Human Development from Early Childhood to Early Adulthood

Findings from a 20 Year Longitudinal Study

Wolfgang Schneider,Merry Bullock

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135595647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

Data generated from longitudinal studies allow researchers to better understand how context and experience interact with stable characteristics of the developing person over time. This book summarizes a landmark longitudinal study of 200 children, from the ages of 3 to 23. The Munich Longitudinal Study on the Ontogenesis of Individual Competencies (LOGIC) examined the development of individual differences over time and whether it is possible to predict later competencies from earlier ones. Offering a snapshot of theory and data on personality, social, motor, moral, and cognitive development, the contributors help us understand which individual differences can and cannot be altered through schooling and other experiences and how differences seen in the earliest stages are later reflected in adulthood. The results provide valuable insight into the strengths and limitations of early prediction of individual differences.

This is the second volume to review the wealth of data generated by the study. The first volume (Weinert and Schneider, 1999) traced development from ages 3 to 12. This volume continues the story, integrating these early findings with the results from adolescence and young adulthood.

Each of the chapters provides an overview of current research and addresses how the data help us understand the presence and developmental effects of individual differences. Among the findings are results on:

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• The relative stability of cognitive competencies

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• The long term effects of shyness and aggression

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• The relation between moral understanding and action, and

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• The role of education in the development or maintenance of performance differences.

Intended for researchers and advanced students in developmental, educational, personality, social, and cognitive psychology, this book will also appeal to educators, especially the chapters that focus on literacy development, educational context, scientific reasoning and mathematical reasoning.

1
Introduction and Overview

Goals and Structure of LOGIC

Merry Bullock and Wolfgang Schneider

1.1 INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

Many of the essential human questions—who we are; how much of what we are is due to our personal history, education, and experiences; how we change; how much our essential characteristics can change; and what happens during growth and childhood—are among the questions that underlie developmental psychology. Although everyday folk psychology provides potential answers to these questions—such as “The child is father to the man”; “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree”; “The child is a blank slate”; and “From little acorns grow mighty oaks”—the answers are often contradictory, some implying that our essential characteristics are independent of experience, and others that we are molded by our own specific life trajectories.

The contributions of nature (inherent characteristics) and nurture (experience) to development comprise one issue that motivates developmental psychology. Another is the nature of change itself. Is the development of new skills and competencies gradual and even throughout development? Are there spurts and stops? Do all children progress through the same sequence at the same time? Another question is individual differences. Does relative standing in memory ability or language skill early in life remain stable later on? Does personality remain the same? What characteristics of childhood predict who we are as adults?

Although the goal of developmental psychology is to understand change in behavior across the life span, most empirical work provides only a short snapshot view of behavioral change, because most developmental research infers change by comparing different people of different ages (cross-sectional studies) rather than attempting to follow change within the same people over time (longitudinal studies).

Why does a science of change base its theories on the indirect evidence provided by cross-sectional data? One reason is pragmatic: Longitudinal studies require investment of long periods of time and resources, and commitment to a single sample and set of questions. It is difficult to find funding for such projects, and this represents one of the major reasons for the overall lack of longitudinal studies, despite the fact that calls for longitudinal studies are frequent in the literature (see Block & Block, 2006; Harway, Mednick, & Mednick, 1984; Schneider, 1989). Another reason is more conceptual: There has been an assumption in much of psychology that the basic processes governing human behavior are universal in nature, sequence, and scope, with variation primarily in rate of change, not kind of change. Given this assumption, cross-sectional studies make sense, as one can look at the “prototypical” child to predict the “prototypical” adolescent or adult.

As longitudinal studies have proliferated from a few hundred in the 1980s to many thousands today, it has become clear that the data they generate provide crucial windows into change that paint a rich and varied picture of development, and that allow researchers to understand more deeply how context and experience interact with stable characteristics of the developing person. The goal of this volume is to contribute to the growing body of information about stability, change, and development in individuals over time.

1.1.2 THE LOGIC STUDY

1.1.2.1 The Original Plan

At the time of its conception, the Munich Longitudinal Study on the Ontogenesis of Individual Competencies (the LOGIC study) was rather unique in its approach. First, it was begun with a commitment for stable funding for the entire longitudinal span tracing development from preschool until high school. Such a commitment could not be carried out through a university system, but was assured through the founding of the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in 1982, directed by Franz Weinert. At that time, one reason for founding a Max Planck Institute (to provide context, there were 62 institutes, including three in psychology, in 1982) was to support research programs that were too comprehensive, too costly, or too resource intensive to be feasible within a university system and its shorter term funding commitments. Franz Weinert’s vision was to design and carry out a longitudinal study covering a variety of domains of cognitive and social and personality development, with a strong focus on the genesis and growth of individual differences, and on the prediction of school achievement, which he carried out through a parallel study that matched the LOGIC participants with their school classmates (the SCHOLASTIC study; see Weinert & Helmke, 1997).

