hey kids dr. Turner here and welcome to theories in child development now this week is really an overview of a lot of theories you might have heard of in psych 101 or Educational Psychology but it's important to revisit a lot of these theorists because they're going to weigh in on what it means for the developing person like how we come to explain behaviors so the first thing I want to do is talk about this word theory a theory is really just an explanation for something and it's a generalization that means that it should be something like gravity where it applies to everything the problem with creating a theory and child development is that people are so complex and varied and so it's really really hard to come up with some unified theory that explains how we grow how do we develop how we come to think in more sophisticated ways and so what you end up with in the study of child development is really a lot of blind guys trying to explain what an elephant is like you know and somebody's got a hold of the tail and somebody's got a hold of the snout and really we're doing our best but because human development is so multifaceted it's really hard to just strip out all the variables and look at one at a time so the best research in child and adolescent development is multidisciplinary it crosses boundaries it linguists and neuro saw neuro scientists and health workers everybody works together and they're making observations and they're trying to determine if they can see patterns like we talked about last week that occur over and over again and if so what explanations do we have for those patterns and the best theories use multiple methods and they and they take into account multicultural perspectives that were not all thrown down in the same contexts together so what that in mind I want to just highlight some of the big ideas that are in your chapter this week and here they are this mind-numbing slide brought to you from your textbook I want to go over these quickly so that you feel more familiar with them so that they don't just seem like a whole bunch of names and useless information and so as you prepare for discussion here's what I'm gonna have you do so you can you can think about this as you listen to the rest of this video and as you read your book and decide what you want to say in this week's discussion post because I'm going to ask you to identify a developmental change in your own life and then use language from this chapter to help explain that change or that phenomena now you don't have to use a whole framework you might use one piece of prj for instance but do try to use as many terms as you can to help you start using the language of a child and adolescent development and start and so you start mastering these terms and don't feel mastered by them so here's themes in childhood development from last week here's a little recap but themes in childhood development often come in three distinct areas one is the shape one of the things that theorists often disagree on as I mentioned last week is whether or not the right metaphor is stairs that they're discrete steps that it's more like a very significant and observable change or if it's more really like a ramp where you just really don't see the change it since tricked in Kragh mental and small and remember that the stair model is gone apparently the stair model is is where we really think that the whole organism has changed somehow more like a tadpole turning into a frog so they're metaphors but you'll notice in in the ways that there is think that they tend to think in one or the other now time is the timing is the other thing like do these things have to happen and a certain age one of the things we believe about child development is in order for a child to be healthy mental and physically they have to form attachment to a care provider very very early on so there's this idea of critical timing which is that it must happen or the child will have deficits or sensitive timing where if you learn a language earlier it will have you'll have the an opportunity for that for it to not have a dialect to be more fluent and then finally the source is often disputed does it come from the environment or heredity so when we say nature we mean heredity when we say nurture we mean environment so is the change because you're genetically predisposed to a certain behavior or is it because of the way you're socialized so these three things you can use these terms in your post this week are all terms that we use when we try to get a handle on what is happening when we characterize development so one of the first theoretical areas I want to talk about is ethology and this one is very very much in a heredity sort of nature not nurture approach and it is really it looks at how we have evolved like behaviors as ways that are part of our evolutionary heritage this takes it to lead from Darwin and and his theory that you know species were more likely to survive if they had certain traits so ethologist look at what those traits are and if they come to us from our evolutionary history and often those are physical traits the area ethology that examines social behavior is called so sociobiology and it looks at not just how you know we developed opposable thumbs and all of that in order to manipulate our environment it looks specifically at how our social behaviors have helped us survive as species so if it if it meant that we were more likely to survive because we invented language that we had pair-bonding that we created hierarchies in groups you know how how does that part of our evolutionary history drive behavior and this also is very much built on sort of more this is more of a combination nature and nurture when you look at that piece of the equation and now we couldn't discuss any kind of like theoretical framework without inviting Freud and because as the father of modern psychology and he's the first person to start really thinking about this stuff and so even though some of his stuff seems a little awkward or odd now he was the first person that really tried to form these theories out so so um you know according to Freud we had these three elements of our personality and and he thought of these as sequentially developed and so we'd start off with the eed which was a kind of our baby self that it was drooling and demanding and just wanted to be fed and pampered and then we developed this super-ego