Foreign Perspectives

First relationships uses up around a third of the chapter in scene setting before moving into quite a structured format.

In most cultures there is a small number (usually one) of people caring for a baby which explains the emphasis on dyadic relationships in this field. The other cultures are touched on in later sections of this chapter but it’s worth noting here that in some cultures a baby doesn’t count as a person at all (I’ll be picking this up on the notes on children’s acquisition of grammar). There’s a brief mention of the tension between Freud’s psychoanalyitical theory and developmental psychology but not really enough to properly understand why this is.

Moving on we get into the more structured part of the chapter with a series of sections dedicated to different aspects of early relationships. First of those is meshing which is an important part of teaching the infant the importance of turn-taking through pseudo conversations both explicitly by way of “baby talk” and indirectly through feeding patterns. The only theorists mentioned in detail in this section are Kaye & Fogel who looked at the development of greetings which ranged from random at 6 weeks through to an equally balanced interaction at 26 weeks.

Next up is immitation which is quite a short section. Both Moran and Pawlby found that mothers were more likely to immitate their baby up to a year old than vice versa. This immitation helps to start the development of a theory of mind ie the idea that others think too.

Scaffolding is basically the junior version of the same notion from Vygotsky. Bruner looked at the reading style used with infants and picked up on the four types of utterance used: “look”, “what’s that?”, “it’s an X” and “that’s right”. Wood et al generalised this to modelling (showing what can be done), cueing (indicating what needs to be done next) and raising the ante (encouraging the child to achieve more complex goals).

Containing is the longest of the sections and in contrast to the earlier sections looks at the negative aspects. First up of these is that Bradley found that young babies generally spend between 25% and 50% of their waking hours in a fretting/crying state which may help to put some of our adult “off-days” into perspective! This in turn means that soothing one’s baby becomes a major task so it’s probably no surprise that Oakley found that 70% of mothers felt angry/violent towards their baby. Klein’s object-relations theory seems important here: it suggests that in the first 2 to 3 months of life babies perceive attributes of objects as being entirely separate objects. Thus, for example, the nipple giving milk isn’t the same object as the same nipple that later doesn’t give milk. Only later does she see the infant constructing the representation of a single object from the multiple objects represented by the various attributes: cf Piaget’s object permanance. With this integration comes depression in that one finds there are no objects that are exclusively good (isn’t psychoanalysis depressing?).

The section on transacting seems to be there merely to point out that the infant is an active participant in constructing their social world. Worth noting is that this chapter is very culture-specific and that, for example, the Kalulis in Papua New Guinea who don’t get into the dyadic conversations that sometimes seem the only way to go in western cultures. Other multi-cultural studies have picked up on this too.

Not a bad chapter to revise. The early sections (meshing and imitation) could be related to the language learning in the third book whilst scaffolding clearly relates back to Vygotsky’s ideas from earlier on in book 1. The psychoanalyitical theory whilst confined to the introduction and the section on containing would probably need to be mentioned in the answers to most potential questions.

That’s my series on book 1 completed so next up is gender identity from book 2. Why not siblings & peers which was on my original list? That’s definitely on my notes from the tutorial but as has been pointed out to me we covered that in TMA3. In that it was highlighted in the tutorial I’ll be covering it but towards the end of this series.

Real-life managed to interfere with my revision today so my notes on first relationships will turn up tomorrow if you’re one of the growing band who are looking for such things.

However, I was thinking about the overall revision strategy for the coming weeks. As Tim implies, this is the time to be condensing the notes and this series of notes is all about condensing the volume and getting the ideas clear in my mind. This is pretty much essential as the even just considering the 12 chapters I’ve selected for revision there are 360-odd pages in the books, 60-odd in Erica’s notes and even a couple of dozen in Tim’s. All being well, my condensed version will be more like 10 pages.

