Human Development and Learning
Human development and learning items ask you to connect developmental level, learning theory, and individual differences to the referral question - for example, deciding whether a second grader's reading difficulty reflects a developmental lag, inadequate instruction, or a disability.
Developmental frameworks
- Piaget: preoperational (2–7), concrete operational (7–11), formal operational (11+); conservation and reversibility emerge in concrete operations.
- Vygotsky: zone of proximal development, scaffolding, and private speech as self-regulation.
- Erikson: industry versus inferiority in the elementary years, so repeated school failure erodes perceived competence.
- Language: BICS (conversational) develops in one to three years; CALP (academic) takes five to seven years, which matters when evaluating an English learner.
Learning and reading science
- The simple view of reading: decoding × linguistic comprehension. Weak word reading points to phonological awareness, phonics, and rapid automatized naming; weak comprehension points to vocabulary, background knowledge, and inference.
- Behaviorism (antecedent–behavior–consequence), social learning (modeling, self-efficacy), and information processing (working memory, attention, automaticity) explain different intervention targets.
- Executive function - inhibition, working memory, shifting - develops through adolescence and underpins organization and self-monitoring.
Worked example
A third grader reads accurately but slowly and cannot answer comprehension questions. Decoding is intact, so the profile fits fluency and comprehension rather than a decoding deficit. You would probe oral reading fluency and vocabulary/inference, not reteach letter sounds.
Traps
Treating a bilingual student's low English vocabulary as a language disorder without checking the home language; confusing a developmental difference with a disability; and invoking Piagetian stages to justify withholding intervention from a struggling student.