Development in Context

Acting and Thinking in Specific Environments

Robert H. Wozniak, Kurt W. Fischer

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317783343
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this volume leading developmentalists address the question of how children's thinking develops in context by drawing on the theories of Vygotsky, Gibson, and Piaget.

Analyses of the ecology and the dynamics of behavior have become popular, emphasizing the particulars of people acting in specific environments and the many complex factors of human body and mind that contribute to action and thought. This volume brings together many of the current efforts to deal with development in this richly ecological, dynamic way.

The research reported demonstrates that recent years have produced major shifts in approach. Activities are studied as they naturally occur in everyday contexts. Children's active construction of the world around them is treated as fundamentally social in nature, occurring in families, with peers, and in cultures. Behavior is studied not as something disembodied but within a rich matrix of body, emotion, belief, value, and physical world. Behavior is analyzed as changing dynamically, not only over seconds and minutes, but over hours, days, and years.

I ECOSYSTEMS, AFFORDANCES, TRANSACTIONS, AND SKILLS: THEORIES OF PERSON/SITUATION INTERACTION

1 The Ecology of Cognitive Development: Research Models and Fugitive Findings

Urie Bronfenbrenner

Cornell University

There is a text for this chapter. It is taken from the works of arguably the most cognitive of English 19th-century poets—Robert Browning. The familiar lines are from the imagined soliloquy of the painter, Andrea del Sarto:

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for?

I am about to make that reach. My immodest aim is to move us toward a unifying theory of cognitive development. Whether the effort brings us closer to heaven or to hell remains to be seen. Perhaps the best I can hope for is to be left in limbo; by which I mean that the reader will reserve judgment, pending further developments. And, as becomes apparent here, further developments are indeed required. What I present here is less a theory than a theoretical perspective.

I must also admit my inadequacy to the task. The scope of that inadequacy becomes apparent once I lay out the dimensions of the endeavor. Under these circumstances, one may well ask why I presume to try. There is an answer. It is one that I give from time to time whenever I accept what I regard as our professional obligation to communicate to policymakers and to the public what we have learned from our research. I begin by acknowledging that there is much we do not know. I then go on to say: “We may not be very good, but, unfortunately we are the best there is.” I then explain that, although we don’t know many of the right answers, we do know how to ask the right questions. It is finding the right questions that is my aim here, not for social policy, but for science.

To turn to the task at hand. If the goal is to move toward a unifying theory, what is it that needs to be brought together? The first desired conceptual convergence is already implied in the first word of my title. Central to the ecological paradigm that I have proposed is a view of development as an evolving process of organism–environment interaction. I offer some notions about the nature of these interactive processes.

But the same ecological paradigm posits interaction not only between but also within each of its two constituent domains. Thus, the first comprehensive exposition of the theory, now a decade ago (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), was devoted primarily to what I then viewed as the necessary first task of constructing a differentiated conceptual framework for analyzing the developmental environment as a system of nested, interdependent, dynamic structures ranging from the proximal, consisting of immediate face-to-face settings, to the most distal, comprising broader social contexts such as classes and cultures. These constituent nested systems were also conceived as interdependent. In due course, I return to further consideration of these interactive contexts, and what I view as their critical role in cognitive development.

The task of constructing an analogous conceptual framework for analyzing the developmentally relevant characteristics of the person posed a different kind of challenge. Whereas in relation to the environment no such taxonomy existed, with respect to personal qualities the problem was one of overabundance. As I wrote in the 1979 monograph, in this domain, “the researcher has at his disposal a rich array of cognitive constructs, personality typologies, developmental stages, and dispositional tendencies, each equipped with ready-made measurement techniques” (pp. 16–17). How does one choose among them?

Nor is it simply a matter of too many disconnected concepts and variables. Beginning in the period after World War II, the discipline of psychology experienced rapid expansion accompanied by progressive, centrifugal fragmentation of the field, with the social-personality researchers ending up in one corner, cognitivists in another, and the biopsychologists in yet a third. Only in infancy could one still find an integrated organism, but the infant soon grew out of it, and conformed by breaking up into separate segments. For someone who had been trained in a generation taught that faculty psychology was extinct, it was an eerie feeling to see it coming back from the dead, but now garbed in modern dress, each faculty after its own fashion. (The cognitivists insisted on the most formal attire, but that was only after the learning theorists had lost their tails.)

