Evolution refers to the process of change in gene frequencies within populations over many generations. The major principle of evolution is reproductive fitness, which refers to the likelihood that an individual will produce offspring or that that individual’s offspring will produce offspring. Evolution provides an explanation for how a mechanism developed but also why it developed. Previously adaptive mechanisms may not be adaptive anymore in modern society.

Evolutionary developmental psychology refers to a field which looks at development of humans from an evolutionary perspective. It is useful to look at which cognitive operations underlie adaptive behaviour. Psychological mechanisms (e.g. cognitive psychology) may be the missing link between evolution and behaviour.

It is possible that domain-specific mechanisms designed by natural selection to deal with specific aspects of the physical or social environment (e.g. face recognition) evolved. However, evolution has also influenced domain-general mechanisms (e.g. executive functions). There are three types of constraints on learning:

1. Architectural constraints
   This refers to the ways in which the brain is organized at birth (e.g. neurons). This limits the type of and manner in which information can be processed. This, in turn, influences what is processed as development progresses (e.g. no processing of peer feedback at infancy yet).
2. Chronotopic constraints (i.e. maturational constraints)
   This refers to limitations on the developmental timing of events (e.g. some brain areas develop earlier than others). Brain areas may be sensitive to certain types of learning during a particular timeframe (e.g. language learning), putting constraints on learning but also enabling it.
3. Representational constraints
   This refers to hardwired representations in the brain (i.e. innate knowledge). This guides and constraints learning (e.g. basic knowledge of objects).

These constraints indicate that people are prepared by natural selection to process some information more readily than other. Evolved probabilistic cognitive mechanisms refer to information-processing mechanisms that have evolved to solve recurrent problems faced by ancestral populations but they are expressed in a probabilistic fashion in each individual in a generation. This means that it will develop in a species-typical manner if the individual experiences a species-typical environment but if not, development will be different (e.g. people are not innately afraid of snakes but are ready to develop a fear of snakes if the environment gives reason for this).

According to Geary, the mind is a set of hierarchically organized domain-specific modules that develop as children engage their physical and social worlds. Though people have domain-specific modules, human cognition is adaptive to local conditions. Development fine tunes the modules that are very flexible and broad.

The long period of youth in children may be necessary or children to master complexities of human societies and technologies. This means that cognition needs to be adapted to a wide range of environments. There are biologically primary abilities (e.g. language):

1. This has undergone selection pressure and has evolved to deal with problems faced by our ancestors.
2. This

According to Jay Belsky’s process of parenting model, parenting is determined by characteristics of the parent, child and family social context. Parental personality and parental psychological functioning are important factors in the parental domain. In the child’s domain, a difficult temperament is important. In the social context domain, parents’ work habits, sources of parental social support and marital relationship quality are important. 

Positive parenting refers to dimensions of parenting such as warmth, sensitivity, limit setting, appropriate scaffolding and contingency-based reinforcement. Negative parenting refers to behaviours that are inconsistent, over-reactive, controlling and harsh. Negative parenting has been linked to negative child outcomes (e.g. lower academic achievement) while positive parenting has been linked to adaptive child outcomes. Associations between parenting and child outcomes are stronger in early childhood. Adolescence may also be a critical period.

Fathers have taken up a larger parenting role over the recent years. Research shows that the parenting of fathers is subject to contextual influence and has a great impact on child outcomes.

According to Belsky, there are three primary predictors of parenting:

1. Developmental history
   This may predispose the parent to have certain traits which impact the ability to parent. There is evidence for the intergenerational transmission of parenting for mothers, highlighting the importance of developmental history. Parenting and family climate one experiences as a child is a strong predictor of future parenting for mothers.
2. Personality
   
