Child Development Theories and Examples

The Transformation Of Concepts Of Ability And Competence

As these research examples illustrate, analyzing development as a collaborative process leads to a reconceptualization of many basic cognitive-developmental concepts. Since every behavior can be seen to depend on a collaboration between child and environment, it becomes impossible to analyze any behavior without including both organismic and environmental factors.
Cognitive developmentalists and psychometricians commonly speak of children's ability, or capacity, or competence, as if a child possessed a set of static characteristics that could be defined independently of any context: One child has the ability to understand conservation of water, and another child does not. As soon as the collaborative role of the environment is introduced, these concepts must be radically changed. Competence is not a fixed characteristic of the child but an emergent characteristic of the child in a specific context. It is not enough to make a distinction between competence and performance, because in standard usage this distinction begs the question. The assumption is made that children really do possess a set of competences, but they are somehow prevented from demonstrating them in their performance (Overton and Newman, 1982). If concepts such as ability and competence are to be consonant with a collaboration approach, they must be redefined in terms of the interaction of child with environment.
Within a collaboration approach, concepts of ability and competence retain their utility, because the child is part of the analysis, too. In certain contexts, children perform up to a certain level of complexity and not beyond it, thus demonstrating a certain competence for those contexts. At times children show partial knowledge of what is needed for a particular task (Brown et al., 1983; Feffer, 1982) and so demonstrate the competence for collaboration with a more knowledgeable partner. Also, children evidence large individual differences in the facility with which they can generalize an ability to new contexts, thus demonstrating variations in the competence to generalize. Upon the emergence of formal operation, for example, very bright children seem to be able to use their new capacity quickly in a wide range of tasks, whereas children of normal intelligence take much longer to extend the capacity to many tasks (Fischer and Pipp, 1984; Webb, 1974).
The collaboration orientation poses many new questions for the study of cognitive development. It is not enough to ask questions such as: How does the child's behavior change with age, or how does the child's behavior change as a function of experience? Instead, questions like the following need to be asked: Why do children often perform below capacity? How does context support or fail to support high level performances that are known to be within the child's reach? How do specific collaborative systems support the acquisition of particular skills in different ways at different developmental levels? How is the nature of the child's experience jointly regulated by the child and by resources (human and other) available in the child's environment? Later, we examine several lines of research that show promise of contributing answers to such questions.