Why Do Youger Childer Fail at Balance Beam, Conservation and Three Dimensional Mountains - Essay Example

? Why do younger children fail at Balance beam, Conservation and Three Dimensional mountains? Task: The study of child development is a very broad subject. Understanding of child development is crucial since we need to appreciate emotional, physical, social and educational growth which our children pass through from birth until they become adults. There are many theories of child development which provide the best explanation for human development and intellectual growth. Among the theories that were given were the Sigmund Feud theory, Erik Erikson theory, Cognitive Child Development Theories like the Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, Behavioural Child Development Theories like classical and operant conditioning theories and Social Child Development Theories (John Bowbly-attachment theory, Albert Bandura-social learning theory and Lev Vygotsky- Sociocultural theory) (Berk, 2009). Piaget noted that children who were in early preoperational period had failed on most conservative task. The most popular conservative tasks were; the number conservative task (in this task children were to confirm their counting ability). Children were given same rows of counters which were paired together then they could say they were the same; one of the counters was then separated and asked the same question, those children who have not fully developed will have a difficult time answering the question. The same was done to test all other conservative tasks. The length task (in this task children were to confirm their ability to measure or tell length of lines), the mass task (here children were supposed to confirm their ability to weigh different types of things), in total there were seven tasks of which were said that they cannot be acquired at once (Boyd, 2009). This was an inverse to Piaget, who gave the notion of decalage, this he explained that these tasks were acquired at diverse ages meaning that there is no way any two children of the same age could develop these abilities at the same time, reason being several environmental and biological factors that always contribute to these factors. Preoperational stages occur between the ages 2 to 6. Piaget noted that children in this stage made language developments as one of their official marks of this period. He also noted that they could not understand concrete logic, and could not mentally manage or influence information. They were also not able to consider other peoples’ ideas, this he called egocentrism. During this stage, children start improving in their usage of symbols and this is confirmed by their playfulness. Children are able to role play such as play the roles of their parents, drivers and nannies. Piaget also used several ways to research the mental abilities of children at this stage. He used a 3-D display of a mountain scene, and then asked the children to describe or choose a picture of what the scene that they had seen. He deduced that most of the children were able to do this without struggle. Then the children were asked to describe a photo that was showing what another person would have seen while looking at the mountain from another viewpoint. But these children always picked the scene that was showing their own view of the mountain picture. Piaget said that this difficulty was because children could not take other people’s visible scenes. Another experiment that was done to display openly a child’s understanding of conservation was where a liquid was put in two containers that were identical. The same liquid was also put in two different containers then the children were asked to say which container held a lot of liquid. And children always picked the container that was appearing fuller than the other. Piaget performed many similar experiments on conservation number task, weight task, volume task, quantity task and length task and he discovered that very few children had the understanding of conservation before the age of five (Boyd, 2007). Researching on the theory of mind displays contradicting results. Children who were past their preoperational conservative tasks always passed definitive mental state tests of understanding whereas young children passed this test. A meta-analysis was conducted to address the empirical theory inconsistencies and controversies. False-performance always showed a development pattern on different children in various environments and various conservative task manipulations. The theory of mind is an important topic that is always being researched on. It emphasizes that psychology involves monitoring people’s mental states. It is obvious that a child could make that error and search for the apple somewhere else. False belief serves as a stage for mentalist understanding of young children. Cognitive theories, this theory is not biological or humanistic. The Gestalt theories including; Wertheimer and Koffka these are theories interested on how the brain draws a pattern of the current world. The benefit of the theory is the attention that it gets to the problem-solving part in learning. Its behaviourism is concentrated in simplifying a task into simple tasks that can be done easily. The theory is also influenced by the psychology of Piaget on concentrating on maturing factors that affect a child’s understanding (Smith, 2003). The cognitive theory is generally based on hoe people understand things in their environment. It is also the foundation of the constructivism (an educational approach) which insists on a student being creative. Theorists who have studied the cognitive developments in children have been known as neo-Piagetians. They said that the maturing processing speed to increasing the working memory and set upper limits on complex problems that a child was able to solve. The neo-Piagetians said that the experience on development was very specific to environmental and cultural differences than what was in Piaget’s theory. For example, they concluded that a child’s ability to process information quickly was related to the biological maturation of the central nervous system (Wood, 2006). I conclude that a socio-cultural approach directs us to look at the interactions are for learning in a specific way. Piaget’s view of how children’s minds work and how they develop influenced him to research on how things developed that way. He in turn gave stages in which he believed that children’s minds developed in, but this argument is played down by neo-Piagetians who say that the minds of children develops smoothly. The understanding of child development is important for the growth of the child into adulthood. References Berk, L. E. (2009). Child Development 8th Edition. London: Pearson. Boyd, H. B. (2007). The Developing Child 11th Edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall PTR. Clare Wood, K. L. (2006). Developmental Psychology in Action. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Greeno, J. G. (2006). Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. Michigan: University of Michigan. Peter K Smith, H. C. (2003). Understanding children's development 4th Edition. London: Oxford. planning, T. d. (1997). Sarah L. Friedman, Ellin Kofsky Scholnick. London: Routledge. Sieglar, R. S. (1998). childrens thinking,3rd edtion. London: Oxford University Press. Read More