The Developing Learner

This is Unit Three, part one, on the developing learner: how development is studied, the growing body and brain, and Piaget's account of how thinking changes. Unit Two closed on teachers studying their own practice. Unit Three turns to what research has found about how learners develop. Carry one idea through this part: grand theories describe development as universal steps, like a staircase, but real development varies with experience. At the entry on formal thought, the part shows a stage that not everyone reaches. By the end you will be able to place an influence in Bronfenbrenner's systems. To tell a critical period from a sensitive one. To explain why the adolescent brain seeks sensation before it can control it. To distinguish assimilation from accommodation. And to say what later research changed, and did not change, about Piaget's stages.

Eight entries on how development is studied: grand theories, three domains, nested systems, and the field's recurring questions.

Why teachers study development.

EDP 0201 Why Development Matters

Knowing how children develop helps teachers set activities and expectations that fit, since students of similar age still differ widely and different ages differ more; a multi-grade teacher sees at once how differently seven- and ten-year-olds reason. Developmental trends vary in how universal they are and how strictly they follow a sequence.

Staircases, and kaleidoscopes.

EDP 0202 Grand Theories

Educational psychology has favored grand theories of development, which describe change as general, universal and sequential, like a staircase climbed step by step, where a kaleidoscope model expects many patterns. Grand theories organize a great deal, but they risk overgeneralizing, confusing what happens to some children with what should happen to all.

Three domains of development.

EDP 0203 Three Domains

Development is studied in three domains: physical, covering body, brain, senses and health; cognitive, covering thinking and language; and psychosocial, covering emotions, personality and relationships. The domains interact constantly: puberty changes the body, the self-image and friendships at the same time, so a change in one usually reaches the others.

The systems around a child.

EDP 0204 Bronfenbrenner's Systems

Bronfenbrenner's ecological model nests a child in systems: the microsystem of family, school and peers; the mesosystem, the links between them, such as a parent-teacher conference; the exosystem, settings the child is not in that still affect them, like a parent's workplace; and the macrosystem, with the chronosystem adding timing.

Placing an influence in the system.

EDP 0205 Placing an Influence in the System

To place an influence in Bronfenbrenner's model, ask where the child stands. Settings the child takes part in directly, such as family, classroom and peer group, form the microsystem. Relationships between those settings, such as parent-teacher communication, form the mesosystem. Settings the child never enters but that shape their life, such as a parent's job or the school board, form the exosystem. Cultural values, laws and economic conditions form the macrosystem, and change over time the chronosystem. When an employer cuts a parent's evening shifts and the parent can now help with homework, the workplace is exosystem and the homework time microsystem. Home and school are each microsystems; only the connection between them is the mesosystem.

Gradual change, or jumps.

EDP 0206 Continuous or Discontinuous

Continuous development changes gradually by small amounts, like growing taller; discontinuous development changes in qualitative jumps, like grasping that hidden objects still exist, a new ability rather than more of an old one. A related question asks whether children actively shape their development or passively receive it; Piaget saw them as active.

Windows that close, and windows that narrow.

EDP 0207 Critical or Sensitive Period

A critical period is a limited window in which an experience must occur; if it is missed, the loss cannot be made up. A sensitive period is a window in which development comes most easily, but later experience can still help, with more effort. Language learning is a sensitive period: a teenager arriving from abroad learns a new language more slowly than a young child, but learns it. The terms are often used as if they meant the same thing. Ask whether later experience can still produce the change; if it can, even slowly, the window was sensitive.

Inheritance and experience together.

EDP 0208 Nature and Nurture

Nature, what we inherit, and nurture, what we experience, interact constantly, so development is never the product of one alone: a child's inherited ear for music develops only with lessons and practice. The question is no longer which one matters, but how the two work together for a given trait.

Five entries on the growing body, from newborn reflexes to puberty and the effects of health and poverty.

Puberty, and pressure to fit gender roles.

