LANGUAGE CW STUDY
EXAMPLES AND DEFINITIONS
“A
longitudinal survey is a correlational research study that involves repeated
observations of the same variables over long periods of time. It is a type of
observational study. Longitudinal studies are often used in psychology to study
developmental trends across the life span, and in sociology to study life
events throughout lifetimes or generations. The reason for this is that, unlike
cross-sectional studies, in which different individuals with same characteristics
are compared, longitudinal studies track the same people, and therefore the
differences observed in those people are less likely to be the result of
cultural differences across generations. Because of this benefit, longitudinal
studies make observing changes more accurate, and they are applied in various
other fields. In medicine, the design is used to uncover predictors of certain
diseases. In advertising, the design is used to identify the changes that
advertising has produced in the attitudes and behaviours of those within the
target audience who have seen the advertising campaign.”
Examples
of longitudinal studies (related to child/children development)
Millennium Cohort Study – UK – 2000/19,000participants:
Study of child development, social stratification and family life.
Child Development Study- Cohort-United
States-1987/585 participants: follows children recruited the year before they’ve
entered kindergarten in 3 cities: Nashville, Knoxville, TN and Bloomington, Indiana.
“Jean
Piaget (1896 - 1980) was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s,
where his job was to develop French versions of questions on English
intelligence tests.
He became intrigued with the reasons
children gave for their wrong answers to the questions that required logical
thinking. He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important
differences between the thinking of adults and children.
Piaget (1936) described his work as
genetic epistemology (i.e. the origins of thinking). Genetics is the scientific
study of where things come from (their origins). Epistemology is concerned with
the basic categories of thinking, that is to say, the framework or structural
properties of intelligence. What Piaget wanted to do was not to measure how
well children could count, spell or solve problems as a way of grading their
I.Q. What he was more interested in was the way in which fundamental concepts
like the very idea of “number”, “time” “quantity”, “causality”, “justice” and
so on emerged”
“Before Piaget’s work, the common
assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers
than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different
ways compared to adults.
According to Piaget, children are
born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on
which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based.”
THERE ARE THREE BASIC COMPONENTS TO PIAGET'S COGNITIVE
THEORY:
Schemas
(Building blocks of knowledge).
2. Adaptation processes that enable the
transition from one stage to another (equilibrium, assimilation and
accommodation).
3. Stages of Development:
•sensorimotor,
•preoperational,
•concrete operational,
•formal operational
Stages of Development
“A child's
cognitive development is about a child developing or constructing a mental
model of the world. Jean Piaget was interested both in how children learnt and
in how they thought. Piaget studied children from infancy to adolescence, and
carried out many of his own investigations using his three children. He used
the following research methods: Piaget made careful, detailed naturalistic
observations of children. From these he wrote diary descriptions charting their
development. He also used clinical
interviews and observations of older children who were able to understand
questions and hold conversations. Piaget believed that children think
differently than adults, and stated they go through 4 universal stages of
cognitive development. Development is therefore biologically based and changes
as the child matures. Cognition therefore develops in all children in the same
sequence of stages. Each child goes through the stages in the same order, and
no stage can be missed out. There are individual differences in the rate at
which children progress through stages. Piaget
did not claim that a particular stage was reached at a certain age - although
descriptions of the stages often include an indication of the age at which the
average child would reach each stage. Piaget
(1952) believed that these stages are universal - i.e. that the same sequence
of development occurs in children all over the world, whatever their culture.”
Stage
of Development/Key Feature/Research Study
Sensorimotor -0 - 2 yrs. Object Permanence
Blanket & Ball Study
Preoperational-2 - 7 yrs. Egocentrism Three Mountains
Concrete Operational- 7 – 11 yrs. Conservation/Conservation
of Number
Formal Operational- 11yrs + Manipulate ideas in head, e.g. Abstract Reasoning
