Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 18 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)

Developmental psychology
Chapter 18
Educational implications

Child-centered psychology and education

Pedagogy: an aspect of theory or practice related to learning.
Curriculum: the set of courses, and their content, offered at a school or university.

Social interaction, learning and development

The effects of peer interaction

Piaget’s interest in interaction was predominantly in the importance of interaction with the physical rather than interpersonal environment.
In his earlier work, Piaget outlined a case for the importance of social interaction not only as a means to encourage learning, but also as a direct cause of development itself.

The primary intellectual deficit of the preoperational child, is the child’s inability to decentre or take account of alternative perspectives on the world to their own. However, this egocentrism could be overcome by peer interaction.

• Peers provide the ideal potential source of sociocognitive conflict, the two may each hold opposing egocentric views on a situation.

Through interaction with peers the child questions their own understanding, leading to a resolution of the conflict and a cognitive advantage.

Working in pairs can promote performance on Piagetian tasks

Peer facilitation effects: pairing of two children can have a positive impact on children’s later individual performance.

Bad performing children benefit from interaction.

Peer effects are persistent

The effects of paired interaction improve children’s performance are relatively long-lasting.

The changes in thinking promoted by sociocognitive conflict help children to benefit from subsequent learning experiences.

The positive and persistent effects of peer interaction extend beyond advances in cognitive development to advances in social development.
There is also concomitant development in social skills, communication, self-esteem, perspective-taking and social-emotional competence.

These positive effects on social skills are themselves a separate product of peer collaboration.

Peer effects in older children: Computer-based tasks

Much of the experimental work on the effects of peer interaction on children’s learning in middle school has centered on computer-based tasks.

7- 9 year olds benefit from interacting with other child when working on the Tower of Hanoi problem-solving task.

Peer interaction not only improved how quickly children arrived at the correct solution, but also positively affects the kind of strategies these children use.
Positive peer interaction effects are not restricted to very young children.

Constructing effective peer pairings

Positive effects of the efficacy of peer collaboration are not certain to arise.
Whilst a more developmentally advanced peer can likely benefit form collaboration in the form crystallizing and communicating their own thinking, it is not always the case that the outcomes are both member of the peer partnership.
It is just as likely for the more developmentally advanced peer to regress as a result of socio-cognitive conflict as it is for the lesser-able child to develop.

There is an effect of popularity on the outcomes of peer collaboration.
Also the child’s social competence.

• When girls are paired with each other they perform at a level equal to if not better than boys.
• Mixed pairs appear to fail because in this situation girls are less likely to discuss ideas and contribute to the planning often required to solve complex reasoning tasks.

But it can work well if positive collaboration is actively promoted and encouraged.
This appears not to be specific to childhood.

The relative intellectual status of the pairing is an important influence on cognitive outcomes, but gender seems to be a moderator of this relationship.
Greatest gains are seen for a mixed-sex paring where the girl is more intellectually able than the boy.

What is effective learning?

Vygotky’s theory

Knowledge exists intermentally between individuals before it can exists intramentally within an individual.

The zone of proximal development and scaffolding

The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is the distance between the actual development level determined by independent problem soling and the level of potential development determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more able peers.
Two important implications:

• The concept of ZPD characterizes learning through guidance or assistance as a normal but important part of development because the child’s intermental ability ultimately becomes intramental ability by appropriate interaction.
• It supposes that learning can be made more effective through the most appropriate form of teaching.

Scaffolding: the means by which adults structure and simplify the environment to facilitate children’s learning and to guide them through their ZPD.

What makes effective scaffolding?

Children are more likely to succeed if there mothers followed two rules of teaching:

• Any failure by a child to bring off an action after a given level of help should be met by an immediate increase in the level of control.
• When a child is successful then the adult needs to decrease the level of control.

Teaching in line with these rules is contingent.
Effective teaching can lead to effective learning.

How can teachers use scaffolding in the classroom?

It is important that the process of scaffolding is interactive, involving both student en teacher.
Scaffolding should be contingent.

Two key principles:

• Fading, the gradual withdrawal of support as the student increases their level of understanding.
• The transfer of responsibility from teacher to learner as the child develops new skills and levels of competence.

The effectiveness of scaffolding depends heavily on the context in which it is implemented. It is never the same.

Five forms of scaffolding:

• Drawing
  Encouraging students to use free drawing or promoted sketches to illustrate explanation.
• Contextualized phenomena
  Embedding in real-world context
• Checklist
  Providing a lest of ideas or a ‘wordbank’
• Rubrics
  An extension of the checklist also including available marks assigned to each component.
• Sentence frame
  Providing particular sentence stems for students to complete

Contextualized is most effective. It helps students to apply information.

Cognitive scaffolding: large input form teacher
Metacognitive scaffolding: involves a large degree of input from the learner.

Whilst cognitive scaffolding is effective in supporting students’ content knowledge and knowledge integration, metacognitive scaffolding results in students improving in their use and evaluation of evidence, and the quality of their scientific reasoning.
Different forms of scaffolding support the development of different skills.

Are children effective teachers?

It is important that dyads are of mixed ability, but children should actively exchange ideas when working together.
The more able child is guiding the less able child through their ZPD.

Today, the More knowledgeable other (MKO) can be a computer program.

Implications for educational practice and assessment

Student Teams Achievement Divisions (STAD): a method used to show how cooperative learning can work. Children are allocated to work in small groups comprising children of varying ability, gender and ethnic backgrounds. The teacher introduces a topic and the group members discuss this until they agree that they fully understand the topic.

Psychology, schools and educational reform

The question of the relationship between the content of a school curriculum and the nature of children’s learning is key in all developed countries.

Attainment targets: description of the knowledge that children should have acquired as they work their way through the education system.

Assessing children’s learning

Two crucial aspects of the assessment procedures introduced by the National Curriculum:

• They represent the first compulsory assessment of children as young as 7 years after only two or three years of formal schooling
• The method of testing was intentionally different from standard forms of testing.

Norm referencing: test based on the average scores for the population, and hence provide a reference point to indicate how individual children perform relative to the scores of other children.
Most scholar test are norm referenced.

Criterion referencing: the measure of a child’s performance relative to a specified criterion.
The test introduced with the National Curriculum where.
It gives a description of what the child actually knows.
Formative: a function of assessment where the purpose is to provide information to support further learning.