Child Development and Pedagogy
Child Development and Pedagogy carries 30 marks in CG TET Paper 1. It tests whether you can explain how a Class I–V child thinks, learns and is shaped by family, school and society, and what a teacher should do about it in a real classroom.
Piaget: what the Paper 1 child can and cannot do
- Stages: sensorimotor (0–2) → preoperational (2–7) → concrete operational (7–11) → formal operational (11+).
- Preoperational thinking shows egocentrism, animism, irreversibility and no conservation.
- Concrete operational children conserve, classify, seriate and reverse - but only with concrete material, not abstract propositions.
Vygotsky and the social child
ZPD is the distance between what a child does alone and what the child does with adult or more capable peer support. Scaffolding is that support, given and then withdrawn. Private speech gradually becomes inner speech.
Theories and inclusion
Thorndike's laws and Skinner's operant conditioning explain reinforcement: positive/negative reinforcement strengthen behaviour, punishment suppresses it. Constructivism (Piaget, Vygotsky, NCF 2005) treats the learner as building meaning from experience, hence activity-based, child-centred teaching. Gardner proposes eight intelligences. Dyslexia affects decoding, dysgraphia writing, dyscalculia number sense - none of these means low intelligence. RTE 2009 gives free and compulsory education for ages 6–14, no detention or expulsion, no board examination till elementary completion.
Worked example
A Class III child insists a tall narrow glass holds more water than a short wide one with the same amount. Reasoning: he watched the pour, so perception dominates; he cannot mentally reverse the pouring - this is failed conservation of liquid, a preoperational trait. The teaching move is to pour the water back, let him compare, and repeat with several containers. Telling him 'they are equal' changes nothing, because the concept, not the fact, is missing.
Traps
Negative reinforcement is not punishment. ZPD is not a stage. A slow reader is not automatically learning-disabled - rule out vision, attendance and language of instruction first.