Friday, October 31, 2008

Child Dev: Attachment, Behaviorism, Constructivism & Other Thoughts

Attachment
Freud: The oral stage has importance of nursing and feeding behavior. The anal stage has an importance of toilet training. Basically the bond with the mother as the prototype of all deep emotional attachments is stressed.

Erikson: There is a need for balance, if trust vs. mistrust is not balanced by the relationship with the caregiver the child will have sensory maladjustment, withdrawal, and lack hope.

Bowlby-Ainsworth: All children attach, but the amount qualitatively varies. Attachment behavior is a genetic predisposition meaning that it has cultural overlays and that humans will naturally adapt. Therefore, the caregiver and the child (along with environment) will effect the degree of attachment: it's a two way street! Amongst the caregiver's roles, they could strive for balanced diatic conversation.

The research shows that in a strange situation there will be 3 outcomes:
  1. Avoidant babies: may seem comfortable, but heart rate will stay high and will often continually look for outlet to hide stress.
  2. Securely attached babies: will check in (contact maintenance), seek proximity they are comfortable with.
  3. Resistant-ambivalent babies: will show anger, have problems adjusting or being away from primary caregiver who likely does not treat the baby with consistency. These children have a hard time in schools
Implications on Attachment: development knowledge, lack of child care regulations in the US, issues with abuse/abandonment & neglect, responses for classroom teachers and school psychologist.

Behaviorism
First, it is important to notice that there are many internal/psychological processes that humans do that are not always externally expressed (daydreaming, self-doubt, depression). Here are some terms/concepts:
  • classical conditioning: ex. Pavlov's Bell, something from an outside organism, direct
  • operant conditioning: Skinner, something learned over time with reinforcements
  • reinforcements: Intermittent can be fixed or ration, take longer to forget/extinction. Shaping requires raising the expectations making the steps of a task more difficult to learn a goal.
  • Social Learning Theory: Bandura, groups
  • Modeling: learning from reinforcing others
A great clinical psychologist is Dr. Gerald Patterson who studies extreme cases. Instead of pulling a class down to discipline a child, find ways to give extra rewards if the whole class (including the hyperaggressive child) can achieve a goal. Watch out for the Halo Effect which is when a child may change, but a teacher/adult may not adjust to the positive (or negative) changes as they occur.

Limitations: The ideal implementations are near impossible (can't reward and discipline every single act). See the JCM's Shoebox Management Theory. Can affect long term ability of intrinsic value and motivation, not just focusing on rewards. Lacks attention to the fact that human's emotions will affect behavior. If all consequences or rewards are given by adult, what happens when the adult is gone? Can be over-used (if you complement too much, it won't mean as much).

Behaviorists typically hold a materialist worldview ... "the world is composed of objects and actions." View development as a continuous process, ex: developing photograph.

Constructivist views the world idealistically, believes the child constructs a model of reality through active interaction and develops in stages, ex: legos.
Constructivism
Piaget: Studied many things that Americans don't often study (ex: epistemology, dreams). He considered what was cross cultural, nature v. nurture. The stages (sensory motor, pro-operational, concrete operations, and formal) are often seen on a line, but should be considered as a bull's eye in circles, each encapsulated by the next and not gradual. There are three schemes:
  1. assimilation: making a new behavior to adjust to the environment
  2. accommodation: changing to environment to adjust to goal
  3. equilibration:
Consider these natural behaviors that are learned at such young ages. Things that complex billion dollar robots are yet to do.

ETC.
  • Social Network: As a teacher it is critical to have a strong social network for support to be successful and able to survive in the profession. This involves getting to know everyone in the community (at the grocery store, office max, etc.)
  • When you have a good day, you'll feel like a god(dess). You've achieved so much and changed the life of a child, you'll think you finally got through. Then the next day, you will (likely) easily find out you were wrong and you'll feel like pond scum.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Tech: Tools and Websites

Today in Tech class, Mark showed us a few great websites that I'd like to use in the future:
We also looked at some websites that could be used for communication collaboration:
Other things we discussed that were the Smart Board (an interactive white board) and the use of Logger Lite (software used with measurement devises). He also showed how keepvid.com can be used to download videos to your own computer.