   1. Extraversion
      This is associated with high levels of energy, sociability, response to reward and optimism. This may lead to more sensitive and responsive parenting but the limited verbal ability of a child may lead to maladaptive outcomes due to the social desires of the parents. This may negatively impact fathers but not mothers.
   2. Agreeableness
      This is associated with cooperativeness, being trustful, prosocial and willing to compromise. This is associated with positive parenting because these people have a high investment in maintaining close social relationships. It may also be a protective factor against mother’s likelihood to engage in harsh parenting.
   3. Conscientiousness
      This is associated with being organized, dependable, responsible and orderly. This can aid parenting though extremely high levels of conscientiousness may be detrimental to parenting as there may be conflict between the chaos of a young child and the desire to be very organized. There is a positive association with warm parenting.
   4. Neuroticism
      This is associated with being anxious, insecure and emotionally unstable. It is negatively associated with adaptive parenting behaviours. The focus on their own distress impairs their ability to respond sensitively to the need of the child. It is negatively associated with warm parenting. This may impact mothers more than fathers.
   5. Openness
      This is associated with originality, imagination, open-mindedness and broad-ranging interests. This may lead to sensitive parenting though the desire for new activities may conflict with the need for repetitive tasks of parenting.
3. Psychopathology
   Depression is associated with impaired parenting

Emotions may facilitate adaptation by readying behavioural responses (1), enhancing memory for important events (2) and guide interpersonal interactions (3). However, emotions are maladaptive when they are of the wrong type (1), at the wrong time (2) or at the wrong intensity level (3). Emotions consist of three key features:

1. Emotions arise when an individuals attend to a situation and understands it as being relevant to one’s current goals (i.e. the meaning a person assigns to a situation).
2. Emotions are multifaceted and involve changes in subjective experience (1), behaviour (2) and peripheral physiology (3) (e.g. it gives rise to subjective feeling).
3. Emotions are malleable (i.e. it gives rise to response tendencies that can be changed).

The behavioural changes as a result of emotions are associated with autonomic and neuroendocrine changes that anticipate the associated behavioural response with an emotion.

The modal model of emotion states that emotion arises four steps:

1. There is an inter-personal situation.
2. The situation demands some form of attention.
3. The situation is appraised.
4. There is a response (e.g. anger).

Emotions can change the environment which, in turn, alters the probability of experiencing a certain emotion.

Emotion regulation refers to how one attempts to influence the emotions one has, when one experiences them, how one experiences them and how one expresses these emotions. Intrinsic emotion regulation refers to regulating one’s own emotions. Extrinsic emotion regulation refers to regulating the emotions of somebody else (e.g. regulating the emotions of a child). Emotions can be down-regulated (i.e. lower intensity of emotions) but also up-regulated (i.e. greater intensity of emotions).

Emotion regulatory acts may have their primary impact at different points in the emotion generative process. Each of the parts of the modal model of emotion may be influenced by emotion regulation. There are five points at which individuals can regulate emotions:

1. Situation selection
   This refers to the subset of choices that are taken with a view to the future consequences of the actions for the emotional responses (i.e. actively taking steps to influence emotions). This affects the situation to which a person is exposed. It involves taking actions to make it more likely to be in a situation which gives rise to desired emotions or vice versa (e.g. actively seek out situations that provide us with contact with friends). This process is difficult as people often show duration neglect where they are not good at estimating how long one would feel a certain way as a result of a situation. It is difficult to balance the short- and long-term effects of situation selection and thus often requires the perspective of others.
2. Situation modification (i.e. problem-focused coping)
   This refers to efforts to modify the situation (i.e. external physical environments) directly to alter the emotional impact. This can take many forms, including emotion expression as a form of extrinsic emotion regulation form.
3. Attentional deployment
   

There is a bi-directional influence between peer relationships and children’s disorders. Children’s problems with peers may contribute to the genesis of the disorder (e.g. anxiety) and the disorders may make peer contact more problematic.

Matching of negative emotion with another infant (e.g. making another infant cry in the nursery) is the first form of peer interaction. Variation in responsiveness to young peers may relate to general individual differences in emotionality and behavioural inhibition.

Infants start to smile at, reach towards and touch other infants by the second half of the first year of life. This behaviours develops simultaneously with peers and adults. Topic-related interactions between infant peers is a characteristic of the second year of life (e.g. direct peers’ attention to toys).

Contingent peer interactions (i.e. contingent responsiveness) refers to an interaction which resembles turn-taking and can be observed at 6 months. Infants are better at this when a toy is not present. One year olds are able to engage in cooperative games with their peers. This makes use of sustained interactions with mutual engagement (1), repetition of actions (2), alternating of turns (3) and playful quality (4). Other forms of prosocial behaviour (e.g. helping; sharing; comforting) emerge around the first birthday.

