Unified Theories or Development Developmental Psychology: Unified Theories Michael F Mascolo Merrimack College & Kurt W Fischer Harvard Graduate School of Education Unified Theories or Development Unified approaches to development attempt to articulate the ―big picture‖ of the nature of human development by addressing a series of fundamental questions: What is the basic unit of analysis for understanding human activity and its development? What is the nature of developmental change? How can it be measured? What change processes spur developmental change? A variety of unified approaches to development have been advanced in recent decades These include dynamic systems theory (Van Geert, 1998), developmental contextualism (Lerner, 1991), ecological and cultural theory (Rogoff, 1998), lifespan approaches (Elder, 1998), and dynamic developmental approaches (Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Mascolo & Fischer, 2005) Although these approaches differ, they share a series of important assumptions: (a) Novel forms of psychological activity emerge in development as a product of (b) dynamic interactions among interconnected biological, psychological, and cultural processes Depending upon the local conditions and context, such interactions result in (c) multiple pathways of development To illustrate these principles, we will elaborate upon one particular unified model – dynamic skill theory (Fischer, 1980; Fischer & Bidell, 2006), which is especially broad in its integration of multiple factors in a single framework Along the way we will identify links with other approaches Dynamic Skill Theory as a Unified Model of Development The basic unit of analysis in dynamic skill theory is the skill (Fischer, 1980; Fischer & Bidell, 2006) A skill refers to an individual’s capacity to control elements of thinking, feeling, or acting within specific contexts and within particular task domains A skill is a not a property of an individual actor, but of the person-in-context Changes in context typically require different actions, and some contexts support high-level actions, while others elicit low-level actions Contexts that provide high support (e.g., modeling desired behavior; providing cues, prompts, etc.) generally result in higher levels of skill (such as a child’s optimal level of skill) than contexts that provide low support or no such assistance (such as a child’s ordinary or functional level of Unified Theories or Development skill) For example, a child who is asked to imitate a complex story modeled by an adult will generally tell a more complex story than she does without the benefit of adult modeling Optimal and functional levels are just one example of a number of developmental processes that all children use as they grow actions, thoughts, and feelings All skills develop through a set of common growth processes, but at the same time these processes produce many different developmental pathways Research underscores that unevenness is the rule in development of skills, with different skills at different levels A child does not move all of her skills to a new level, as if she took a step up a ladder Skills from different domains such as arithmetic, reading, and drawing develop mostly independently of each other, moving through their own developmental pathways As a result, development follows a web of pathways rather than a unidirectional ladder, as depicted in Figure Different skills develop in diverse directions along multiple strands that weave in and out of each other The developmental web portrays variability in developing skills both within and between individuals That is, (a) individuals develop along separate pathways in different domains, such as reading and mathematics Simultaneously (b) different children take alternative pathways in any one domain, as in reading, when some children read easily but others labor hard to learn to read, eventually having to read differently from the normative pattern In this way, skill development is diverse, showing many different pathways; while at the same time all pathways have a common human shape based on universal growth processes (Fischer & Bidell, 2006) Insert Figure about here Unified Theories or Development Levels and Pathways of Skill Development Skills develop through the hierarchical coordination of lower level action systems into higher-order structures, as diagramed in Figure In this model, skills develop through three broad tiers: Sensorimotor actions refer to smoothly controlled actions on objects (such as reaching for a red ball) Representations consist of symbolic meanings about concrete aspects of objects, events and persons (e.g., ―Mommy bounces a ball‖) Abstractions consist of higherorder representations about intangible and generalized aspects of objects and events (e.g., ―Kindness is acting for the benefit of others, such as sharing a ball with another child, without expecting anything in return‖) Within each broad tier, skills develop through four levels: Single sets (single actions, representations, or abstractions), mappings of two or more sets, systems (coordination of mappings), and systems