where we learned the rules and there's the ways things were done and not done and so this is kind of the over-the-shoulder like no oh no you don't mr. it'd know you won't yell at your teacher right now because you're gonna get in trouble and that we as conflicted human beings are really the ego right there in the middle trying to juggle you know my needs and this is in in the societal sort of mores and of course psycho antic theories give us so much of our language and so much humor really anymore but the way that the Freud postulated development as human beings is that we started out with this oral fixation where we just sucked on everything and then we moved on to the anal part of our development in which we're a super interest in our bowel movements and we we came thrilled to know that we could like hold that and this is where we get some language like anal retentive so moving on from our anal phase is our phallic phase in which we realized we were different and boys had penises and girls were gonna forever be penis envy ears and because well darn and then Freud postulated that nothing happened between five and age five and puberty ages and very chill time and then once puberty hit for the rest of our lives would be obsessed with our genitals so you be the judge whether or not Freud is right on those developmental stages instead of looking at um just our sort of psyches in the ways that we develops psychologically Erik Erikson wanted to look at how we how we evolved socially and and so he came up with a stage model of his own where he thought that everything was about identity and social bonding and so you had to go through these stages now notice this is going to be this is going to be sensitive periods or even critical periods because his in his model you move from the top of this chart down to the bottom of this chart and if you don't get trust mistrust then you can't move on to autonomy versus shame adjust and doubt so all of these build on other things and so and so it has more to do with your social development in your interactions with other people and we're going to talk some more about Erikson stages as we go on into social and moral development but for now you can kind of get a sense of what he was he was looking at there he's all about the emergency emergence of the self in the search for identity well talk more about that later the problem with Erickson and Freud is that you really couldn't test that stuff you could generalize that we all go through a trust mistrust fazer oh we all get excited about our poop at some time but we but those weren't measurable and so in the early part of the 19th century you had the behaviorist come on the scene and you probably remember BF Skinner in the Pavlovian experiment in which you could condition a response by for instance the dogs you ring the bell and and you feed them and and when you pair things enough you can get unconscious responses such as salivating when a bell rings and because people were really interested in that they decided to try this on a baby which is actually terrifying but I'm gonna tell you about it anyway so that they so that you can see the ways that people tried to test this stuff out so training a child as if it were a Pavlovian experiment researchers in the year in the early part of the 19th century got a subject called they called little Albert he was a nine month old baby and they introduced him to animals one was a white rat and they noticed that he was not afraid of any of those animals and so after introducing him to all those animals each time they would reintroduce the animal they would startle him by raining I think they ring a bell or some big loud clang that would startle the baby well it turns out you can condition a child so after this conditioning happened every time that little Albert would see a rat he would scream and cry because he'd been conditioned to startle is in so much that he started to fear anything like with a beard or with we're with fur on it so this is not only illegal and ethical and wrong in every way it's not the way things are done thank heavens but that's just part of our history of trying this stuff out BF Skinner took this stuff into the realm of operant conditioning and the difference between classical conditioning and operant conditioning if you really want to know is that operant is unconscious like this baby is startling just be it's because it's unconscious he just fears that there's no like there's no thinking about oh should I be how should this modify my behavior BF Skinner postulated that you could fashion behavior you can modify behavior based on those consequences and he was famous for reinforcers and Punishers and you'll probably remember these from Ed psych but reinforcers always always always increase a behavior so a positive reinforcer is something you get that increases a behavior like oh I get pizza if I read a book so I'll read another book and negative reinforcer keep in mind always increases a behavior so if you put on your seat belt because you're tired of listening to that little alarm go off that is a negative reinforcer because you're avoiding something unpleasant but it's increasing the behavior of putting on that seatbelt Punishers are opposite they are they are trying to decrease a behavior and so you can add something in unpleasant like timeout or you can remove something that somebody likes like their car their nature but punishment is always bent on on reducing a behavior reinforcement is always bent on on increasing a behavior that's how you might recognize the difference we're going to talk about bandura a little bit more later for sure but bandura's basic premise is that there we have so many social influences on our lower and we underestimate how much we learn from watching other people and from modeling and that you can learn vicariously from watching somebody else get punished you can be like I'm not gonna do that so people who make the argument that violent movies are violent video games I'm create violence in children often are extending bandura's social cognitive learning theory so we'll talk about him some more later but he's also a big believer in what we call self-efficacy and that's when you're like oh you know what I'm good at something I'm confident I can start doing this and that feeling it that can-do feeling actually is like M actually creates more possible possibilities for