The Interactions Of Persons And Environments To Enhance Learning And Development

By Author: Aurora
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Returning to the "general contours" observation, another line of research is now possible: Researchers may now be able to build on these macro level features by looking into each in more detail to illuminate the process of development more fully. In a discussion of state versus process-oriented approaches to studying development, Granott and Parziale argued that the study of development is now poised for a paradigm shift from identifying global states of development over Replica Tag Heuer the lifespan to studying processes of development from a much more precise and refined micro genetic perspective. Research in this field "has supported a natural evolution in psychology from analysis of what develops to analysis of how people learn and develop, and from general identification of structures that characterize developmental stages to analysis of processes of real-time activity within specific contexts". Understanding college student development is at a similar juncture: researchers have a solid foundation on which to ground understanding of what ...
... develops, and can now build on this foundation to better understand how students develop, and thus identify the kinds of experiences that are conducive to cognitive and moral development.

More fully understanding development in context will require sustained scholarly attention to the kinds of developmental issues discussed here and to more fine-grained analyses of contextual features (e.g., how learning environments are organized, what kinds of cognitive demands are placed on students, how expectations for developing community norms are shared). Perhaps more urgent is the need for interdisciplinary scholarship that builds on understanding of how people shape environments and how environments shape people. Just as educators have benefited from Cartier Replica Watches the availability of many theories and ways to describe college students in developmental terms, they could also benefit from comparable attention to contextual features that differentially affect given subgroups of students. That is, there is a need for scholarship on cognitive and moral development that focuses on the interactions of persons and environments to enhance learning and development.

Last, there is an urgent need for sustained scholarly attention to developmental assessment. It can be difficult to differentiate content from structure in cognitive and moral assessments, but this is essential if a given developmental assessment accurately reflects its theoretical underpinnings. Further, assumptions about stage variability (e.g., whether a person is "in" one stage at a time) must be reflected in the scoring and interpretation of the data. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are needed for the continued development and refinement of instruments to assess cognitive and moral development to inform theory, research, and practice.