of systems A system of systems is built from the intercoordination of two or more systems to form the first level of the next broad tier of development For example, a system of sensorimotor action systems creates and is equivalent to a single representation In this way, dynamic skill theory specifies three broad tiers of development comprising a total 10 specific levels as well as rules for specifying steps between adjacent levels, which vary greatly in number The skill levels have been verified in scores of studies examining development in a variety of domains (Fischer & Bidell, 2006) Insert Figure about here Example of Reading Development In the development of decoding and comprehension in reading, different children develop along converging and diverging pathways, as shown in Figure Normative reading development involves the converging development of three broad cognitive domains: letter decoding, sound analysis of words, and conceptual understanding (meaning) As they develop sensorimotor skills, children gain the capacity to differentiate patterns of everyday sounds and shapes Building upon this base, at the level of single representations, normally developing Unified Theories or Development children learning an alphabetic reading system can coordinate visual and auditory patterns into a single representation of an everyday icon For example, without decoding components, young children can often identify McDonald’s logo To move from such symbolic images to words written with an alphabet, children need to learn to identify the sounds of words, so that they can eventually link those sounds with specific letters In genuine word decoding, children link together the sounds made by different letter sequences to spell a word such as ―Mom‖ (/mm/ + /ah/ + /mm/ = /mom/) With practice, decoding words becomes increasingly automatic and effortless Reading comprehension requires more than the simple decoding of letter sequences When reading for meaning, children draw upon conceptual and narrative structures, which naturally develop along their own pathways For example, children’s capacity to understand and tell stories moves from simple event descriptions using single representations to more complex narrative forms at the levels of representational mappings and systems Skilled reading comprehension requires the convergence of the decoding and narrative lines of development Thereafter, reading comprehension skills continue to develop as children construct metacognitive skills for identifying reading goals, monitoring comprehension, and adjusting reading strategies relative to their goals Insert Figure about here Whereas normative reading development involves convergence of the decoding and conceptual lines of development, as indicated in Figure 3, difficulties in mastering particular components of reading skill result in non-normative pathways Four groups of children with reading disorders can be distinguished (Fischer, Bernstein, & Immordino-Yang, 2007; SpearSwerling & Sternberg, 1994) Non-alphabetical readers fail to develop an understanding of the alphabetical principle and rely upon rudimentary visual strategies to decode words Children with difficulty analyzing the component sounds of words must develop compensatory strategies for decoding words Non-automatic readers are able to decode words, but have difficulty Unified Theories or Development automatizing the decoding process Delayed readers include children who are proficient at decoding but have difficulty with comprehension The Development of Psychological Structures Any complete explanation of development must take into account the many processes that spawn change It is helpful to differentiate among at least three broad kinds of change processes – bio-developmental, individual, and cultural Unified models of development analyze how developmental changes in acting, thinking, and feeling emerge from interactions among these nested change processes Component systems affect each other in both directions, a characteristic that is called co-action For example, genes and other forms of DNA affect the functioning of cells in the body, and at the same time changes in the cell influence gene action The direction of influence is dynamic and bi-directional rather than linear or unidirectional Biodevelopmental Processes Biodevelopmental systems are the foundations for the emergence of new levels of cognitive skill Recent research supports several hypotheses about relations between brain and behavior in development and learning (Fischer & Bidell, 2006) According to the first principle, the neural networks hypothesis, action, thought, and emotion are grounded in dynamic neural networks that coordinate multiple brain regions, not by isolated local brain regions Functional neural-imaging studies have demonstrated distributed networks of neural activation in the performance of any task (Dehaene 2007) Every cognitive function arises from dynamic interplay among multiple brain regions operating over time – distributed systems of partially localized brain functions These neural systems show considerable plasticity, as when victims of