Different Perspectives in Child Development

About this chapter

Different Perspectives in Child Development introduces the five major lenses through which developmental psychologists study how a child grows from infancy to adolescence: the Biological perspective (Arnold Gesell's maturational viewpoint and the Bowlby-Ainsworth attachment viewpoint with its Strange Situation and four attachment types), the Life-Span perspective (Paul Baltes's Selective Optimization with Compensation model and seven characteristics of life-span development), the Bioecological perspective (Urie Bronfenbrenner's nested system of microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem), the Cognitive perspective (Piaget's four stages, the Information-Processing approach and Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience), and the Socio-Cultural perspective (Vygotsky's view that culture, language and social interaction shape thinking). CTET Paper 1 regularly tests Gesell's normative approach, Ainsworth's attachment types, Bronfenbrenner's systems, Piaget's stages and Vygotsky's role of culture as single-fact and applied items. The four tests — Practice 15, Quiz 15, Hard 15, Mastery 30 — cover every named theorist, every key term and every classroom implication of these five perspectives at CTET depth and difficulty.