Theorist worksheet

Theorist

Physical development

Cognitive development

Language development

Social and emotional development

Moral development

Piaget

Studied children’s thinking through a clinical method by letting them talk freely and educated their thoughts from a detailed study. Also using schemas and assimilations in which a child points out an object and describes while the parent accommodates the assimilation and educates the child further about the object.

Believed that language is controlled by the developmental way of thinking. For example, if children used words like “I am thirsty” they must have grasped the concept of being thirsty to needing a drink before they said it.

Described moral development in three stages: premoral, heteronomous morality, and autonomous morality.

Bandura

Believed that learning can be done by simply watching someone else do something and mirroring the same action.

In watching an action being done, children will also start doing the same action, for example like cleaning.

Freud

Believed that the basic human motivation is the sex drive. He outlined five stages in child and adolescent development, called psychosexual stages which he labeled these stages labeled these stages the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages.

Believed that moral development proceeds when the individual’s selfish desires are repressed and replaced by the values of important socializing agents in a person’s life such as one’s parents.

Erikson

Opposed to Freud’s theory about psychosexual stages. Erikson developed psychosocial stages which is based on based on a central conflict to be resolved involving the social world and the development of identity. Erikson’s theory went beyond Freud’s theory and added three stages of adulthood.

Vygotsky

Believed that learning takes place in interaction between people. The child internalizes the learning and it becomes a part of their own independent thinking. Developed the concept of zone of proximal development which is what a child cannot do on their own but can do with skilled help.

Believed that the language adults use to explain a task, the child then uses later to do the task independently.

Brofenbrenner

Believed that a person cannot understand the life course of an individual without understanding how that person interacts with different aspects of his or her environment in which all aspects of the environment affect the individual and the individual affects all aspects of the environment.