What is the significance of developmental theories to education

Motivation is the process whereby goal-directed activities are instigated and sustained. As environment properly arranged help learning to occur, teachers should prepare the environment that will help learners to learn such as arranging activities that suit environment.

Teachers also need to help learners make practice of what they have learned. This is important as learning is subject to the rate of occurrence of behaviour. The practicing is important for strengthening the responses. Learning should be reinforced.

Students should therefore be given rewards. Teachers are to reward any desired behaviour in learning. However to weaken the undesired behaviour learned, teachers should apply punishment. In developing the profession of teaching, teachers have to note that developing professionally has some benefits such as being able to help learners learn. This is to say teachers plan to develop professionally due to these observable benefits as well. Cognitive learning theorists stress the acquisition of knowledge and skills, formation of mental structures and processing of information and beliefs Chunk, To cognitivists, learning is an internal mental phenomenon inferred from what people say and do.

They contend that learning best takes place by doing it Aggarwal, Practice of skills and correct feedback as needed promote learning. What students do with information, how they attend to, rehearse, transform, code, store, and retrieve is critically important. In general cognitivists suggest that learning takes place in the mind as is a result of mental processes on the information received.

Teachers need to use variety of teaching techniques. This helps teachers lead students to explore the concepts from different angels. Observational learning by Albert Bandura suggests that students learn by observing. Teachers therefore need to be role models to their students. Current learning builds upon the previous one. Teachers need to provide exercises and practices to the learners. This is because students learn best in the course of doing exercises.

Exercises help to accommodate the information into the mind. Courses and topics should be divided into subparts which can easily be understood by students. The small parts should be taught in such a way that they reinforce each other. This theory was put forward by Jean Piaget whose study focused on the development of children understanding. He did this through observing them while talking and performing different activities.

His particular insight was on the role of maturation in increasing capacity of children to understand their world.

It was recognized that, children cannot undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so Atherton, Note that assimilation and accommodation go together: you can't have one without the other. Jean Piaget believed that humans learn through the construction of one logical structure after another.

He also concluded that the logic of children and their modes of thinking are initially entirely different from those of adults. It also has to be flexible to respond to initial and emerging ideas and skills.

Planning should include strategies like; how learners will receive feedback, how they will take part in assessing their learning and how they will be helped to make further progress to ensure that learners understand the goals they are pursuing and the criteria that will be applied in assessing their work alternative assessment.

This will enable learners to impart knowledge and skills compatible to their understanding ability. This structure also reflects also the age of learners for example preschool children can start at the age of years the time where their is rapid language development. Teachers of this level do so to meet this objective. Constructivism is a theory of knowledge with roots in philosophy, and psychology.

The founders of this theory are : Vygotsky, Brunner and John Dewey , they believe that 1 knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject; 2 the function of cognition is adaptive and serves the organization of the experiential world.

In other words, "learning involves constructing one's own knowledge from one's own experiences. Meaning that humans generate knowledge and meaning from an interaction between their experiences and their ideas i. Hawkins said that knowledge is actively constructed by learners through interaction with physical phenomenon and interpersonal exchanges. Mathew said that constructivist teaching and constructivist learning are Oxymoronic terms meaning that they are two terms which goes together but they are controversial to each other.

In constructivist teaching the teacher is required to enact agendas from outside the classroom that is it has to be of societal imperative but intended to enrich the curriculum at classroom level. Bell describes four forms of constructivist relationship between teacher and student these are;.

Power of: This is also a traditional approach of instruction where the teacher ignores learning opportunities in the course of teaching but students are told to take note of them to be explored post learning process. Power for: This is a democratic approach of teaching where the learner is freer to explore physical environment so as to solve some problems and create new knowledge.

Power with: This is a democratic approach of teaching where learners have high opportunity in the course of learning. It was contended that, constructivist teaching scheme has five phases which are:. The theory has far-reaching consequences for cognitive development and learning as well as for the practice of teaching in schools.

Professional development should consider the important of using learners experience in teaching and learning process. By experiencing the successful completion of challenging tasks, learners gain confidence and motivation to embark on more complex challenges Vygotsky call it as zone of proximal development ZPD Vygotsky, Teachers should encourage and accept student autonomy and initiative.

They should try to use raw data and primary sources, in addition to manipulative, interactive, and physical materials. So that students are put in situations that might challenge their previous conceptions and that will create contradictions that will encourage discussion among them. In our teaching therefore we need to use some activities which originate from our environment so that learning can be meaningful to students. Bandura's child development theory suggests that observation plays a critical role in learning, but this observation does not necessarily need to take the form of watching a live model.

Instead, people can also learn by listening to verbal instructions about how to perform a behavior as well as through observing either real or fictional characters displaying behaviors in books or films. Another psychologist named Lev Vygotsky proposed a seminal learning theory that has gone on to become very influential, especially in the field of education.