And when that same someone was also attempting to develop an ecological paradigm for human development, the eerie feeling became an awesome obstacle. For within that paradigm, the human organism is conceived as a functional whole, an integrated system in its own right in which various psychological processes—cognitive, affective, emotional, motivational, and social—operate not in isolation, but in coordinated interaction with each other. From this perspective, research that deals only with one of these processes not only underspecifies the model, but risks overgeneralization of findings and, what is even more fatal for developmental science, can result in oversimplification and distortion of psychological realities.

The fact that intrapsychic processes are interdependent does not mean, however, that we cannot take one set of them, in this instance those in the cognitive domain, as a primary focus, and examine the systems in which they operate from that perspective.

Thus far, I have identified three systems—domains in which I attempt to effect some conceptual convergence. But there are still two other, often separated arenas that need to be linked—theory and reality.

It was Kurt Lewin who made the provocative assertion that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” He then proceeded to demonstrate the validity of his claim by successfully applying his highly abstract, quasi-mathematical field theory to the design of effective programs of what he called “action research” for dealing with a variety of challenging problems confronting U.S. society, ranging from changing national food habits in order to cope with shortages during World War II (Lewin, 1943) to reducing racial tensions in New York City (Lewin, 1946).

I cite these examples in order to illustrate two essential requirements of a good theory: first, that it can be translated into concrete research designs; second, that it can be applied to the phenomena that it presumes to explain as they are manifested in the actual contexts in which they usually occur. Need I add that, in the case of human development, these are the contexts of everyday life.

I mention these two, perhaps seemingly obvious requirements, because not all developmental theories acknowledge their validity. Some remain so abstract as to defy unambiguous translation into research operations. Others confine such operations to settings so specialized as to preclude generalizing with any confidence to the environments in which human beings live and grow.

Accordingly, the fourth and final integration that this chapter attempts is that between theory and reality. Specifically, the abstract propositions or hypotheses I propose are followed, in due course, by the specification of research models appropriate for their operationalization in real-life settings.

Before beginning the integrative effort, I feel some obligation to try to forestall what I regard to be an altogether reasonable reaction to some of the material I present. Many psychologists are engaged in elegant research on specific domains of cognitive functioning, such as short-term memory, selective attention, encoding specificity, retrieval strategies, working memory capacity, and the like. These fundamental psychological processes may seem far removed from some of the topics I discuss here; for example, single-parent families, the relation between home and workplace peer groups, social class, ethnic differences in childrearing patterns, chaotic lifestyles, and, last but not least, the impact of historical events on life course development. One may well ask, with Hamlet, “What’s Hecuba to me, or I to Hecuba?”

Or, in plainer English, “that’s all well and good, but I am interested in basic cognitive processes that undergird behavior in all situations and are common to all human beings, no matter where they are. Moreover, these processes are best studied under uniform conditions, in which other factors are controlled, so that cognitive functions can become the principal focus of observation and interpretation.”

To speak for myself, I regard scientific investigations of this kind as of the highest importance. But their very importance depends on the simultaneous conduct of scientific studies of the same processes in a rather different context; namely, in everyday life. Thus, it is equally essential for basic science that we understand how encoding operates in learning to read, how memory functions in courtroom testimony, or how selective attention operates in the family and the workplace, and how such processes develop.

But once the researcher admits to this broader kind of interest, the cognitive cat is out of the bag, no longer in a controlled environment, and other conditions and psychological processes come into play. In the case of species Homo sapiens, these conditions and processes become extraordinarily complex. This for two reasons. First, human beings are not only the partial products, but also the partial producers of their environments. Second, because of this species’ unusual capacities for language and thought, the created environments are also symbolic in nature, and these symbols are not only cognitive in structure and content, they are also emotionally, socially, and motivationally loaded.

This means that once we as researchers become interested in cognition and cognitive development in everyday life, we need to develop more complex theoretical paradigms and research designs that are commensurate with the complexities of human beings functioning in human situations. This chapter represents one investigator’s effort to contribute toward meeting this dual need. Need I add, there’s a long way to go, and it will take many more of us, working from diverse perspectives, to make significant progress.

