Faculty of Cognitive Science & Human Development

KMF1043 – HUMAN DEVELOPMENT PSYCHOLOGY

ASSIGNMENT 1 – CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

(CHILD IN ACTION)

Slot : Tuesday, 1100-1400

GROUP : 12

Students’ Name andMatric Number:

1.Ikram Bin Ahmad 47004 2.Farah Nazeema Binti Johari 455613.Nurfarahani Norman 459214.Nornadirah Binti Abdul Rahman 458235.Faten Anis Syairah Binti Seri 46799

Programme: KMF1043 – Human Development PsychologyTopic: Childhood Development Psychology (Child in

Action)Lecturer’s Name: Dr. Julia Lee Ai Cheng

CHAPTER TITLE PAGE

1 INTRODUCTION 3

2 THEORY 9

2.1 Case Study2.2 Discussion

3 CONCLUSION 10

4 APPENDIX

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Child development is a process in which every child in the world goes through,

regardless of their backgrounds or origins. It happens as soon as the child is born. Child

development involves mastering skills of talking, walking, wearing their own clothes, taking

a bath on their own, and includes their well-being, emotional as well as cognitive functioning.

Most children learn skills of walking in the middle of the ages of 9 to 15 months. Cognitive

and emotional development discusses the growth of a child in terms of information

processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill and language learning (Piaget.)

Advancements of children are said to be multidirectional, multidimensional and lifelong.

Children during their early years mainly develop their cognitive skills such as solving simple

mathematical problems, and recognizing things around them. The brain of a child during

birth, as we are aware of, are not fully developed, hence it grows very swiftly during the first

several years of life. They also cultivate social skills, for instance being able to relate or in

other words, interact with people around them. Besides having emotional and social skills,

children correspondingly develop language skills in which they start to understand and use

words. Each child is a unique individual and they grow within their own rapidity. Different

children possess different skills of development. For this project, we conducted an

experiment to test the cognitive developments of a child named Nur Insyirah binti Norazwan,

who happens to be the cousin to one of our group members. Nur Insyirah is a seven years old

child, being the first child out of three siblings and lives in Kuching, Sarawak. Questions

were given to the child and results were noted whether the child was able to understand and

answer the questions provided or the other way around. A child’s cognitive and emotional

development basically depends on their environment and how their parents approach their

needs. Parents play a huge role in children’s life. They often think that buying lots of toys and

gadgets for their children is the way to encourage their child’s development, when the most

vital things that need to be given to their children are loads of love and attention. Showing

children that they matter is the utmost essential aspect in assisting to improve a child’s

development.

Social and emotional developments in children occur based on different hereditary

factors. Most children will be more comfortable with people they are familiar with, and will

show fear and perhaps anger when coming across people they have never met or are

unfamiliar with. This happens through experience of the children themselves. Besides,

emotional progresses can be seen in children when they encounter problems with their school

work for example, and leads to frustration and the feeling of dissatisfaction just because they

feel that they fail to understand and process the cognitive skills needed to finish their work.

This is related to socio-emotional processes, which are those that comprises deviations in

psychosocial development, including emotional communication, self-understanding,

relationships with others, and moral reasoning and behaviour. (Papalia, Olds, & Feldman,

2008). A baby’s smile in response to its mother’s touch can be one of the proofs of the socio-

emotional factors, which is involved in the physical nature of the touch and the baby’s

reaction to it. The cognitive process allows for the baby understands that the smile is a

premeditated action, while the socio-emotional process is involved in both the positive

emotional feeling that is mirrored in the act of smiling and in the constructive link with

another human being (Santrock, 2008). A child's psychological progress exhibits the

intricacy of influences and functions as well as the diverse dissimilarities of the factors that

disrupt it and the connections, be it within the stages of development or the transverses of it.

