The four ‘Grand theories’ about child development are built on the fundamental idea about children’s nature & role of the environment they are …show more content…
It does not theorize about ‘mental events’. Playing with fire can cause burns or rashes will certainly lead to learning. But this can hardly be called a social experience.
One of the advantages of behaviourism lies in its utility as a direct form of communication with children who are too young to speak, or who are otherwise difficult to communicate with about their behaviour like Autism / Asperger – ABA[4]. Any application of Behaviourism will almost certainly involve interaction between people – as in the Media kit video1, interaction between the autism child Joe and the 'therapist' Sean Rhodes[5]. This makes it difficult to judge how much any intervention is due to the application of the theory and how much to the social interaction itself !
But the question is really 'does the theory itself single out interacting with people as being of particular importance in learning/development?' The answer would be no. Other people are viewed simply as elements of the environment. In practice of course most rewards and punishments will arise through interaction with other people - but in the theory these people are just part of the conditioning environment like any other part e.g. getting bitten by an animal or getting an electric …show more content…
Their understanding of the world tends to focus on states rather than on transformation. This is seen in their performance of conservation tasks. Similarly such children are unable to comprehend points of view different from their own. Piaget devised an experiment to explore such egocentrism in children. Referring to Media kit video 1[5], the Three Mountains experiment shows how younger children below years of age cannot make judgements beyond their own viewpoint, whereas older children beyond 7 years of age can; thereby proves his viewpoint that children of different age groups are in different stages of cognitive development. The younger children are preoperational and hence are yet to develop their understanding of conservation of mass, weight or volume; they are also egocentric being centred on their own perceptions. This contrasts with the performance of older children who are the concrete operation