One year olds also have conflict with peers and use force to pursue their goals, next to being cooperative and prosocial. Most conflict regards the possession of toys or violation of personal space. Conflicts between young peers are characterized by communicative gestures and signs of social influence. Toddlers use hitting and grabbing. Grabbing tends to decrease over time while hitting remains stable. This may be a precursor for later aggression. Younger toddlers show more frequent, brief aggression and older toddlers show fewer but more sustained aggressive behaviours. This peaks around 30 months of age. Adult behaviour affects toddlers’ responses to conflict.

Infants are more likely to respond positively to unfamiliar peers than to unfamiliar adults. They also interact differently with unfamiliar peers compared to familiar peers. Preferences for playmates develop in toddlerhood as well as preferences for same sex peers.

There are individual differences in the quality of play with peers during the first few years of life. It is predicted by the social environment (1), experience with siblings (2), attachment figures (3) and other caregivers (4).

Stable individual differences in competence with peers emerge in the first years of life. Individual differences in aggression and externalizing problems emerge during toddlerhood. Socially inhibited behaviour in preschool settings is predicted by earlier patterns of inhibition with peers.

An infant’s ability to engage successfully in interaction with peers requires several skills:

1. Joint attention
   This refers to the ability to coordinate attention with another person and develops with adult partners between 6-12 months of age. Joint attention in the second year predicts theory of mind skills. Successful peer interaction requires being able to read and produce joint attention signals

A peer refers to two or more people who are operating at similar levels of behavioural complexity (e.g. two toddlers). This means that children who differ in age can be considered peer as long as they adjust their behaviour to suit one another’s capabilities as they pursue common interests or goals.

Conflict among peers when resources (e.g. toys) are scarce can help children learn how to resolve their differences in a positive way. This fosters the growth of prosocial conflict resolution (e.g. sharing). Hostile exchanges could create dominance hierarchies which minimizes the likelihood of future aggression within the peer group. Peer interaction may promote the development of adaptive patterns of social conduct.

Equal-status contacts (i.e. same age interactions) with peers are likely to contribute to the development of social competencies. This is more difficult to obtain with parents as parents are the more powerful interaction partner and this is not the case with same-age peers.

A mixed-age peer interaction refers to interactions among children who differ in age by a year or more. The asymmetry in this interaction (i.e. one child having more social competencies) could help children acquire certain social competencies. The presence of younger peers may foster the development of compassion (1), caregiving (2), prosocial inclinations (3), assertiveness (4) and leadership skills (5). Younger peers learn a variety of new skills from this interaction. Mixed-age peer interaction does not have the same influence as sibling contact as sibling status is determined by order of birth whereas peer status is more flexible.

Children tend to spend more time in mixed-age interactions than with same-age peers. As a result of gender segregation in childhood, boys form packs where competition is central (e.g. team sports; competitive games) whereas girls form pairs where a cooperative relationship is central.

Parents and peers each contribute something essential but different to a child’s social development. Regular contact with sensitive, responsive parents permits infants to acquire basic interactive skills and provides them with a sense of security. Contact with peers may allow children to elaborate their basic interactive routines and develop competent and adaptive patterns of social behaviour with those who are similar to them (i.e. peers). Peer rejection is a risk factor for negative outcomes (e.g. delinquency).

Harris claims that peers are more important as socialization agents than parents because parental influence is mainly genetic while peer influence is mainly environmental (e.g. parents react to individual differences in the child due to genetic differences rather than create these differences using parenting). However, parenting behaviour does matter.

Sociability refers to one’s willingness to interact with others and seek their attention or approval. 6-7 month old babies smile, vocalize and gesture to other infants. 10-month-old infants show simple social preferences. By 1 year, they start to imitate peers and between 12 and 18 months they start to react more appropriately to each other’s behaviour (e.g. turn taking). By 18 months of age, infants begin

Effective teachers are teachers who have a positive impact on students’ engagement in learning activities and the outcomes associated with students’ learning (e.g. self-regulation). Teachers operate in the atmosphere of the classroom (1), instruction (2) and management (3). Effective teaching encompasses all three domains. This means that an effective teacher is one who considers how the three domains interact and is able to respond to the teaching environment by implementing practices aligned with the four dimensions of effective teaching.