The team that Franz Weinert assembled included a group of young scientists interested in development from multiple standpoints—cognition, personality, intelligence, memory, moral development, motor abilities and action development, and schooling. His vision was to combine investigation of development from ages 3–4 through grammar school with an intense look at individual differences that moved beyond the traditional concerns of differential psychology. Weinert was interested in patterns of development—and in asking whether there were important interindividual differences in intraindividual change (for more details, see Weinert, Schneider, Stefanek, & Weber, 1999). Results from this period of LOGIC have been reported extensively in the literature (see the list of publications in the Bibliography) and in an earlier volume, Individual Development from 3 to 12 (Weinert & Schneider, 1999).

1.2.2 LOGIC—REVISED

Although the original plan was for LOGIC data collection to stop at the end of grammar school, this was extended as it became clear that there were important questions stemming from LOGIC that could only be addressed by looking at adolescent development and beyond. LOGIC was thus extended two times—in 1998, when participants averaged 18 years of age, and in 2003, when participants averaged 23 years of age. These extensions were made possible by a commitment from the Max Planck Institute for funding until Wave 10 and for the use of Max Planck facilities for testing and analyses for Wave 11, by funding from the Volkswagen Foundation for data collection and transcription for Wave 11, and by funding from the Jacobs Foundation for the final period of data reduction and archiving.

There are some noteworthy features about the LOGIC study that bear recognition, including characteristics of its sample, its research team, and the context (Bavaria, Germany) in which it took place.

1.2.2.1 The Sample

The LOGIC sample remained remarkably stable over the 20 year period of data collection. When the study began, the sample of around 200 children was representative for the Munich area in Germany. The sample was those children who attended one of 10 preschools in the greater Munich area and were German speakers. Over the next almost 20 years, attrition remained low, at least until adulthood, as indicated in Table 1.1.

1.2.2.2 The Research Team

Another remarkable feature of LOGIC was the research team. Of the initial research team of nine scientists and students who were part of the first planning, five remained actively involved in each assessment wave throughout the LOGIC study. Three new domains (mathematics, moral reasoning, and logical and scientific reasoning) were added during subsequent waves as children entered school, and the researchers for those domains remained engaged throughout the remainder of the study. In addition to the core team (researchers, graduate students, and postdocs) a number of national and international colleagues remained engaged with the LOGIC study, participating in planning seminars and regular evaluations.

Data collection was carried out by a core team of four research assistant professionals, two of whom also remained with LOGIC until the end of the study. These core professionals were the liaisons with the researchers, and trained and maintained reliability with student research assistants who participated in the data collection. Coding was carried out by each researcher and his or her research assistants. This stability is not trivial. It meant that the questions asked and, perhaps more importantly, the individuals responsible for administering and measuring the constructs remained stable over the course of the study.

1.2.2.3 The Context

At the time that the LOGIC study was carried out, the German school system had some unique characteristics. All children attended grammar school from grades 1 to 4. At the end of grade 4, school tracking began. School tracking was of several sorts. The preuniversity track began with entrance in grade 5 in the gymnasium, a school that spanned grades 5–13 and that focused on a more academic course of studies. The preprofessional and prevocational tracks began with Hauptschule in grades 5 and 6, and then a further bifurcation after grade 6 into preprofessional training in Realschule for the next 4 years (through grade 10) or prevocational training in Hauptschule, ending in grade 9. This tracking system allowed LOGIC researchers to ask about the effects of schooling in cognitive, social, and moral domains.

Table 1.1 shows the overall data collection timetable for LOGIC for the period 1984–2004—a span of 20 years. Each “year” in the table represents three data collection points of 3 hours each—for a total of 9 hours testing time per year (each year’s measurement was labeled as one measurement wave in LOGIC). Participants came to the Max Planck Institute for testing sessions, and participants and families were contacted several times over the course of the year to maintain motivation and interest.

As noted in Table 1.1, there was only modest attrition between Waves 1 and 9. In Wave 10, dropout was 8% of the Wave 9 participants; and in Wave 11, it was 10% of the Wave 10 sample. These attrition rates are expected, as in Waves 10 and 11 participants were no longer necessarily in the school system or in the same geographical area. Preliminary results suggested no substantial differences among those who remained in the LOGIC sample except that the proportion of participants in Wave 11 who were in the higher educational tracks was higher (and probably related to ease of follow-up and recruitment).

These attrition rates are an issue for those analyses that are used to make general comments about developmental patterns. However, given the interest in differential prediction and individual differences, the attrition rates may affect overall generalizability but do not affect our conclusions about early to late patterns and predictions.

1.3 THIS VOLUME

This volume, published more than 25 years after the onset of the Munich Longitudinal Study, is the second book that presents an overview of findings from LOGIC. The first looked at the period that was originally the extent of the study—from age

See Table

3 to age 12. This volume continues the story, integrating these early findings with results from the next two developmental phases—adolescence (measurements at ages 13 and 18) and young adulthood (measurements at age 23).

Each of the chapters provides a summary of the state of the literature and a set of answers to some common questions—was development stable, and was it possible to predict later variables from earlier ones? The topics covered include core variables reflecting basic cognitive and motor skills (intelligence, memory, and motor skills), social-cognitive competencies (moral thinking, personality, and self-concept), and school-related competencies (scientific reasoning, spelling, and mathematics). Each author summarizes developmental trends within his or her specific domain,...