Like Piaget, Vygotsky believed that children learn actively and through hands-on experiences. His sociocultural theory also suggested that parents, caregivers, peers and the culture at large were responsible for developing higher-order functions.

In Vygotsky's view, learning is an inherently social process. Through interacting with others, learning becomes integrated into an individual's understanding of the world. This child development theory also introduced the concept of the zone of proximal development, which is the gap between what a person can do with help and what they can do on their own. It is with the help of more knowledgeable others that people are able to progressively learn and increase their skills and scope of understanding.

As you can see, some of psychology's best-known thinkers have developed theories to help explore and explain different aspects of child development. While not all of these theories are fully accepted today, they all had an important influence on our understanding of child development. Today, contemporary psychologists often draw on a variety of theories and perspectives in order to understand how kids grow, behave, and think. These theories represent just a few of the different ways of thinking about child development.

In reality, fully understanding how children change and grow over the course of childhood requires looking at many different factors that influence physical and psychological growth. Genes, the environment, and the interactions between these two forces determine how kids grow physically as well as mentally. Ever wonder what your personality type means?

Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Developmental assessment of children. J Clin Diagn Res. John Bowlby and contemporary issues of clinical diagnosis. Attachment Lond. Understanding observational learning: an interbehavioral approach. Anal Verbal Behav. Esteban-guitart M. The biosocial foundation of the early Vygotsky: Educational psychology before the zone of proximal development.

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These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. Table of Contents View All. Table of Contents. Psychosexual Theory. Psychosocial Theory. Behavioral Theories. Cognitive Theory. Attachment Theory. Social Learning Theory. Sociocultural Theory.

Freud's Stages of Psychosexual Development. Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development. Piaget's Four Stages of Development. Understanding Attachment Theory.

How Social Learning Theory Works. Sociocultural Theory: Examples and Applications. Issues in Developmental Psychology. Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? In a classroom, for example, a teacher might praise a student for speaking during discussion, but ignore him for making very similar remarks out of turn.

In operant conditioning, the schedule of reinforcement refers to the pattern or frequency by which reinforcement is linked with the operant. If a teacher praises me for my work, does she do it every time, or only sometimes? Frequently or only once in awhile? In respondent conditioning, however, the schedule in question is the pattern by which the conditioned stimulus is paired with the unconditioned stimulus.

If I am student with Mr Horrible as my teacher, does he scowl every time he is in the classroom, or only sometimes? Frequently or rarely? Behavioral psychologists have studied schedules of reinforcement extensively for example, Ferster, et al. For teachers, however, the most important finding may be this: partial or intermittent schedules of reinforcement generally cause learning to take longer, but also cause extinction of learning to take longer.

This dual principle is important for teachers because so much of the reinforcement we give is partial or intermittent. Typically, if I am teaching, I can compliment a student a lot of the time, for example, but there will inevitably be occasions when I cannot do so because I am busy elsewhere in the classroom. For teachers concerned both about motivating students and about minimizing inappropriate behaviors, this is both good news and bad.

Once the inappropriate behavior is learned, though, it will take somewhat longer to disappear even if everyone—both teacher and classmates—make a concerted effort to ignore or extinguish it.

Finally, behavioral psychologists have studied the effects of cues. In operant conditioning, a cue is a stimulus that happens just prior to the operant behavior and that signals that performing the behavior may lead to reinforcement. Reinforcement was associated with pressing a lever when, and only when, the light was on.

In classrooms, cues are sometimes provided by the teacher deliberately, and sometimes simply by the established routines of the class. Calling on a student to speak, for example, can be a cue that if the student does say something at that moment, then he or she may be reinforced with praise or acknowledgment.

But if that cue does not occur—if the student is not called on—speaking may not be rewarded. In more everyday, non-behaviorist terms, the cue allows the student to learn when it is acceptable to speak, and when it is not. Behaviorist models of learning may be helpful in understanding and influencing what students do, but teachers usually also want to know what students are thinking , and how to enrich what students are thinking.

For convenience these are called psychological constructivism and social constructivism or sometimes sociocultural theory.

The main idea of psychological constructivism is that a person learns by mentally organizing and reorganizing new information or experiences. The organization happens partly by relating new experiences to prior knowledge that is already meaningful and well understood. Stated in this general form, individual constructivism is sometimes associated with a well-known educational philosopher of the early twentieth century, John Dewey — Although Dewey himself did not use the term constructivism in most of his writing, his point of view amounted to a type of constructivism, and he discussed in detail its implications for educators.