The second thing that struck me is that the collected efforts of Erica Cox, Tim, myself and no doubt some others could create a bit of an interesting problem for the OU. As Tim said some time back his notes on the site are his personal notes as are mine ie both reflect our own take on the various chapters covered. Thus if a sizeable chunk of people use those notes as the basis for their own revision there’s a chance that the way in which we’d collectively answer the questions on the exam could be strikingly similar. Clearly we can’t draft the actual answers in advance but I’d imagine that my own answers will be based on my own notes: would it be plagiarism if someone else did the same thing? For that matter, I know that some people have talked about writing a sort of generic answer although that’s not wildly different from my own notes style.

And, of course, there’s the possibility that someone out there has run up notes on the seen question chapter and put them online somewhere. Erica’s set of notes are too general for that to be an issue but personal notes might well not be which I gather is why Tim hasn’t published his own notes on his selected chapter. I’m not publishing mine for the simple reason that I don’t have any.

Which reminds me: I must write some more on the seen question over the weekend. You might think that I’m running behind with that but I’m basically on schedule with it as I didn’t want to have it finished weeks ahead of time. In principle, I’m aiming to get a good first draft of it run up over the course of the week. At the minimum I want to have enough of it done to try writing it out in case it’s not coming out at the right length (which, at the moment, I think is around 700 words).

Whilst early cognitive development seemed like a fairly well structured chapter, temperament and development seems all over the place at first glance and really only seems to get going in the second half which doesn’t suit my (relatively) organised mind.

There’s a long history of looking at temperament dating back to ancient Greece which started looking at types of personality (Theophrasus and Hippocrates) but these days things are generally looked at in terms of character traits. That said, Thomas and Chess do suggest some mappings of combinations of traits onto particular personality types ie the two approaches aren’t entirely separate. The three main trait theories are Eysenck’s, the Big-5 and Cattell’s 16PF in increasing level of complexity. Overall the issue here is looking at “what makes people develop in similar ways?” vs “what makes people different from each other?”. Since we’re looking at developmental psychology in this course, there’s the additional problem that the above systems rely on self-completed questionnaires which obviously won’t work too well on a 2 year old. Related to that clearly many of the traits aren’t applicable to infants. However, Bates identified three broad categories that are applicable to pre-schoolers: emotional responses, attentional orientation patterns and motor activity.

Moving on (in the usual confused way of this chapter) there’s the issue of how one actually defines temperament. Do you look at abstract tendencies, or visible behaviours? What about a genetic basis? Stability is clearly important and the Colorado Adoption Project showed how stable temperament is. And, of course, temperament needs to run across all settings.

Finally, we’re on to what seems to be the meat of the chapter: measuring temperament. The four major theories are Thomas and Chess (nine-dimensional framework), Buss & Polmin’s EAS [Emotionality, Activity and Sociality], Kagan’s categorical approach and Dunn & Kendrick’s embedding of temperament in social relationship (ie reactions depend on the situation). Problems with these include the difficulty of identifying truly separate traits eg the Thomas & Chess “attention span” and “distractibility” dimensions don’t seem entirely independent.

What influences does temperament have on development? There’s the direct one (eg in school situations), the direct effect on the parents, indirect via “goodness of fit” (eg between child and parents), indirect via susceptibility to psychological adversity, indirect on range of experiences (eg a shy child will tend to avoid social situations) and, as always, the effect on attachment.

Overall, this chapter seems all over the place. Good for a waffly answer but I don’t think that it would be my first choice in the exam.

Next up is first relationships. And a drop more on the seen question I think.

Going by my revision plan I should have done sensation to perception first and indeed I have gone over those notes. However, the chapter from the book is an entirely different matter covering mainly the technicalities of the senses with heaps of new terminology rather than “proper” psychology. My thinking is that there’s basically no chance of me being able to answer a question based on that chapter at the moment although it does seem a nice introduction to the L3 course based around those themes; I’m going to leave it ’til then.

So what’s early cognitive development all about? Essentially it comes in three sections: understanding objects, interacting with people and understanding representations in descending order of importance going by the page count of each.