EDP 0209 Puberty and Gender Roles

Puberty brings sexual maturation and a growth spurt, and early adolescence often brings gender-role intensification, when pressure to fit conventional gender roles rises: some girls begin to downplay success in math and science, and some boys turn toward athletics. Girls are often taller than boys around ages ten to fourteen.

The reflexes newborns bring.

EDP 0210 Reflexes

Newborns arrive with survival reflexes, such as breathing, rooting and sucking, and primitive reflexes, such as the Babinski, stepping, grasping and Moro reflexes. A newborn who turns toward a touch on the cheek and begins to suck is rooting. Survival reflexes stay; primitive reflexes fade as voluntary movement takes over.

The direction of motor development.

EDP 0211 Motor Development

Motor development runs cephalocaudally, from the head downward, and proximodistally, from the center of the body outward: a baby controls the head before sitting, and reaches with the arm before using a pincer grasp. Gross motor skills use large muscles, as in running; fine motor skills use the hands and fingers.

Sensing, and making sense.

EDP 0212 Sensation and Perception

Sensation is the sense organs registering information; perception is the brain interpreting it. Vision is the least developed sense at birth, and a newborn sees best at eight to sixteen inches and prefers faces. Hearing is keen from birth, with newborns preferring voices, especially their mother's; sensing a sound is not yet understanding it.

Health, illness and poverty.

EDP 0213 Health, Illness and Poverty

Children catch more colds than adults, and illness clusters where there is crowding, scarce health care and stress, conditions that often come with poverty. Frequent illness means missed lessons. Physical health belongs in a teacher's view of learning, because holding a pencil, sitting still and staying well all affect schoolwork.

Four entries on the developing brain: connections, speed, flexibility, and the adolescent brain's uneven timing.

Connections made, and connections pruned.

EDP 0214 Neurons and Pruning

The brain holds about eighty-six billion neurons, which connect at synapses. Early childhood produces far more connections than are kept: those a child uses often grow stronger, and unused ones are pruned. Pruning is refinement rather than loss, because experience decides which connections survive in each child.

Faster signals, and the last region to mature.

EDP 0215 Myelin and the Lobes

Myelination coats nerve fibers and speeds their signals, continuing into early adulthood, while the prefrontal cortex, which handles planning and judgment, is the last region to mature. Each hemisphere has four lobes: the frontal lobe plans, the occipital lobe sees, the temporal lobe hears, and the parietal lobe processes touch.

A flexible, two-sided brain.

EDP 0216 Plasticity and Lateralization

Neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change with experience, is greatest in childhood, and lateralization gives the two hemispheres different strengths: the left leads language production, the right visual and spatial processing. The corpus callosum links them and grows fast between three and six, aiding two-handed coordination.

The adolescent brain's uneven timing.

EDP 0217 The Adolescent Brain

In adolescence the reward-sensitive limbic system matures ahead of the prefrontal cortex, so sensation-seeking rises before the capacity for control catches up: the accelerator develops before the brakes, in Steinberg's image. Executive functions such as planning, focusing attention and controlling impulses keep maturing into the twenties.

Four entries on how learners construct knowledge, from two kinds of constructivism to Piaget's engine of change.

Two kinds of constructivism.

EDP 0218 Two Kinds of Constructivism

Psychological constructivism, Piaget's, sees each learner constructing knowledge individually; social constructivism, Vygotsky's, sees learning happen through interaction with more expert others, as one child solves a puzzle alone and another with a parent's hints. Both are constructivist; they differ on whether the key work happens inside the learner or between people.

Support that is meant to come down.

EDP 0219 Scaffolding

Scaffolding is temporary support, given in the right way at the right time, that lets a learner succeed at more than they could alone: a teacher models the first problem, prompts the second and watches the third. The term comes from Wood, Bruner and Ross, and its defining feature is gradual withdrawal.

Fitting the world to a schema, or the schema to the world.

EDP 0220 Assimilation and Accommodation

Piaget held that children organize knowledge in schemas and adapt them two ways: assimilation fits new information into an existing schema, and accommodation changes the schema to fit. Calling a zebra a horse is assimilation; learning it is a different animal is accommodation. Both are adaptation; the question is whether the schema changes.

