Over the years, psychologists tried to observe children’ behavior and explain their observations by developing theories of child development focusing on different developmental aspects such as social, emotional, physical, and cognitive. Even not all of these theories were accepted, but all of them influenced on understanding of child’ development. The most influential theories of child development are: Behaviorism, Nativism, Piaget’s constructivist theory, and the Vygotskian social-cultural theory. Behaviorist believed that children are born as a “clean state” and they are developed as result of classical conditioning, when people learn to produce an existing response to a new stimulus, and instrumental conditioning, when probability
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When they are born, they already have some schemata (sucking reflex, grasping reflex). As children grow, they gain new information that is used to modify existing schemas by adaptations: assimilation (taking new information into existing schemas) or accommodation (changing existing schemas). Balance between these two forms of adaptations – equilibration – explains how children are moving from one stage of their development to next one. Children are moving through four stages in their cognitive development: the sensorimotor stage (birth – 2 years old), the preoperational stage (2-7 years old), the concrete operational stage (7-11 years old), the formal operations stage (11 years old – adulthood). These stages are universal, and each child goes through all these …show more content…
At first, they need adult’ help to teach them how to use mediation tools, and later they would be able to independently do this. Adult’s role is to mediate the new motives development that would drive them to be engaged in new activities. But these new activities need ability and mental process that the children do not have yet. So, these new activities begin from the involvement in this activity both, the child and the adult, and again the role of the adult is to provide a child with new mediation tools. Vygotskians looked at this process of children development as a determined by adult mediation process, but the totally disregarded role of genetically predetermined maturation in children development. Maturation is considered as prerequisite on children development, but it does not determine the general characteristic of children development or individual differences in the
When they are born, they already have some schemata (sucking reflex, grasping reflex). As children grow, they gain new information that is used to modify existing schemas by adaptations: assimilation (taking new information into existing schemas) or accommodation (changing existing schemas). Balance between these two forms of adaptations – equilibration – explains how children are moving from one stage of their development to next one. Children are moving through four stages in their cognitive development: the sensorimotor stage (birth – 2 years old), the preoperational stage (2-7 years old), the concrete operational stage (7-11 years old), the formal operations stage (11 years old – adulthood). These stages are universal, and each child goes through all these …show more content…
At first, they need adult’ help to teach them how to use mediation tools, and later they would be able to independently do this. Adult’s role is to mediate the new motives development that would drive them to be engaged in new activities. But these new activities need ability and mental process that the children do not have yet. So, these new activities begin from the involvement in this activity both, the child and the adult, and again the role of the adult is to provide a child with new mediation tools. Vygotskians looked at this process of children development as a determined by adult mediation process, but the totally disregarded role of genetically predetermined maturation in children development. Maturation is considered as prerequisite on children development, but it does not determine the general characteristic of children development or individual differences in the