PSYC20008 Lecture 1: PSYC20008 Lecture 1 +2
10 May 2018
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Lecture 1
- Plato: emphasised self-control and discipline as the most important elements of
education, children are born with innate knowledge (e.g. cat is an animal)
- Aristotle: believed that all knowledge comes from experience, the infant mind is like a
blackboard, wrote that education should meet the needs of the child
- Middle ages view: for many centuries people saw children as fully formed, miniature
adults (paintings of children from the Middle Ages), socially children were treated like
adults (working, mingling with adults by the age of 6 or 7)
- Some thought that children entered the world with “a God-given purity and innocence
that is later corrupted”
- Others thought that “children bear humankind’s original sin. Children, they emphasised,
are ignorant creatures who possess a wanton sensuality and a lack of morals”, need to
be educated to ward away bad influences and keep themselves on the good path
- Preformationist view: scientists thought that a tiny, fully human (or homunculus) was
present, debated if these tiny humans were present in the sperm or the egg, this
preformationist thinking dates back to at least the 5th C BC and even as late as the 18th
C most scientists held preformationist views
- John Locke (1690) - children are neither innately good nor bad, but are nothing at; tabula
rasa (blank slate), using writings of Aristotle, views fitted well with the ideals of the
European enlightenment (equality for all, everybody is born equal, only through
experience in life that people are moulded (adult becomes adult through experience
alone), Pavlov and Skinner are Locke’s theoretical heirs, focus on growth of character of
child - self-control, rewards and punishment underpinned his educational philosophy
- Jean Jacques Rousseau: children are not empty containers but have their own modes of
feeling and thinking, born with some qualities, grow according to nature’s plan (which
urges them to develop different capacities at different stages), people are inherently
good and could live happily according to their spontaneous passions but they are
enslaved by social forces, urged parents to give children maximum freedom that they will
learn spontaneously
- Charles Darwin: theory of evolution inspired research on nature of child development as
this understanding might help develop insights into the nature of humans, conducted
careful observations of his son William (noting motor, sensory and emotional growth),
wrote “baby biography” published in 1877 represented one of the first methods of
studying children
- Alfred Binet (French): Binet and his colleagues pioneered the systematic testing of
children’s intelligence, among the first to investigate differences among children of the
same age
- Hall and Gesell: American researchers, Stanley Hall, and later Arnold Gesell, presented
questionnaires to hundreds of parents, children and teachers, to detail numerous
aspects of development (feeding schedules of infants, toilet training techniques,
activities of pre-schoolers, social relationships of children, adolescent changes)
- Freud: Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, developed theories of development from
his analysis of the recollections of his patient’s dreams and childhood recollections,
psychodynamic theories of development
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- Watson: John Watson (American psychologist) developed the behaviouralist theory,
children’s development is determined by environmental factors especially rewards and
punishment that follow particular events or stimuli, little Albert
- Seven enduring themes:
- 1) Nature and Nurture: what is the relationship between nature and nurture in child
development, how is one more important than the other, how do they interrelate,
Genetics and biology that go into child // What is the parenting they are receiving, how
they’re looked after in school
- 2) Children’s role in their own development: what role do children themselves play,
children play an active role in carving out their own environment
- 3) Continuity/discontinuity in development: is development a continuous or staged
process
- 4) mechanisms for developmental change: what external and internal stimuli help
someone to change over time
- 5) Socio-cultural context: how important is it for parents/school to step in and keep the
child under control
- 6) Individual differences in child development: at a particular age point why are children
so different from each other
- 7) Research and children’s welfare: how can research help improve children’s welfare
- Cross-sectional design: people of different ages are studied at a single time,
(advantages) yield useful data about differences among age groups, quick and easy to
administer, (disadvantages) uninformative about stability in individual differences over
time (doesn’t tell us how people change over time, how unstable people’s performance
is and how it changes over time), uninformative about similarities and differences in
individual people’s patterns of change
- Longitudinal design: people are examined repeatedly over a prolonged period of time,
(advantages) indicates the degree of stability of individual differences over long periods,
reveals individual change over long periods, (disadvantages) difficult to keep all
participants in the study, repeatedly testing people can threaten the external validity of
study (generalising results to broader community)
- Microgenetic design: people are observed intensively over a relatively short time period
while a change is occurring, (advantages) intensive observation of changes while they
are occurring can reveal processes of change, reveals individual change patterns over
short periods in considerable detail, (disadvantages) does not provide information about
typical patterns of change over long period, does not reveal individual change patterns
over long period
- Ethical research: no psychological or physical harm, obtain informed consent, preserve
participant anonymity, take action to counteract unforeseen negative results that may
arise from the research, be honest with the participant and explain the aims of the
research in a way s/he can understand
Lecture 2
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find more resources at oneclass.com
- Darwin: concept in evolutionary terms → as a species we are adapted to our
environment and the way we deal/interact with it is based on nature of mind, genetic
model
- Locke vs Darwin model: environmentalist mind (tabula rasa) vs constrained by
evolutionary background
- Rousseau: left to own devices → children develop natural, gentle, correct way (writing
against notion of growing up in families that constrain/control and schools children,
unnatural developmental process)
- Binet: first person to develop psychological test to assess competence, the intelligence
test assessed learning/educational experience, was looking at what people had acquired
from experience
- Piagetian Theory: stages of development, describes changes in operational thought
(operation = mentality, thinking, how good at operating on ideas)
- 1) Sensorimotor (up to 2 years): 0-2 years, 9 months and older have a sense of object
permanence (point/stage that child can keep something in mind, develop thought), don’t
have thought in classical way, sensorimotor schemas, discover the world through action
on it, sense → motoric activity → image → thinking
- 2) Pre-Operational (up to 5 years): 2-6/7 years, child begins to develop mental
representations (mental ideas), no thought abilities → primitive thought abilities,
perspective taking (inability to operate on own thinking, can the child pick out the photo
of what the doll sees, 3-5 yo can’t do this task, child can’t operate on own thinking, can’t
operate on the thought to pick out the ability to see what the perspective of another, take
mental perspective of another in mind → if can’t do that → limits thinking)
- 3) Concrete Operational (up to 12 years): 7-8 to 11-12 years, children able to manipulate
mentally internal representations formed in the preoperational period, can operate on
concrete images or instances/mental representations, keep one idea in mind and
compare with another one, perspective taking task (keep own perspective in mind and
see perspective of doll), development of mental ability, all tasks that demonstrate
inability of children to operate on their thinking
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Plato: emphasised self-control and discipline as the most important elements of education, children are born with innate knowledge (e. g. cat is an animal) Aristotle: believed that all knowledge comes from experience, the infant mind is like a blackboard, wrote that education should meet the needs of the child. Middle ages view: for many centuries people saw children as fully formed, miniature adults (paintings of children from the middle ages), socially children were treated like adults (working, mingling with adults by the age of 6 or 7) Some thought that children entered the world with a god-given purity and innocence that is later corrupted . Others thought that children bear humankind"s original sin. Children, they emphasised, are ignorant creatures who possess a wanton sensuality and a lack of morals , need to be educated to ward away bad influences and keep themselves on the good path.