brain damage exhibit remarkable capacities for partial or full recovery, adapting their neural networks to use their capacities in novel adaptations for important activities (Immordino-Yang, 2007) According to the second principle, the brain growth hypothesis, brain development exhibits discontinuities (spurts, drops, reorganizations) that support the emergence of new Unified Theories or Development levels of psychological skill Research on the development of cortical (electroencephalogram or EEG) activity, synaptic density, and head growth provides evidence for discontinuities in brain growth associated with nine of the ten levels of skill development listed in Figure Little research exists to test the hypothesis for the tenth level For example, in a series of studies, American, Swedish, and Japanese children and adolescents demonstrated spurts in brain growth (EEG, head circumference, and measures of brain activity) at approximately 3-4, 7-8, 11-13, and 20-24 months in infancy and 4, 7, 11, 15, and 19 years in childhood and adolescence Different brain systems and different behaviors develop relatively independently of each other, but at the same time they show clusters of sudden change at certain ages The third principle is an elaboration of the second According to the cyclic network growth hypothesis neural networks grow systematically for each level of skill development by reorganizing brain connections in a recurring pattern of movement around the cortex This network reorganization produces the spurts and other changes in brain activity and supports the emergence of new cognitive skills That is, transformation from one level of skill to the next (Figure 2) is supported by new neural networks that link brain regions Research with EEG makes it possible to trace the growth of such connections between regions For example, Bell and Fox (1996) assessed relations between brain electrical activity and the development of crawling skills in infancy Between and 12 months of age, electrical connections between specific cortical regions involving planning, vision, and control of movement exhibited a surge while the infants were mastering crawling The surge in connection activity dropped after they had become skilled crawlers, as the brain connections became more efficient These changes illustrate the systematic relations between movement through skill levels and cyclic changes in brain activity Individual Processes Biodevelopmental changes are necessary but not sufficient for the emergence of new skill levels While any level of skill requires a requisite level of brain development, individual Unified Theories or Development children need to coordinate specific activities in their world to develop skills at new levels They must be agents or actors that exercise and practice control of activities Individual action plays an important role in neural organization of the brain, as illustrated by the spurt in cortical connection as children learn to crawl For novel skills to develop, children must carry out activities that coordinate lower-level skill components into higher-order skills Fischer and his colleagues have identified a series of transformation rules that describe the active processes by which children coordinate skill elements into higher-order structures Substitution occurs as children perform a previously constructed skill on a novel object For example, an infant who has acquired the skill of grasping a rattle might use this skill via substitution to grasp a small teddy bear Shift-of-focus occurs when children redirect their attention from one component of skilled activity to another Children often use shift-of-focus to reduce task demands They break down complex tasks into simpler sub-tasks and then shift the focus of their attention in sequence from one task element to another For example, a threeyear-old will often simplify a fairy tale or children’s story by breaking it into separate parts and dealing with each part on its own Children can use compounding to construct more complex skills within a given developmental level, linking a series of skill elements at that level For example, five-year-olds often tell stories by compounding characters that act out distinct roles, such as doctor, patient, and nurse The change mechanism that produces movement to a new level is intercoordination, in which children go beyond merely compounding elements to reciprocally coordinate them to form a skill at the next developmental level For example, at the level of single representations (Rp1 in Figure 1), a 2-year-old can pretend to make a doll named Jack act ―nice‖ to Jill by kissing her (or vice-versa) However, it is not until 3½ to years of age that the child can coordinate two representations to form a mapping (Rp2), in which Jack is nice to Jill by kissing her, which causes Jill to reciprocate by kissing Jack back The actions are reciprocally related, not just done separately Unified Theories or Development Cultural Processes While individual children must actively coordinate lower level components to produce new skills, they act in a rich cultural environment, not in a vacuum