HUMAN DEVELOPMENT ASSIGNMENT

Human Development Assignment

Human Development Assignment

1) Trip who is falling behind rapidly in mathematics due to his difficulty in learning principles of fractions is very concrete in his thinking about mathematical principles compared to many of his classmates.

Piaget's Ideas

In this situation, Piaget's ideas suggest that the development of a child like Trip occurs through a continuous transformation of thought processes. A developmental stage consists of a period of months or years when certain development takes place. Although students are usually grouped by chronological age, their development levels may differ significantly, as well as the rate at which individual children pass through each stage. This difference may depend on maturity, experience, culture, and the ability of the child.

Children develop steadily and gradually throughout the varying stages and that the experiences in one stage form the foundations for movement to the next. Piaget has identified four primary stages of development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. (Woolfolk 2006)

Sensorimotor Stage: In the sensorimotor stage, an infant's mental and cognitive attributes develop from birth until the appearance of language.

Preoperational Stage: The characteristics of this stage include an increase in language ability (with over-generalizations), symbolic thought, egocentric perspective, and limited logic.

Concrete Operations Stage: The third stage is characterized by remarkable cognitive growth, when children's development of language and acquisition of basic skills accelerate dramatically. Children at this stage utilize their senses in order to know; they can now consider two or three dimensions simultaneously instead of successively.

Formal Operations Stage: The child at this stage is capable of forming hypotheses and deducing possible consequences, allowing the child to construct his own mathematics.

Vygotsky's Ideas

In order to make the principles of fractions more understandable for Trip, Vygotsky's ideas suggest that children be given scientific language when some degree of understanding already exists. Applying Vygotsky's idea to learning mathematics, the growth of mathematical understanding occurs through a process of connecting earlier thought with new mathematical language in order to create more meaning. Explaining one's thoughts to others becomes reasoning for oneself. During the process of students' sharing and negotiating thinking, "taken-as-shared meanings" emerge in the classroom. In the presence of a knowledgeable teacher, these taken-as-shared meanings become the shared mathematical meanings of society. Although not every student's understanding is matched with another's, if a teacher listens to a student and interprets what a student does and says, then the teacher can try to build a "model" in his or her mind of the student's conceptual understanding and, thus, understand a student's taken-- as-shared meanings. In order to have opportunities for children to build taken-as-shared meanings, teachers need to plan contexts that encourage children's active involvement and mental activity and provide social learning situations in which communication takes place. (Woolfolk 2006)

2) Erik Erickson created one of the major theories that open a window to the development of everything that makes us who we are on the inside. It is referred to as Erickson's Theory of Human Development and it simplifies the complex topic of ...