Understanding objects kicks off with Piaget’s object permanance (the toy hidden under the cloth) which they fail before around 9 months according to him. Bower tried testing using a train but this one falls down as young children can’t stop tracking a moving object. Finally, Baillargeon’s drawbridge and car experiments using the habituation method indicated that they could understand permanance from around 5 or 6 months of age and down to 3 1/2 in a replication. He went on to show that children before around 3 months thought that any size of object could hide any other size of object. Bringing up the rear were Hood and Willats with their light off experiment which also came out around 5 months for object permance.

On a separate tack, Piaget came up with the A-not-B (a variant of the toy hidden under the cloth). Harris felt that this was down to fragile memory but Butterworth came up with the same result even with a transparent cloth (sounds like a weird result, eh?). This suggests that the confusion could be down to a mismatch between updating their egocentric memory vs their allocentric memory. Diamond went on to try variations of the delay between hiding the toy and asking the child to retrieve it: as you would expect this delay could be lengthened as the child got older.

The second theme is around people and interacting with them. This one’s all about imitation which ranges from no imitation in the first month, some up to 4 months, direct imitation from 8-12 months and after that they can imitate  new and deferred behaviours. As ever, everyone else found that kids could do all this stuff much earlier than Piaget found with Meltzoff & Moore getting imitation down to 12-21 days of age (albeit with a small sample and no “nothing happened” option). Aside from those qualifications they went on to show that the ability to imitate improved with age as one would expect: 2 or 3 months old kids clearly could do more than those 6 weeks old.

Finally, in this chapter there’s a rundown of the understanding of models. DeLoache used a model room and found that children from around 3 years of age could correctly identify in the real room where stuff had been hid in the model room. Most common was the A-not-B error which suggested that the problem was an inhibitory one. However, that would suggest that they’d do better on the first trial but in practice some 77% failed first time around.

Overall, the problem of experimenting on really young children is that it’s not possible to ask them to explain their reasoning and that they may have difficulty in co-ordinating what they know with what they’d like to do.

Now, if I can manage to remember all that in the exam that would work out around the right wordcount for an answer I think. Anyway, ’tis on to temperament and development next. Oh, and the seen question…

As those who’ve done this course will know, there is a LOT of course needing to be revised. So much in fact that, unless you’ve nothing else to do, there’s no way to do it all to the required level.

However, there is the advantage that the usual rule for courses is that a given topic is only examined once (update: unless the course is ED209). Therefore anything covered on assignments can be dropped which takes out a surprising amount for this course since all the essay questions had two options.

Moreover, each question on the exam paper is confined to a single chapter.

Take those together and what remains are the following chapters:

Book 1: Psychological development and early childhood

1. ch3: Sensation to perception
2. ch4: Early cognitive development
3. ch5: Temperament and development
4. ch7:First relationships

Book 2: Children’s personal and social development

1. ch3: Children’s interactions:siblings and peers
2. ch5: Gender identity and the development of gender roles
3. ch6: National identities in children and young people
4. ch7: Young consumers

Book 3: Cognitive and language development in children

1. ch1: Early category representation and concepts
2. ch2: First words
3. ch4: The development of children’s understanding of grammar
4. ch5: Executive functions in childhood development and disorder
5. ch6: Understanding minds

Thanks to Martin, our tutor, for doing the hard work on the above. The ones in bold are those also selected by Tim who has a brilliant set of notes should you want to reduce the revision time even more. Personally, I’m using the Erica Cox notes which equate to something like a half dozen pages per chapter so around 70 pages to do all the above chapters.

To reduce revision time even more don’t forget that you only need to answer TWO questions from the above (plus the seen question!). Thus you only need to revise two of the books ie around 50 pages of the Erica Cox notes. Is it worth cutting it down that much? If it’s a choice of revising two books well or three not so well then I’d go for two; the third book is basically there as insurance against two questions that you really don’t like from one of the books.

Anyway, ’tis back to make a start on actually writing TMA7 (ie the seen question) tomorrow for me and, hopefully, the first run through of one revision chapter. Incidently, on that question, don’t forget that you’ve only got around 50 minutes to write out the answer so don’t be drafting more than around 7001000 words unless you write really fast.