Interactions with others play a direct role in the formation of psychological structures in at least two ways (Fischer & Granott, 1995; Mascolo, 2005) First, in face-to-face social interaction, interaction partners engage in continuous reciprocal communication, in which both partners are simultaneously acting as senders and receivers of meanings As a result, partners continuously adjust their ongoing actions, thoughts, and feelings to each other Neither social partner exerts complete control over his own behavior, but instead they co-regulate each other’s actions In this way, social partners function as actual parts of each other’s behavior Second, in constructing new knowledge, children work with others using cultural meanings, tools, and artifacts As children’s thinking becomes mediated by cultural tools – particularly language and other symbolic vehicles that represent shared cultural meanings – their actions and thoughts develop in directions that are shaped by cultural meanings and practices In this way, cultural systems play an active role in the constitution of cognitive skills Differences in symbol systems between groups thus shape action and thought to develop along different trajectories (Mascolo, Fischer, & Li, 2003; Rogoff, 1998) Third, people acting as cultural agents shape development (unconsciously most of the time) through guided social interaction, having especially large effects with children One way that adults promote children's development is through the process of scaffolding, in which adults or expert peers help a child to perform a task (Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1975) More broadly, adults and expert peers often support children’s behavior by modeling or reminding them about key components of a task, which often leads to performance at the child’s optimal skill level (Fischer & Bidell, 2006) Such interactions create what Vygotsky (1978) called the child's "zone of proximal development" – the distance between the level of performance a child can sustain on her own and her level in interactions with a more expert person Scaffolding and support Unified Theories or Development 10 move children to higher levels, helping them to internalize cultural knowledge and practices For example, to help her six-year-old remember where she put her hat, a mother may ask "When did you last wear it?" In so doing, the mother uses signs to regulate the mental retracing of the girl's actions As the girl internalizes these sign-mediated interactions, she acquires the higherorder strategy of remembering by 'retracing one's steps' (Wertsch, 1998) This social matrix facilitates children’s construction of novel skills In learning from scaffolding and support, people not merely copy cultural knowledge from others, but they appropriate knowledge, transforming what they take from others in ways that fit their own skills and meanings (Rogoff, 1998) An example of the process of appropriation shows how development generally takes place at the intersection of bio-developmental, individual, and cultural processes In the following transcript (adapted from Cole, 2006), a teacher instructs a 7-year-old boy named ―Sam‖ about decoding words, scaffolding his attempt to read a passage about a pet shop: S: He has food for the pet /sh/ T: What is the SH sound? S: /St/? T: No, the quiet sound What if a baby were sleeping—the mother, what might she say? S: ShT: /Sh/ So it starts with /sh/ The pet what? S: Ship T: Almost, but there is not an ―i‖ there If there was an I, it would be ship That’s an O, a short O, and that says /o/ Pet what? /sh/ S: Shop Sam has to be biologically ready to master this set of skills, with neural networks that can support coordination of the components that he needs to master Most students his age have that capacity, although some may have a disability that creates difficulties in coordinating Unified Theories or Development 11 sound, sight, and meaning in reading, as shown in Figure Sam’s task is to decode several words and understand them (at the alphabetic level of representational mappings in Figure 3) When he comes upon a novel word or idea, he needs to coordinate letters, sounds, and meanings in the word to create a higher-order meaning or representation The teacher assists him by adjusting her scaffolding and support to the particular problem that he is trying to solve Sam falters as he attempts to decode the word "shop" The teacher first asks a question intended to promote constructive activity about a letter pair ("what is the SH sound?") When Sam mistakes "st" for "sh", she attempts to scaffold him indirectly through word meaning (e.g., what sound people make to say ―be quiet‖?) When that fails, the teacher becomes more directive: "No, it starts with /sh/, the pet what?" At this point, Sam is able to coordinate the /sh/ sound with the remainder of the word (/op/) to form "shop" His skill in reading the word "shop" arises from effortful acts of coordinating orthographic, phonemic, and semantic meanings, using signs and other cultural tools (books), within a context that is richly scaffolded by the teacher