There are four dimensions of effective teaching:

1. Developing caring classroom communities
   This includes elements from classroom management (e.g. monitoring) to promote a fair, democratic and caring classroom atmosphere.
2. Enhancing students’ motivation to learn
   This is done by providing informative feedback that focuses on students’ effort while still expressing high expectations in ways that promotes interest and engagement.
3. Planning and delivering engaging, assessment-driven instruction
   This includes processes of classroom management and the use of instructional strategies. The learning activities need to be planned and managed to provide an appropriate context in which to motivate students’ learning. Methods include individualizing instruction for students (1), using student assessment data for student grouping (2) and using this data for instructional focus (3).
4. Supporting students’ deep processing and self-regulation
   This includes all other domains and requires careful coordination of all domains.

Teachers’ knowledge and dispositions are reflected in their behaviour and are thus also important. However, this indirectly influences students’ outcomes but directly affect teachers’ skills.

Developing caring classroom communities requires eliciting desirable social and behavioural student outcomes (e.g. cooperation) by using affective mechanisms (e.g. praise) and behavioural mechanisms (e.g. procedures) to establish a safe place for students ’learning. Teachers establish classroom community and atmosphere early in the semester and tend to maintain this atmosphere. Positive classroom atmospheres provides students with emotional and academic support. To establish this, teachers need to be caring and fair (1), get to know students (2) and create an atmosphere of mutual respect and positive interpersonal relationships (3).

Teachers need to be emotional warm and teachers’ positive interactions with students provide support for building their social competencies. Students need to feel a sense of belonging in school settings to promote their academic achievement and social well-being. Allowing for student collaboration fosters students’ interest, engagement and autonomy. Monitoring without public punishment leads to more engaged students. Instructional talk allows for students to respond and this may foster autonomy.

Developing a classroom community can be done by monitoring behaviour rather than punishing (1), foster a classroom community (2) and establish a democratic classroom (3).

An effective teacher elicits desirable affective and cognitive responses from students about their academic work (e.g. being excited and engaged in learning) by using affective mechanisms (e.g. their own excitement) and cognitive mechanisms (e.g. having students make predictive inferences about a story) to enhance students’ motivation to learn.

Teachers with mastery-focused values and goals tend to

Contrary to most animals, humans communicate cooperatively. Infants (i.e. 10 to 12 months) begin in cooperative communication through the pointing gesture. This form of communication relies on their social-cognitive ability to direct the attention of others and to understand the attention-directing intentions of others.

Skills of intention-reading refer to social-cognitive abilities which are necessary to understand one’s intentions and which are foundational to all forms of human communication. Cognitive skills of pattern-finding refer to general cognitive processes of categorization, analogy, schema formation and distributional learning aimed at reconstructing the linguistic abstractions of a speech community to become productive and creative with the conventions of a language.

One theory of language acquisition is that children have innate knowledge of language (e.g. Chomsky) and these innate grammar structures constrain language development. Constructivist theories state that children acquire competence with a language mainly through cultural learning and other cognitive processes (e.g. categorization; analogy). In constructivist theories, children are biologically prepared for language but only in general ways (e.g. capacities for cultural learning).  

An utterance refers to the smallest unit in which a person expresses a complete communicative intention (e.g. ‘give’). It is used to direct a recipient’s attention to something and to express a communicative motive (e.g. through an emotional expression). A child needs to understand the communicative intention of an utterance before the child can use it. Adults help this by stressing the word in a sentence. When a child does not understand the sub-functions of an utterance, the child will not be able to use it in different situations (e.g. novel situations).

Children learn words by attempting to understand utterances. To understand utterances, children often need to determine the functional role of a word. To learn a new word, children must extract it from a larger utterance and connect it to the relevant aspect of the current situation. Children learn the function of an utterance or word and this is how they begin to learn language.

A linguistic construction refers to a unit of language that comprises multiple linguistic elements used together for a relatively coherent communicative function. The elements also perform sub-functions. Constructions vary in their complexity depending on the number of elements and interrelations and they also vary in their abstractness. This makes that people know the general profile of an event in a sentence without knowing anything about individual content words (i.e. grammatical structure tells us who does what).

