Understanding Children's Development


Book Description

Understanding Children's Development is the UK's best-selling developmental psychology textbook and has been widely acclaimed for its international coverage and rigorous research-based approach. This dynamic text emphasizes the practical and applied implications of developmental research. It begins by introducing the ways in which psychologists study developmental processes before going on to consider all major aspects of development from conception through to adolescence.




Understanding Children's Development


Book Description

This fully revised and updated edition of a fundamental New Zealand psychology text examines how and why children develop and how they are influenced by the people and events in their lives. Discussed are theories of development and learning, the importance of early experience, intelligence and assessment, and the family. The development of social behavior, gender roles, language, and thinking are also covered. The question of mainstreaming--the integration of children with special educational needs into regular preschools and classrooms--is also debated. There is a strong emphasis on local conditions and the New Zealand historical and social context. This new edition addresses the important issue of giving children themselves a voice, in order to better understand their development and to involve them in decisions about their lives.




Understanding Children's Development


Book Description

Revised to take account of developments in the field, this edition includes new discussion of the major issues in current UK and European research as well as expanded coverage of the practical applications of this research.




Understanding Children and Childhood


Book Description

Emphasising the voices and rights of children, international expert Anne Smith examines the latest thinking on children’s learning and development. Contemporary theories and research about children and childhood are explained, using observations from children’s everyday experiences and debates about policy. A sociocultural perspective presents development as driven by a child’s learning, supported by opportunities for reciprocal social interaction across diverse cultural contexts.




Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8


Book Description

Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.




Understanding how Young Children Learn


Book Description

Ostroff highlights processes that propel learning (including play and collaboration), distilling the research into the most important ideas teachers need to design pedagogy and curriculum.




Understanding Child Development


Book Description

Understanding Child Development introduces the main areas of developmental psychology in childhood. Drawing on content which first appeared in ‘Understanding Child Development’, published in 1986, the book includes new bases of evidence and offers an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. Following a thematic approach, this book draws together strands of knowledge from psychology, neuroscience, and medical, social and cognitive sciences. It covers both classic and contemporary theories and research, while also examining child development in real-world settings. Chapters explore conceptual issues, key developmental theories, and research methodology, while developing practical ways of making children’s lives better. These discussions are presented in a refreshing tone giving the reader an insight into the broad area of developmental psychology and its applications. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Understanding Child Development is essential reading for students on introductory courses in developmental psychology. It also offers valuable reading for those on related courses in education, health and social work.




Children's Understanding


Book Description

This work argues that cognitive development is experience driven, and processes entailed in acquiring information about the world are analyzed based on recent models of learning and induction. The way information is represented and accessed when performing cognitive tasks is considered paying particular attention to the implications of Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) models for cognitive development. The first half of the book contains analyses of human reasoning processes (drawing on PDP models of analogy), development of strategies, and task complexity -- all based on aspects of PDP representations. It is proposed that PDP representations become more differentiated with age, so more vectors can be processed in parallel, with the result that structures of greater complexity can be processed. This model gives an account of previously unexplained difficulties in children's reasoning, including some which were influential in stage theories. The second half of the book examines processes entailed in some representative cognitive developmental tasks, including transitive inference, deductive inference (categorical syllogisms), hypothesis testing, learning set acquisition, acquisition and transfer of relational structures, humor, hierarchical classification and inclusion, understanding of quantity, arithmetic word problems, algebra, conservation, mechanics, and the concept of mind. Process accounts of tasks are emphasized, based on applications of recent developments in cognitive science.




Understanding Cognitive Development


Book Description

Understanding Cognitive Development provides a fresh, evidence-based research perspective on the story of children’s cognitive development in the first ten years of human life. Starting with a brief survey of the key theoretical positions that have come to define developmental psychology, the textbook then focuses on the different cognitive abilities as they emerge throughout early development. Uniquely, it examines these in terms of their interdependence; that is how skills such as perception, memory, language and reasoning relate to one another. This holistic treatment allows students to see the many important intersections in this critical phase of human life development. This textbook employs a novel design that will be of immense help to both students and instructors and is intended to be read at two levels: at the first level, it provides a fully referenced explanatory account of experimental research on cognitive development with complete attention to the needs of students who have never been exposed to experimental methodology nor studies in cognitive development before. At the second level, and mapped directly onto numbered sub-sections within the text, the author uses illustrative panels designed along the lines of PowerPoint presentations to summarise studies and key findings, employing lots of pictorial material together with bullet-points to give vividness and texture to the material covered. These panels are replicated on the accompanying companion website in PowerPoint for lecturers and students to make further use of in teaching and revision. Revision points are provided at the end of every chapter. Rich in academic coverage, including a widespread database of the most important empirical research in the field, this textbook will be essential reading for students of cognitive development and developmental psychology across psychology and education.




Parenting Matters


Book Description

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.