Clearly, bio-developmental, individual, and cultural processes all work together in this teaching situation to promote Sam’s learning to read Conclusion: A Whole Person Developing into the Future People develop by integrating bio-developmental, individual, and cultural processes to form skills shaped by action, emotion, and environment People build novel forms of skill that are grounded both in their own experience and in the general processes of skill development Depending upon the local conditions of development – characteristics of both the individual and the environment – people build multiple pathways of development For each domain of learning, they develop along a particular pathway; and different people develop different pathways based on their own abilities and experiences At the same time, all pathways involve a common set of processes that define a general developmental scale based on the processes of skill development Unified Theories or Development 12 This example of a unified model not only paints a view of the "big picture" of development, but it also provides a framework for further theoretical and empirical work To pursue this integrative work requires concepts and research methods that allow and promote connecting several aspects of action and thought, such as speech, memory, emotion, and cultural framing These elements of behavior are often studied independently of one another, even though they plainly operate together in any actual slice of life Performing research to test and elaborate unified models of development requires collaboration among researchers from diverse disciplines and the use of multiple methodologies to capture multiple elements of behavior (Lerner, 1991) Fortunately this is a time when researchers and theorists routinely work together across disciplines in fields such as educational neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, behavior genetics, and human development Collaborative efforts like these will chart the developmental course of unified theories of development References Bell, M A., & Fox, N A (1996) Crawling experience is related to changes in cortical organization during infancy: Evidence from EEG coherence Developmental Psychobiology, 29, 551-561 Cole, A D (2006) Scaffolding beginning readers: Micro and macro cues teachers use during student oral reading Reading Teacher, 59, 450-459 Dehaene, S (2007) A few steps toward a science of mental life Mind, Brain, and Education, 1, 28-47 Elder, G H (1998) The life course as developmental theory Child Development, 69, 1-12 Fischer, K W., Bernstein, J H., & Immordino, M H (2007) Mind, brain, and education in reading disorders Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press Fischer, K W (1980) A theory of cognitive development: The control and construction of hierarchies of skills Psychological Review, 87 477-531 Unified Theories or Development 13 Fischer, K W., & Bidell, T R (2006) Dynamic development of action and thought In R M Lerner (Ed.) Handbook of child psychology Vol 1: Theoretical models of human development (6th ed., pp 313-399) New York: Wiley Fischer, K W., & Granott, N (1995) Beyond one-dimensional change: Parallel, concurrent, socially distributed processes in learning and development Human Development, 38, 302-314 Immordino-Yang, M H (2007) A tale of two cases: Lessons for education from the study of two boys living with half their brains Mind, Brain, and Education, 1, 66-83 Lerner, R (1991) Changing organism-context relations as the basic process of development : A developmental contextual perspective Developmental Psychology, 27, 27-32 Mascolo, M F (2005) Change processes in development: The concept of coactive scaffolding New Ideas in Psychology, 23, 185-196 Mascolo, M F., & Fischer, K W (2005) Constructivist theories In B, Hopkins, R G Barre, Michel, G F., Rochat, P (Eds.) Cambridge encyclopedia of child development (pp.4963) Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press Mascolo, M J., Fischer, K W., & Li, J (2003) Dynamic development of component systems of emotions: Pride, shame, and guilt in China and the United States In R J Davidson, K Scherer & H H Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of affective sciences (pp 375-408) Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press Rogoff, B (1998) Cognition as a collaborative process In D Kuhn and R.S Siegler, (Eds.), Cognition, Perception, and Language, Vol 2, Handbook of Child Psychology (5th ed.), W Damon (Ed.), New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998 Spear-Swerling, L., & Sternberg, R J (1994) The road not taken: An integrative theoretical model of reading disability Journal of Learning Disabilities, 27, 91-103 Unified Theories or Development 14 Thelen, E., & Smith, L B (2006) Dynamic systems theories In W Damon & R M Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology Vol Theoretical models of human development (6th ed., pp 258-312) New York: Wiley Thomas, S M (2004) Good night, good knight Puffin publishers van Geert, P (1998) A dynamic systems model of basic developmental mechanisms: Piaget, Vygotsky, and beyond Psychological Review, 105, 