He also argued that a curriculum could only be justified if it related as fully as possible to the activities and responsibilities that students will probably have later , after leaving school. To many educators these days, his ideas may seem merely like good common sense, but they were indeed innovative and progressive at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Piaget described learning as interplay between two mental activities that he called assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the interpretation of new information in terms of pre-existing concepts, information or ideas. A preschool child who already understands the concept of bird , for example, might initially label any flying object with this term—even butterflies or mosquitoes. Assimilation is therefore a bit like the idea of generalization in operant conditioning, or the idea of transfer described at the beginning of this chapter.

Assimilation operates jointly with accommodation , which is the revision or modification of pre-existing concepts in terms of new information or experience. The preschooler who initially generalizes the concept of bird to include any flying object, for example, eventually revises the concept to include only particular kinds of flying objects, such as robins and sparrows, and not others, like mosquitoes or airplanes.

At any given time, cognitive equilibrium consists of an ever-growing repertoire of mental representations for objects and experiences. Piaget called each mental representation a schema all of them together—the plural—were called schemata.

A schema was not merely a concept, but an elaborated mixture of vocabulary, actions, and experience related to the concept. From these collective revisions and additions the child gradually constructs whole new schemata about birds, butterflies, and other flying objects.

Exhibit 1 diagrams the relationships among the Piagetian version of psychological constructivist learning. Parents and teachers, it would seem, are left lingering on the sidelines, with few significant responsibilities for helping learners to construct knowledge. But the Piagetian picture does nonetheless imply a role for helpful others: someone, after all, has to tell or model the vocabulary needed to talk about and compare birds from airplanes and butterflies!

Piaget did recognize the importance of helpful others in his writings and theorizing, calling the process of support or assistance social transmission. But he did not emphasize this aspect of constructivism. Piaget was more interested in what children and youth could figure out on their own, so to speak, than in how teachers or parents might be able to help the young figure out Salkind, Partly for this reason, his theory is often considered less about learning and more about development , or long-term change in a person resulting from multiple experiences that may not be planned deliberately.

We will therefore return to Piaget later to discuss development and its importance for teaching in more detail. This framework often is called social constructivism or sociocultural theory. An early expression of this viewpoint came from the American psychologist Jerome Bruner , , , who became convinced that students could usually learn more than had been traditionally expected as long as they were given appropriate guidance and resources.

He called such support instructional scaffolding —literally meaning a temporary framework like the ones used to construct buildings and that allow a much stronger structure to be built within it. Vygotsky made the reasonable proposal that when a child or novice is learning a new skill or solving a new problem, he or she can perform better if accompanied and helped by an expert than if performing alone—though still not as well as the expert.

Someone who has played very little chess, for example, will probably compete against an opponent better if helped by an expert chess player than if competing against the opponent alone. Vygotsky called the difference between solo performance and assisted performance the zone of proximal development or ZPD for short —meaning, figuratively speaking, the place or area of immediate change.

If the expert is skilled and motivated to help, then the expert arranges experiences that let the novice to practice crucial skills or to construct new knowledge. In this regard the expert is a bit like the coach of an athlete—offering help and suggesting ways of practicing, but never doing the actual athletic work himself or herself.

These relationships are diagrammed in Exhibit 2. But compared to psychological constructivism, social constructivism highlights a more direct responsibility of the expert for making learning possible. He or she must not only have knowledge and skill, but also know how to arrange experiences that make it easy and safe for learners to gain knowledge and skill themselves.

These requirements sound, of course, a lot like the requirements for classroom teaching. In addition to knowing what is to be learned, the expert i. But of course, no one said that teaching is easy! As some of the comments above indicate, psychological and social constructivism have differences that suggest different ways for teachers to teach most effectively.

The theoretical differences are related to three ideas in particular: the relationship of learning and long-term development, the role or meaning of generalizations and abstractions during development, and the mechanism by which development occurs. When acting or reacting to his or her surroundings, the child has relatively little language skill initially.

From this point of view, therefore, a primary responsibility of teachers is to provide a very rich classroom environment, so that children can interact with it independently and gradually make themselves ready for verbal learning that is increasingly sophisticated.

Social constructivists such as Vygotsky, on the other hand, emphasize the importance of social interaction in stimulating the development of the child. Language and dialogue therefore are primary, and development is seen as happening as a result—the converse of the sequence pictured by Piaget. Obviously a child does not begin life with a lot of initial language skill, but this fact is why interactions need to be scaffolded with more experienced experts— people capable of creating a zone of proximal development in their conversations and other interactions.

In the preschool years the experts are usually parents; after the school years begin, the experts broaden to include teachers. Consistent with the ideas above, psychological constructivism tends to see a relatively limited role for abstract or hypothetical reasoning in the life of children—and even in the reasoning of youth and many adults.

Such reasoning is regarded as an outgrowth of years of interacting with the environment very concretely.