MIDDLE CHILDHOOD THEORY

Middle Childhood Theory



Middle Childhood Education Theory

Early childhood education is a field within education encompassing the knowledge base related to children from birth through age eight (third grade). Early childhood is a unique time in the development of a child, during which much learning takes place. Approaches to teaching young children cover a wide spectrum ranging from direct instruction to emergent curricula. This entry provides a brief historical background of early childhood education, discusses its roots in child psychology, summarizes outside impacts on the field, and describes its main curricular models.

Dichotomies and Developmentally Appropriate Practice

Sorting ideas into categories is one of the earliest cognitive skills humans develop. Dichotomous categorizing (this is an animal; this is not an animal) is prerequisite to more elaborate and complex concept formation. Thus, when explaining a new concept, dichotomies are intuitively appealing. For this reason, DAP is outlined in a dichotomous framework (Bredekamp & Coppie, 1997). According to Bredekamp and Coppie, “People construct an understanding of a concept from considering both positive and negative examples. For this reason the chart [describing DAP] includes not only practices that we see as developmentally appropriate, but also practices we see as inappropriate or highly questionable for children of this age” (1997, p. 123).

Behaviorism

Behaviorism explains learning and development in terms of responses to environmental reinforcers and punishers and carefully manages the use of time (Skinner, 1984). Therefore behavioral methods carefully control environmental factors such as the delivery of reinforcers and the pace of instruction. From a behavioral perspective, adequate reinforcement plus sufficient time leads to increased learning. Behavioral methods were successfully used during World War II to rapidly train a victorious U.S. military. Shortly after the war, with the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik, the United States began to fear that the Soviet Union was becoming the ...