LANGUAGE CW STUDY EXAMPLES AND DEFINITIONS (unfinished)

LANGUAGE CW STUDY EXAMPLES AND DEFINITIONS

Longitudinal Studies  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitudinal_study

“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  http://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html
  “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:

1. 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