Human Growth and Development
Theories and their giveaways
Development items reward precise stage-and-age mapping. Piaget: sensorimotor (0-2; object permanence, goal-directed behavior), preoperational (2-7; egocentrism, conservation failure, symbolic play), concrete operational (7-11; conservation, classification, reversibility), formal operational (11+; hypothetical-deductive and abstract reasoning).
Erikson pairs each psychosocial crisis with a virtue: trust/mistrust, autonomy/shame, initiative/guilt, industry/inferiority, identity/role confusion, intimacy/isolation, generativity/stagnation, integrity/despair.
Kohlberg: preconventional (punishment, exchange), conventional (approval, law and order), post-conventional (social contract, universal principles). Gilligan critiqued the framework as male-biased and offered an ethic of care moving from selfishness to goodness to nonviolence. Vygotsky: zone of proximal development, scaffolding, social mediation of learning. Bronfenbrenner: micro, meso, exo, macro, chronosystems. Attachment: Bowlby's ethological account; Ainsworth's secure, avoidant, ambivalent/resistant, and disorganized patterns in the Strange Situation. Also know Levinson's seasons of adult life, Duvall's family life-cycle stages, and Neugarten's social clock.
Traps: calling a preoperational child's conservation failure a deficit rather than a stage feature; confusing Kohlberg's stage 4 (law and order) with stage 5; confusing Vygotsky's ZPD with Piagetian disequilibrium; applying adult grief or trauma models to children without adjusting for their developmental understanding of death.
Rule of thumb: anchor any vignette by age first, then ask what that age can and cannot do cognitively, socially, and emotionally.