learning so it's like a positive feedback loop we have the information processing model which turned the brain basically into a computer and this was no accident as this metaphor basically came out as computers were starting to be super populating popular and basically it postulated that you have all of this information coming into your sensory memory areas at every moment you can hear my voice you're looking at your screen maybe maybe not you can hear dog barking over in the background I'm you're wondering if you should check your text that you just got so you're getting all of this stuff happening all the time and you can't pay attention to everything so what you do is you focus on something and as soon as you focus on something it moves that thing into working memory where you manipulate information and you focus attention you process stuff you talk about it with other people and if you do that long enough it goes into this long-term memory where you could retrieve it later information processing is a cognitive model and it's very much incremental when you're thinking about the steps or the ramp it's very much the ramp that this happens incrementally that we build nods little by little Piaget I'm just gonna I'm not going to go into this real deeply because Piaget we will revisit many times but as an introduction Piaget was all about cognitive stages and how we come to think in more complex ways from the days in which we just roamed on our hands and knees picking up things and sticking them in their mouths notice the cross over to Freud there that that we go from this very concrete stage where we have to look at objects and we start very in a very rudimentary way trying to make you know thinking through how things work in one direction to becoming like pre-adolescence and where we start to think in abstract terms and what if terms in like if then like what does it mean what does it mean when I do this function what will look like on a graph those are intent they are very very abstract and difficult to wrap your head around so prj tried to formulate the steps involved generally the patterns that happen as kids as children move from that very early stages into these very complex ways of thinking and keep in mind I think it's fairly obvious that piace has a step guy that you have to go through these steps one by one these are not incremental okay we got Vygotsky he's one of my favorites because um he's more like he's more like the coach coaching model that that children learn because they have somebody who is a more capable person who is watching them and seeing where they what they know and and nudging them along at just the right times and he talks about the cultural tools that we use but piano or the pencils or the computer or whatever you do to learn a new thing and that you have the psychological tools to that we have language that we have mathematical systems and he his big metaphor is constructed learning that means that I don't just pour knowledge into your brains like on this video like here you go here's all the information you got to know now take the quiz that's how you learn it's not about that it's more about okay here's some information now do something with it I'll take a look at what you've done with it and I'll let you know how well you're doing it that's why you have discussion in this class so that I can see you using the language so I can see you interacting with other people because when you respond to each other's discussion posts you are building knowledge when you put it in the Dropbox where I can read it and give you feedback I'm seeing where you're at and I'm tossing that back to you so that I can say things like I'm not sure you understand this term because of the way you used it that's what so that's what socio-cultural theory is that you have somebody who knows more was able to look at what you're doing and is able to move you along and Vygotsky x' also famous for the zpd or is Nona proximal development which is that that which is why it's so important to take a class like child and adolescent development because if you're especially if you're gonna be a teacher because if you really want people to learn things you don't want them to be like oh my gosh I learned that in second grade like I can totally conk out during this thing and you also don't want to give them tasks that are impossible for them you want it to be just a little bit uncomfortable so if you're too comfortable in this class if you're not pushing yourself around I'm not needling you a little bit you might be too far in this comfy zone so that's why we have the stretch zone that's why I pushed you a little bit that's why I do more than compliment you because if I'm also worried about your little self esteem that I don't give you feedback not doing my job so I'm so stretchy zone I'm gonna try to keep you there so if you feel nudge it's it's because I'm not doing everybody no matter where you're at I think that's part of part of being a good teacher and finally lastly I want to bring up the dynamic systems model because and this is broken Brenner and I'm not going to go into this terribly deeply right now because it's it merits there's like a total lecture all on its own but basically the big idea broken Brenner had is you can't just measure behavior you have to measure behavior in context now notice you're gonna say something different to your peers if you know I'm not around and if I am and so Brent Brenner was like think of the child is in the middle of all of these things that drive behavior that drive development and that the family is part of mminton and these things go from the closest things to the child the parents and teachers daycare providers to the things that are a little bit further away to neighborhoods to extended family and and and basically all of this happens in a big macro system so so which is your nation which is and notice we have different identities we have we have family identities we have religious identities we and we have net and we have like national and global things and it moves from the center on out so with that in mind I'm gonna turn you loose to to think about a developmental change you've gone through to read through your book to take your quiz this week and to make a post in which you try to use some of these terms and really apply them to your own personal experience and I look forward to your post this week