Holophrases refer to one-unit utterances with an intonational contour expressing communicative motive. Children begin speaking language by using holophrases. The initial schemas and constructions of children are very concrete and are organized around particular words and phrases instead of around abstract categories. The utterance-level constructions underlying children’s earliest multi-word utterances have three types:

1. Word combinations (18 months)
   This refers to a combination of two words or holophrases in situations in which they both are relevant, with both words having equivalent status (e.g. ball table).

Primates have been able to learn simple language. However, this may not actually be language use and comprehending as they do not use complex grammar (1), lack social-cognitive abilities that allow for language learning (2) and lack a theory of mind (3). Language may have co-evolved with social intelligence.

Language refers to the systematic and conventional use of sounds, signs or written symbols for the intention of communication or self-expression. Human language differs from the communication of other animals in three ways:

• Human language is symbolic (i.e. it represents something independent of the sound)
• Human language is grammatical.
• Human language varies with culture.\

There are seven functions of language:

1. Instrumental (i.e. express needs).
2. Regulatory (i.e. tell others wat to do).
3. Personal (i.e. express feelings, opinions and individual identity).
4. Interactional (i.e. make contact and form relationships).
5. Heuristic (i.e. gain knowledge about the environment).
6. Imaginative (i.e. tell stories and jokes to create an imaginative environment).
7. Representational (i.e. convey facts and information)

Language consists of phonology (1), morphology (2), syntax (3), semantics (4) and pragmatics (5).

Phonology refers to the sounds of a language. There are age-related changes in the tongue, mouth and the larynx which allow for producing sounds. There are several stages of phonological development:

1. Reflexive crying and vegetative sounds (0 to 8 weeks)
2. Cooing and laughter (8 to 20 weeks)
3. Vocal play (16 to 30 weeks) (i.e. uttering single syllables with vowel or consonant sounds)
4. Reduplicated babbling (25 to 50 weeks) (e.g. bababa)
5. Jargon (9 to 18 months)

Babbling consists of many non-repeated consonant-vowel patterns. Jargon babbling refers to strings of sound filled with a variety of intonations and rhythms to sound like meaningful speech. Speech production driven before 6 months of age is driven by internal forces rather than the environment. Babbling may have the function of socially relating to family members and it may reflect infants’ sensitivity to and production of patterns in the linguistic input. Phonemic awareness refers to the knowledge that words consists of separable sounds. This is important in proficient reading and phonemic awareness may improve by learning to read.

Morphology refers to the structure of words and to a system of rules for combining units of meaning into words (e.g. adding ‘ed’ to a word makes it past tense). A morpheme refers to the smallest unit of meaning in a language. Free morphemes can stand alone as words (e.g. fire; run). Bound morphemes cannot stand alone and are attached to free morphemes (e.g. the letter ‘s’). The mean length of utterance refers to the average number of morphemes a child uses in a sentence and is indicative of children’s linguistic development. Many of the morphemes children learn are word endings and they tend to show overregularization (i.e. overusing a rule; ‘s’ for every word that is plural).

The wug test

Self-concept of ability refers to the perception of one’s capability to successfully perform on academic tasks. This may explain academic achievement. It is possible that young children successfully perform various academic skills which develops a positive view on those skills, making it more likely that they engage with these skills and become proficient in them. A positive perception of skill could be increased by peer comparison and positive feedback.

When a student feels competent, this sense of ability may enhance one’s self-concept, allowing the student to persist at and seek out activities that further influence academic achievement. This means that a positive self-perception of abilities may promote academic achievement.

Early math achievement predicts later math achievement even when controlling or child characteristics, background and demographic variables and early reading achievement also predicts later math achievement.

Self-concept of ability in math between the ages 9 and 14 is related to later math achievement even when taking into account earlier math and reading achievement and other variables (e.g. demographics). Self-concept of ability in reading in middle childhood is not related to later math achievement. This association holds across the achievement spectrum (i.e. high- and low achievers).

Self-concept of ability in reading in middle school predicts later reading achievement even when taking into account earlier achievement and other variables. Self-concept of math does not predict reading achievement. This relationship holds across he achievement spectrum but there is a smaller association between reading self-concept and reading achievement when achievement is high compared to when achievement is lower.

Self-concept of ability plays an important role in motivating achievement over time and across achievement levels. It is possible that these beliefs playa  stronger role for students not achieving at higher levels.