Child Development Theories and Examples

What Is Not Known

The new integrative orientation in cognitive-developmental science has led to wide recognition of the need for framing questions in ways that avoid the traditional oppositions that have typified behavioral science. Most centrally, questions have traditionally been formulated in ways that led to answers focusing on either the child or the environment as the main locus of developmental change. What many researchers are striving for today are ways of building constructs that combine the child and the environment as joint determiners of development. A promising direction for this enterprise is a focus on the collaboration of child and environment. The child is seen as always acting in some particular context that supports his or her behavior to varying degrees. One result of this focus is that concepts of ability, capacity, and competence are radically altered. They are no longer fixed characteristics of a child but emergent characteristics of a child in a context. How to recast these concepts is a major unresolved question in cognitive development.
To do research based on the integrative, collaborative orientation, investigators need to assess behavior in multiple contexts and with various methods. It cannot be assumed that a single variable provides a valid index of overall cognitive functioning in any domain or that behavior is truly divided into neat boxes labeled cognition, social behavior, emotion, and so forth. Within this reorientation toward research, investigations naturally cross traditional category boundaries and examine variations in the child and the environment simultaneously. We have focused on four topics consistent with this reorientation that have been generally neglected in research on cognitive development in school-age children.
Emotion has traditionally been treated as distinct from cognition, but some recent research suggests that in many ways the two may develop hand in hand. Some research has shown that school-age children make major advances in their ability to conceptually integrate diverse emotions. Other major topics that demand investigation include emotional reorganizations that appear to accompany the general cognitive reorganizations of the school years and Freudian, psychodynamic processes, which seem to flower during these years. A promising approach to studying emotion-cognition relationships is to choose issues in children's daily lives that naturally evoke strong emotions, such as the self, divorce, and illness.
Brain development is a major topic in the neurosciences today, but there has been little research on the relationships between brain development and cognitive development. Such research is especially difficult to do, and it has an unfortunate history. Preliminary results have often been overgeneralized and distorted, and unjustified claims have been made about practical implications for education or other socially important endeavors. Nevertheless, research on brain growth and cognitive development promises to provide important scientific breakthroughs, even though it will be a long time before legitimate practical applications will be possible.
Social development and cognitive development have typically been treated as distinct categories, and there has been little research on the contributions of social interaction to cognitive development. The few studies in recent years on this topic suggested that social interaction plays a central role in cognitive development in the school years. Much of the course of normal cognitive development seems to involve a process of guided reinvention, in which the child constructs new skills with the help of constant support and guidance from the social environment, especially from dyadic interactions. Analysis of this process has been almost completely neglected in school-age children, despite the fact that many of the failures of school-based education seem to result from the ways that classroom procedures diverge from the norm of guided reinvention.
Schooling and the literate practices associated with it seem to produce major extensions of human intelligence. Not only are basic cognitive abilities amplified, but the scope of intelligence broadens greatly, and a new capacity arises to conceive of representational systems and to analyze them. The scientific revolution appears both to have resulted from these extensions of human intelligence and to be producing further extensions. These effects of schooling and literate practices illustrate the central role of the environment in supporting cognitive growth. Unfortunately, research has been sparse on these effects, especially in school-age children, even though the school years appear to be the period during which these new types of intelligence are built.
The present epoch is an exciting time in the history of developmental science in general and the study of cognitive development in particular. With the new emphasis on relating the parts of the child and on placing the child firmly in a context, we expect to see major advances in the understanding of cognitive development in school-age children.
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