What drives development forward.

EDP 0221 Disequilibrium and Equilibrium

When new information does not fit, Piaget said, a learner experiences cognitive disequilibrium, and adapting restores equilibrium, driving development forward, as a child certain that heavy things sink watches a large log float and must rethink. A teacher can provoke disequilibrium on purpose, with an experience that challenges what students expect.

Nine entries on Piaget's four stages, what later research revised, and a limit on the last stage.

Four stages in a fixed order.

EDP 0222 Piaget's Stages

Piaget described four stages, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational, taken in a fixed order, none skipped, each transforming and incorporating the last, roughly from birth to two, two to seven, seven to eleven, and eleven onward. The ages are approximate averages; the order, not the timing, is the theory's firm claim.

Thinking through the senses.

EDP 0223 The Sensorimotor Stage

In the sensorimotor stage infants think through their senses and actions, and gradually develop object permanence, the understanding that objects still exist when out of sight: a baby who once forgot a hidden toy now lifts the blanket to find it. The stage ends as mental representation emerges.

What infants know sooner.

EDP 0224 What Infants Know Sooner

Later research found that Piaget underestimated infants: using simpler tasks than his, studies show object permanence around four months and deferred imitation by nine months. Abilities his own tasks missed appeared when the tasks were made simpler. The finding revises Piaget's timing more than his sequence, which has largely held up.

Symbols, and one point of view.

EDP 0225 Preoperational Thought

In the preoperational stage children think symbolically, using words and pretend play, but tend toward egocentrism, difficulty seeing from another's point of view, assuming a viewer across the table sees the same side of a model mountain. They also reason precausally: animism, believing objects are alive, and artificialism, believing people made natural features.

The juice that seems to grow.

EDP 0226 Conservation

Conservation is understanding that an amount stays the same when its shape changes. Preoperational children fail it: poured into a tall thin glass, the same juice seems like more to a four-year-old, because of centration, fixing on one feature such as height, and irreversibility, being unable to mentally pour it back.

Understanding other minds.

EDP 0227 Theory of Mind

Theory of mind is understanding that others have beliefs, desires and intentions of their own, including beliefs that can be false: asked where Sally will look for her moved marble, most four-year-olds say where she left it. False-belief tasks are usually passed around four, and theory of mind develops more slowly in many autistic children.

Logic about concrete things.

EDP 0228 Concrete Operations

In the concrete operational stage children reason logically about concrete objects, using reversibility and decentration to solve conservation and class-inclusion problems: asked whether there are more dogs or more animals, a nine-year-old answers animals. Their logic still fails on purely verbal problems, so hands-on, concrete examples work best.

Reasoning about possibilities.

EDP 0229 Formal Operations

In the formal operational stage adolescents reason abstractly and hypothetically, testing possibilities systematically through hypothetical-deductive reasoning: asked what makes a pendulum swing faster, a teenager varies one factor at a time. Formal thought also brings sarcasm, metaphor and relativistic thinking, seeing that answers can depend on context.

The payoff: formal thought is not universal.

EDP 0230 Formal Thought Is Not Universal

Here the staircase meets its limit. Formal operational thinking is not reached by everyone nor used everywhere: it depends on schooling and experience, many college students fail formal-reasoning problems, and an adult may reason abstractly about work but concretely about unfamiliar science. Training helps only briefly, and adolescents reason through two systems, fast intuitive thought and slower analytic thought.

Look at what you can now do. You can place an influence in Bronfenbrenner's systems by asking where the child stands, remembering that the mesosystem is only the link between settings. You can tell a critical period, a window that closes, from a sensitive one, where later experience still helps. You can explain the adolescent brain's timing: the reward system matures before the prefrontal cortex, the accelerator before the brakes. You can distinguish assimilation, fitting new information into a schema, from accommodation, changing the schema. And you can say what later research did to Piaget: infants know more, sooner, the sequence largely holds, and formal thought is not universal. Part two turns to Vygotsky, language and identity.