 to 6)- Oedipus Complex & Electra Complex
 Latency Stage (age 6 to puberty)
 Genital Stage (puberty onwards)

Freud’s Personality Components

Freud described the personality structure as having 3 components:
 Id
 Ego
 Superego

The id. Operates on the pleasure principle. Focuses on immediate gratification or satisfaction of its needs.
The ego. Operates on the reality principle. It is aware that others also have needs to be met.
The superego. Embodies a person’s moral aspect. Like the conscience it exerts influence on what one
considers right and wrong.

Freud’s Personality Components

The Three Components and Personality Adjustment

Freud said a well-adjustment person is one who has strong ego, who can help satisfy the needs of the id
without going against the superego while maintaining the person’s sense of what is logical, practical and real.

Freud believed that the personality of an individual is formed early during childhood years.
Topographical Model

 The Unconscious
 The Conscious
 The Subconscious

Jean Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

His research method involved observing a small number of individuals as they responded to cognitive
tasks that he designed. These tasks were later known as Piagetian tasks.
Piaget called his general theoretical framework “genetic epistemology” because he was interested in
how knowledge developed in human organisms. Out of his researches, Piaget came up with the stages of
cognitive development. His theory has been applied widely to teaching and curriculum design specially in the
preschool and elementary curricular.

Piaget’s Basic Cognitive Concepts

Schema- refer to the cognitive structures by which individuals intellectually adapt to and organize their
environment. An individual’s way to create meaning about a thing or an experience.

Assimilation- process of fitting a new experience into an existing or previously created cognitive structure or
schema.

Accommodation- process of creating a new schema.

Equilibration- people have the natural need to understand how the world works and to find order, structure
and predictability in their life. When our experiences do not match our schema (plural of schema) or cognitive
structures, we experience cognitive disequilibrium.

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

Stage 1. Sensori-motor Stage. (Birth to infancy) - stage when a child who is initially reflexive in grasping,
sucking and reaching becomes more organized in his movement and activity. The term sensori-motor focuses
on the prominence of the senses and muscle movement through which the infant comes to learn about himself
and the world. Object Permanence. Ability of the child to know that an object still exists even when out of
sight.

Stage 2. Pre-Operatinal Stage. (2 to 7 years old) - Preschool years, intelligence at this stage is intuitive in
nature. At this stage the child can now make mental representations and is able to pretend, the child is now
ever closer to the use of symbols. This stage is highlighted by the following:

1. Symbolic Function - ability to represent objects and events.

2. Egocentrism - tendency of the child to only see his point of view and to assume that everyone also has
his same point of view.
3. Centration - the child focuses only on one aspect of a thing or event and exclude other aspects.
4. Irreversibilty - Pre-operational children still have the inability to reverse their thinking.
5. Animism - children attribute human like traits to characteristics or inanimate objects.
6. Transductive reasoning - refers to the pre-operational child’s type of reasoning that is neither inductive
nor deductive.

Stage 3. Concrete-Operational Stage. (8 to 11 years old) - Elementary School years, this stage is
characterized by the ability of the child to think logically but only in terms of concrete objects. The concrete-
operational stage is marked by the following:

a) Decentering - the child perceives the different features of objects and situations.
b) Reversibility - the child can now follow that certain operation can be done in reserve.
c) Conservation - ability to know that certain properties of objects like number, mass, volume, or area do not
change even if there’s change in appearance.
d) Seriation - ability to order or arrange the things in a series based on one dimension such as weight,
volume or size.

Stage 4. Formal Operation Stage. (12 to 15 years old) - thinking becomes more logical. They can now solve
abstract problems and can hypothesize. This stage is characterized by the following:
1) Hypothetical Reasoning: the ability to come up with different hypothesis about a problem and gather
weight data to make a final decision or judgement.
2) Analogical Reasoning: the ability to perceive the relationship in one instance and then use that
relationship to narrow down possible answers in another similar situation or problem.
3) Deductive Reasoning: ability to think logically by applying a general rule to a particular instance or
situation.