2.0 THEORY

Piagetian Approach

According to Piaget, this period of cognitive development is referred to at the

concrete operational stage. The Piagetian approach emphasizes more on mental thought

processes. Specifically, there are three stages when cognitive growth occurred; organization,

adaptation, and equilibrium. By following these three stages, the children can be tested on

either they can understand the system of new knowledge that they are going to learn, adapt

themselves to the new information regard their surrounding or seek balance for their

cognitive processes. At this stage too, children can understand spatial notions, causality,

categorization, can reason better, conservation as well as number and mathematics (Papalia,

Olds & Feldman, 2007). Children can also concentrate better than they were younger,

meaning now, have the ability to extract distractions and their memory improves more

(Cherry, n.d.).

Information Processing Approach

This approach attempts to conduct the study on cognitive development by observe and

examine mental processes involved in mental information processing (Papalia, Olds &

Feldman, 2007). In this approach, we will also view on children’s improving memory ability

in which they are able to store and retrieve more information when needed and are more

refined in organizing that info (1). Moreover, this information processing somehow related to

stimulus and response in order to observe whether the child can handle all the information

that were told to them very well. By observing the child’s response towards the stimulus, it

will enable us to detect the children understanding and make them understand about their

own mental processes and on how to enhance their learning better.

3.0 CASE STUDY

To conduct the case study, we prepared series of questions that are related to our subject of

choice and present them in a manner that is understandable to the child and yet fun.

For the first question, we asked the child if she understood the concept of a see-saw.

We then, further amplify the concept of a see-saw in which the weight on both sides has to be

equal for it to be balanced. Therefore we presented a diagram with certain weight was on one

side of the see-saw and included choices for her to choose from where we asked her which

added with which weight can result to a balanced see-saw. The second question was inspired

from a video that we watched during lecture. Instead of using physical object, we sketched

drawing (what was intended to be sticks or rulers or any rectangular object with height) with

different unscaled measurements of rectangles and asked the child to arrange the drawing into

ascending order in terms of height (shortest to tallest). For the third question, she was asked

to categorize the drawings for instance, there were illustrations of desk, flower, and

television. Then, the child required classifying them into respective categories.

The next activity allowed us to test the child linguistic capabilities we were informed

that she is learning three languages as school. She was given words and was required to

translate them.

4.0 DISCUSSION

Based on the results, the children have surpassed four tests that were required to test her

developmental process. For the first question, the children had been tested with a concept

which was a concept of a see-saw. The question was given to test her logic, causality and

mathematical ability. As for the result, we can identify that she has a strong logic, causality

and mathematical ability (Piagetian Approach) since she knew that weight plays an important

roles in determining the balance of the see-saw (logic), she knew every part have a different

weight (causality) and to balance the see-saw, she needs a correct weight for both end of

planks (mathematical). For the second question, the children had been tested with a sketch of

a different unmeasured shape of rectangles. She managed to arrange the different shape of

rectangles in an ascending order and it proves that she has a strong spatial notions and

reasoning. She managed to envisage which rectangles should be next and arranged them in an

ascending order (spatial notion). She arranged them in accordance to what the question want

and arranged them correctly in accordance to their respective height (reasoning). For the third

question, an illustration has been prepared to test her skills in categorization and

concentration. She able to recognized and differentiate desk, flower, and television.

Conclusion

Children in the middle childhood were proven to be in the concrete operations stage

where they can compel their mind to solve a substantive problem in their live. As the result

shows in the case study the interviewed child can easily unravel the questions that have been

needled. Every progress that have been achieve in her development such as reasoning,

mathematic logical thinking, and processing information were influents by her surrounding

and been inherited from her parent's. In this stage of development, children that have

different background from the case study may result different outcome. A child that has been

raised in a perfect environment and a stable family condition will tend to adept all of the

cognitive development faster. It is important for the parents to provide positive environment

and be an ideal example for their child, in order to help their child cognitive process to

develop faster.

References

1. Oswalt, A. (2010). Attention, memory and meta-cognition. Retrieved from

https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/attention-memory-and-meta-cognition/

2. Cherry, K. (n.d.). Cognitive development in middle childhood. Retrieved from

http://psychology.about.com/od/early-child-development/a/cognitive-development-in-

middle-childhood.htm

3. Papalia, E., Olds, S., & Feldman, R. (2008).Human development(8th Ed.). Kuala

Lumpur, Malaysia: McGraw-Hill.

APPENDIX