Microdevelopment is the process of change in abilities, knowledge and understanding during short time-spans. This book presents a new process-orientated view of development and learning based on recent innovations in psychology research. Instead of characterising abilities at different ages, researchers investigate processes of development and learning that evolve through time and explain what enables progress in them. Four themes are highlighted: variability, mechanisms that create transitions to higher levels of knowledge, interrelations between changes in the short-term scale of microdevelopment and the crucial effect of context. Learning and development are analysed in and out of school, in the individual's activities and through social interaction, in relation to simple and complex problems and in everyday behaviour and novel tasks. With contributions from the foremost researchers in the field Microdevelopment will be essential reading for all interested in cognitive and developmental science.

Researchers and students in developmental psychology have pointed out that the numerous findings from research about human development seem disconnected and that it is difficult to fit fragmented bits of information together. Studies of separate domains of functioning (e.g., cognition, emotion, language, social relationships, identity) divide the field and there are increasing calls for integrative conceptions of human development. In Exploring the Dynamics of Human Development, Dr. Catherine Raeff constructs a theoretical framework that enables readers to reconcile seemingly disparate information by thinking systematically about dynamic developmental processes. This approach integrates systems theory, organismic-developmental theory, and sociocultural theory, as well as research across cultures and the life span. Raeff brings developmental processes into coherence by building a unified theoretical framework that is organized around the following questions: What develops during development?; What happens during development?; and How does development happen? Using a wide range of illustrative empirical examples, Raeff conceptualizes what happens during development in terms of differentiation and integration and explains how development happens through individual, social, and cultural processes. The framework helps to overcome confusion in the field and explore issues such as individual and cultural variability, looking beyond age-based changed to understand development, and resolving fragmentation by starting with whole person functioning. The framework also opens up new directions for research. This book will be useful to developmentalists, graduate students, upper level undergraduates, and others who seek an integrative understanding of the field as a whole and a systematic way of thinking about and investigating human action and development.

This book represents a broad integration of several major themes in psychology toward its unification. Unifying psychology is an ongoing project that has no end-point, but the present work suggests several major axes toward that end, including causality and activation-inhibition coordination. On the development side of the model building, the author has constructed an integrated lifespan stage model of development across the Piagetian cognitive and the Eriksonian socioaffective domains. The model is based on the concept of neo-stages, which mitigates standard criticisms of developmental stage models. The new work in the second half of the book extends the primary work in the first half both in terms of causality and development. Also, the area of couple work is examined from the stage perspective. Finally, new concepts related to the main themes are represented, including on the science formula, executive function, stress dysregulation disorder, inner peace, and ethics, all toward showing the rich potential of the present modeling.

A bridge between educational psychology and the fields of adult learning and development. For researchers, teachers, and graduate students in these fields.

Tying together almost four decades of neo-Piagetian research, Cognitive Development provides a unique critical analysis and a comparison of concepts across neo-Piagetian theories. Like Piaget, neo-Piagetian theorists take a constructivist approach to cognitive development, are broad in scope, and assume that cognitive development is divided into stages with qualitative differences. Unlike Piaget, however, they define the increasing complexity of the stages in accordance with the child’s information processing system, rather than in terms of logical properties. This volume illustrates these characteristics and evidences the exciting possibilities for neo-Piagetian research to build connections both with other theoretical approaches such as dynamic systems and with other fields such as brain science. The opening chapter provides a historical orientation, including a critical distinction between the "logical" and the "dialectical" Piaget. In subsequent chapters the major theories and experimental findings are reviewed, including Pascual-Leone's Theory of Constructive Operators, Halford's structuralist theory, Fischer's dynamic systems approach to skills, Case's theory of Central Conceptual Structures, Siegler’s microgenetic approach, and the proposals of Mounoud and Karmiloff-Smith, as well as the work of others, including Demetriou and de Ribaupierre. The interrelation of emotional and cognitive development is discussed extensively, as is relevant non neo-Piagetian research on information processing. The application of neo-Piagetian research to a variety of topics including children's problem solving, psychometrics, and education is highlighted. The book concludes with the authors' views on possibilities for an integrated neo-Piagetian approach to cognitive development.

Part of the authoritative four-volume reference that spans the entire field of child development and has set the standard against which all other scholarly references are compared. Updated and revised to reflect the new developments in the field, the Handbook of Child Psychology, Sixth Edition contains new chapters on such topics as spirituality, social understanding, and non-verbal communication. Volume 1: Theoretical Models of Human Development, edited by Richard M. Lerner, Tufts University, explores a variety of theoretical approaches, including life-span/life-course theories, socio-culture theories, structural theories, object-relations theories, and diversity and development theories. New chapters cover phenomenology and ecological systems theory, positive youth development, and religious and spiritual development.

This is a volume about the process of scientific discovery. Thirteen leading senior scientists, each interested in some aspect of behaviorial development, recount their intellectual journeys over the course of their careers and document their individual struggles to better understand and describe various developmental phenomena. Covering a broad range of topics, including perceptual, motor, social, and cognitive development, the contributors to this volume provide case-studies of how one pursues a long-term, systematic research program and how scientists continually formulate and reformulate their working conceptual frameworks based on their research results. Conceptions of Development provides a unique and personal, behind-the-scenes account of the process of scientific discovery, illustrating that useful and enduring scientific insight derives from the bidirectional interplay between empirical work and theory formulation. This volume will be of interest to a broad audience consisting not only of psychologists and psychobiologists interested in the study of development, but also teachers and students interested in behavioral development and its investigation, and the general reader interested in the process of scientific discovery.

Exploring the Complexities of Human Action offers a bold theoretical framework for thinking systematically and integratively about what people do as they go about their lives. Raeff sets the stage for conceptualizing human action by first constructively questioning some conventional practices and assumptions in psychology, such as fragmenting, aggregating, and objectifying. She then articulates an alternative systems conceptualization of action that emphasizes multiple and interrelated processes, and characterizes human action in terms of the complexities of holism, dynamics, variability, and multi-causality. The book also applies this theoretical framework to varied human issues, including mind-body connections, art, diversity, extremism, and freedom. This approach provides a vision of humanity that promotes complex and empathic understanding of human beings that can bring people together to pursue common goals.

Although integrative conceptions of development have been gaining increasing interest, there have been few attempts to bring together the various threads of this emerging trend. The Handbook of Integrative Developmental Science seeks ways to bring together classic and contemporary theory and research in developmental psychology with an eye toward building increasingly integrated theoretical and empirical frameworks. It does so in the form of a festschrift for Kurt Fischer, whose life and work have both inspired and exemplified integrative approaches to development. Building upon and inspired by the comprehensive scope of Fischer’s Dynamic Skill Theory, this book examines what an integrated theory of psychological development might look like. Bringing together the work of prominent integrative thinkers, the volume begins with an examination of philosophical presuppositions of integrative approaches to development. It then shows how Dynamic Skill Theory provides an example of an integrative model of development. After examining the question of the nature of integrative developmental methodology, the volume examines the nature of developmental change processes as well as pathways and processes in the development of psychological structures both within and between psychological domains. The team of expert contributors cover a range of psychological domains, including the macro- and micro-development of thought, feeling, motivation, self, intersubjectivity, social relations, personality, and other integrative processes. It ends with a set of prescriptions for the further elaboration of integrative developmental theory, and a tribute to Kurt Fischer and his influence on developmental psychology. This book will be essential reading for graduate students and researchers of developmental psychology and human development, specifically developmental science.