To turn, then, to the task at hand, I begin at the abstract level by presenting a formal definition of the general paradigm to which I have been referring. By now, the reader will find it somewhat familiar. The main reason for placing it before us is to provide the basis for expanding the terms in the definition.

Definition 1

The ecology of human development is the scientific study of the progressive, mutual accommodation, throughout the life course, between an active, growing, highly complex biopsychological organism—characterized by a distinctive complex of evolving interrelated, dynamic capacities for thought, feeling, and action—and the changing properties of the immediate settings in which the developing person lives, as this process is affected by the relations between these settings, and by the larger contexts in which the settings are embedded.

THE TRANSFORMED LEWINIAN EQUATION

When stated in this full, somewhat convoluted form, the definition hardly invites still further expansion and elaboration. But that is what has to be done if we are to translate the paradigm into operational form, as I promised to do. Paradoxically, we are going to accomplish that expansion first by contraction—that is, by collapsing each of the principal domains of the definition into a single term, and then expressing their relationship in the form of a seemingly simple equation. Those who are familiar with Lewinian theory, from which the ecological paradigm is in fact derived (Bronfenbrenner, 1977), will recognize this equation as a transformed and extended version of Kurt Lewin’s (1935) classical formula:

B = f(PE) [Behavior is a joint function of person and environment]

The transformation begins with a provocative substitution:

D = f(PE) [Development is a joint function of person and environment]

The substitution is provocative because it focuses attention on the conceptual difference between “behavior” and “development.” The key distinction lies in the fact that development involves a parameter not present in Lewin’s original equation—the dimension of time.¹ The additional time factor can be represented in the formula itself by means of subscripts:

where t refers to the time at which a developmental outcome is observed and t-p to the prior period, or periods, during which the joint forces, emanating both from the person and the environment, were operating over time to produce the outcome existing at the time of observation. To indicate that it is development in the cognitive sphere that is our primary focus of interest, we can add a second subscript c to the D on the left-hand side of the equation. It would not be appropriate, however, to add that same subscript to the term P on the right-hand side, for our ecological paradigm posits that other characteristics of the person, besides those that are strictly cognitive, play a critical role in shaping the course and content of intellectual development.

If we now relate this quasi-mathematical formula to the original definition for which it stands, it becomes apparent that the D term refers not to the phenomenon of development, but to its outcome at a particular point in time. Because as researchers we are concerned mainly not with effects, but with the processes that produce them, it is the right-hand side of the equation that identifies the focus of primary interest. Translating symbols into text, it defines development as the systematic study of the processes through which properties of the person and the environment interact to produce continuity and change in the characteristics of the person over the life course.

In the transformed equation, these processes are symbolized by the inconspicuous lower-case f, which stands for “function.” As used by Lewin, this concept carries a signal implication that has also been incorporated in the ecological paradigm. Specifically, while indicating that the left-hand term of the equation is the joint result of some combination of forces arising from both the person and the environment, Lewin explicitly ruled out the assumption that the combination was only one of simple addition. The point is important because, despite occasional theoretical assertions to the contrary, many developmental investigations, including those in the cognitive sphere, employ analytic models that assume only additive effects; that is, the influences emanating from the person and the environment, as well as within each of these domains, are treated as operating independently of each other, with the net result estimated from an algebraic sum of the various factors included in the model.

Lewin used the terms class-theoretical and field-theoretical to distinguish between models in which the process was missing versus those in which it was explicitly defined. Class-theoretical models can provide useful information about how levels and modes of cognition vary in contrasting environments (e.g., cultures, social classes, types of family structure) and among groups with contrasting personal characteristics (such as gender and age). But they are limited by the fact that the processes producing the cognitive differences are left entirely open to speculation. For that reason, in the exposition that follows, I focus primarily on res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Development in Context: An Introduction
• SECTION I ECOSYSTEMS, AFFORDANCES, TRANSACTIONS, AND SKILLS: THEORIES OF PERSON/SITUATION INTERACTION
• SECTION II CONTEXT AND THE ACQUISITION OF SOCIOCULTURAL KNOWLEDGE
• SECTION III SOCIAL SYSTEMS AS SPECIFIC CONTEXTS FOR DEVELOPMENT
• SECTION IV COMMENTARIES
• Author Index
• Subject Index