Week 3

I know most of this week was on Boys vs Girls and how they differ in development but I was really interested in Piaget's theory specifically the preoperational stage of development. The first characteristic of preoperational children is egocentrism which is difficulty seeing the world from someone else's point of view. I used to teach preschoolers and know this to be very true but what I found really interesting was the second characteristic of centration or tunnel vision in preoperational children. I was very interested in the conservation experiments that Piaget used to demonstrate centration such as using two glasses of water that contain the same amount of water in the exact same glasses and asking the child if they have the same amount of water and then taking the water from one of the glasses and pouring it into a shorter wider glass so that it is the same amount of water it just appears different and asking the child again. I kind of thought that this test could be an exaggeration and so I tried it and the penny test on my children who are 5, 6, and 8 and all three of them told me that in the water test the first glasses had the same amount and the second glasses had different amounts even though I poured the water right in front of them. On the penny test my younger two thought that that the top row of the second set of pennies had more but my eight year old was able to recognize that they had the same amount. Piaget stated that this stage lasts from 2-7 years old so it was interesting to see that my son is still switching over from the preoperational stage to the concrete operational period. The final characteristic of preoperational thinking was appearance as reality or that the object's appearance tells the object's reality for example if a piece of rubber is shaped like play food it must actually be food and they will try to eat it.

Week 2

I thought that the synaptic pruning that was touched on this week was interesting. I knew that the brain grows and learns the most in the first 5 years or so of life but I never really thought about the information actually being weeded out. It makes me wonder what things that are learned during that time could actually be useful later on in life. I know that it says that things are pruned based on the activity of the neural connections and that those connections that are lost are thought to represent learning but I think it would be interesting to see a map of the skills that are let go of due to pruning. What if one of the skills that our brain decided wasn't as useful as another one and so it was cut actually was what we needed to master a higher level of thinking or of physical performance. What if that synapse wasn't active during the time that pruning was occurring in that section of the brain but it was lying dormant waiting for the other skills to develop so that this higher level could be achieved. Having said that I can't imagine trying to use our brains if they didn't do some pruning there would simply be too much going on in my head and I think I would have a constant headache from the increased brain processes.

Week 1

I was really interested in reading about the continuity vs. discontinuity this week. As a child I was always very outgoing and friendly talking to everyone but as I entered the middle of my teenage years I became more reserved and introverted. I really only interacted with a few people and have remained that way through my twenties. In fact after graduating from high school my social circle greatly diminished. To be fair I didn't go to college and I have never been one to make friends with people that I work with; at least not the kind of friendst hat you spend time with outside of work. I never knew there was a theory surrounding it I just assumed that it was just something that happened as I grew up. I thought it was something that happened to everyone as they grew up. To read that shifts in life circumstances can be the trigger in that makes a lot of sense because I had a lot of changes the year that I really noticed it happening or at least when I'm looking back when I realized that it was happening. I was also interested in Brofenbrenner's theory about the 4 levels of a person's environment and how they influence development. Using myself as an example still when my personality changed it wasn't as though my microsystem had changed but my mesosystem had changed drastically I formed new friendships by starting a new school and had to reform who I thought I was because I had always thought that I was basically who my friends were. Not the healthiest view but that was how I saw things. Overall I found this chapter interesting in how all the theories are similar but the important but small differences between them all. There are so many little differences in theories like the differences between information-processing theory and Vygotsky's theory. Vygotsky builds on the basic theory that children's thinking becomes more sophisticated as they develop but then adds in how the sociocultural aspects influence development because as the text states," children's thinking does not develop in a vacuum." .