634-677 Vygotsky, L S (1978) Mind in society Cambridge: Harvard Wood, D., Bruner, J S., & Ross, G (1976) The role of tutoring in problem solving Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89-100 Unified Theories or Development 15 Suggestions for Further Reading Coch, D., Fischer, K.W., & Dawson, G., (Eds.) (2007) Human behavior, learning, and the developing brain: Typical and atypical development (2 vols.) New York: Guilford Press Fischer, K W., & Rose, L T (2001) Webs of skill: How students learn Educational Leadership, 59(3), 6-12 Fischer, K W., & Bidell, T R (2006) Dynamic development of action and thought In R M Lerner (Ed.) Handbook of child psychology Vol 1: Theoretical models of human development (6th ed., pp 313-399) New York: Wiley Griffin, S., & Case, R (1997) Rethinking the primary school math curriculum Issues in Education: Contributions from Educational Psychology, 3(1), 1-49 Vygotsky, L S (1978) Mind in society Cambridge: Harvard Unified Theories or Development 16 List of Figures and Figure Captions Figure Development as a Constructive Web Figure Levels and Tiers of Skill Development Between months and adulthood, development proceeds through 10 levels of skills grouped into three tiers between months and adulthood The ages of emergence are for optimal levels, the most complex skill that a person can perform with social-contextual support, based on research with middle-class American or European children They may well differ across social groups There is some evidence for an additional tier of innate action components in the first few months of life Figure Converging and Diverging Pathways in the Development of Reading Skills In young children, precursors of reading skills develop along separate pathways (including processing the shapes of written words, especially letters or graphemes; the sounds that make up spoken words, especially phonemes; and conceptual knowledge or meaning) Decoding skills for written words develop through a series of levels where these pathways converge – integrating and differentiating the shapes and sounds of words, ideally leading to comprehension of single words and then later sentences and text This integration is illustrated by the skill diagram for advanced representational systems, which describes the basic narrative structure for the story Good Night, Good Knight (Thomas, 2004) Comprehension continues to develop at later levels with transformations in higher-order meta-cognitive skills for monitoring and regulating reading strategies Non-normative pathways (reading disorders) begin to branch out early in development, involving difficulty in mastering particular aspects of decoding and/or comprehension Figure Development as a Constructive Web Domains Drawing Arithmetic Reading Mascolo & Fischer Figure Levels and Tiers of Skill Development Tiers Levels Age of Emergence Ab4 Principles Abstractions Representations Ab3 Systems 18-20 years Ab2 Mappings 14-16 years Rp4/Ab1 Single Abstractions 10-12 years Rp3 Systems Rp2 Mappings Sm4/Rp1 Single Representations Actions Mascolo & Fischer Sm3 Systems 23-25 years - years 3½ - 4½ years years 11 -13 months Sm2 Mappings - months Sm1 Single Actions - months Figure Converging and Diverging Pathways in the Development of Reading Skills Abstract Systems Higher-Order Monitoring (19-20 years) GOAL MONITORING Representational Mappings Alphabetic (3 1/2 to years) Single Representations Logographic (18-24 months) Are strategies working? READING GOALS STRATEGY SELECTION What strategies can I use to achieve my goal? What is my reading goal? Single Abstractions Strategic Self-Monitoring (10-11 years) Representational Systems Orthographic (6-7 years) STRATEGY REGULATION Do I need to change goals? Abstract Mappings Higher-Order Monitoring (14-15 years) Advanced Representational Systems Narrative Comprehension (7- 10 years) Adjust strategies to goals What are my reading goals? SELF-MONITORING Am I understanding? makes snail soup sick in bed DRAGONS MOM WIZARD Knight offers help took train makes yummy chicken soup dragons eat and feel better too yukky for dragons to eat went to McDonald’s Mommy & Me to go to the zoo “zoo” We “go” to have lunch “Mom” We Mommy We went to McDonalds ordered burger ate Non-Automatic Readers M≠O O≠M M≠O ‘M’ ‘O’ ‘M’ “mmm” “ahh” “mmm” Compensatory Readers Non-Alphabetic Readers Logo Mommy and Me “McDonalds” go to McDonalds Late Sensori-Motor Visual and Auditory (12-18 months) Delayed Readers McDonald’s “McDonalds” © MEANING SHAPE NORMATIVE CONVERGING PATHS SOUND DIVERGING NONNORMATIVE PATHS ... of processes that define a general developmental scale based on the processes of skill development Unified Theories or Development 12 This example of a unified model not only paints a view of. . .Unified Theories or Development Unified approaches to development attempt to articulate the ―big picture‖ of the nature of human development by addressing a series of fundamental... Harvard Unified Theories or Development 16 List of Figures and Figure Captions Figure Development as a Constructive Web Figure Levels and Tiers of Skill Development Between months and adulthood, development