Faculty of Cognitive Science & Human Development

KMF1043 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT PSYCHOLOGY

ASSIGNMENT 1 CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
(CHILD IN ACTION)
Slot

: Tuesday, 1100-1400

GROUP

: 12

Students Name and

Matric Number:

1.Ikram
Bin
Ahmad
47004
2.Farah
Nazeema
Binti
Johari
45561
3.Nurfarahani
Norman
45921
4.Nornadirah
Binti
Abdul
Rahman
45823
5.Faten
Anis
Syairah
Binti
Seri
46799

Programme:
Topic:

KMF1043 Human Development Psychology

Childhood Development Psychology (Child in
Action)
Dr. Julia Lee Ai Cheng

Lecturers Name:

CHAPTER

TITLE

PAGE

INTRODUCTION

THEORY

2.1
2.2

Case Study
Discussion

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX

10

1.0

INTRODUCTION

Child development is a process in which every child in the world goes through,
regardless of their backgrounds or origins. It happens as soon as the child is born. Child
development involves mastering skills of talking, walking, wearing their own clothes, taking
a bath on their own, and includes their well-being, emotional as well as cognitive functioning.
Most children learn skills of walking in the middle of the ages of 9 to 15 months. Cognitive
and emotional development discusses the growth of a child in terms of information
processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill and language learning (Piaget.)
Advancements of children are said to be multidirectional, multidimensional and lifelong.
Children during their early years mainly develop their cognitive skills such as solving simple
mathematical problems, and recognizing things around them. The brain of a child during
birth, as we are aware of, are not fully developed, hence it grows very swiftly during the first
several years of life. They also cultivate social skills, for instance being able to relate or in
other words, interact with people around them. Besides having emotional and social skills,
children correspondingly develop language skills in which they start to understand and use
words. Each child is a unique individual and they grow within their own rapidity. Different
children possess different skills of development. For this project, we conducted an
experiment to test the cognitive developments of a child named Nur Insyirah binti Norazwan,
who happens to be the cousin to one of our group members. Nur Insyirah is a seven years old
child, being the first child out of three siblings and lives in Kuching, Sarawak. Questions
were given to the child and results were noted whether the child was able to understand and
answer the questions provided or the other way around. A childs cognitive and emotional
development basically depends on their environment and how their parents approach their
needs. Parents play a huge role in childrens life. They often think that buying lots of toys and
gadgets for their children is the way to encourage their childs development, when the most
vital things that need to be given to their children are loads of love and attention. Showing
children that they matter is the utmost essential aspect in assisting to improve a childs
development.
Social and emotional developments in children occur based on different hereditary
factors. Most children will be more comfortable with people they are familiar with, and will

show fear and perhaps anger when coming across people they have never met or are
unfamiliar with. This happens through experience of the children themselves. Besides,
emotional progresses can be seen in children when they encounter problems with their school
work for example, and leads to frustration and the feeling of dissatisfaction just because they
feel that they fail to understand and process the cognitive skills needed to finish their work.
This is related to socio-emotional processes, which are those that comprises deviations in
psychosocial development, including emotional communication, self-understanding,
relationships with others, and moral reasoning and behaviour. (Papalia, Olds, & Feldman,
2008). A babys smile in response to its mothers touch can be one of the proofs of the socioemotional factors, which is involved in the physical nature of the touch and the babys
reaction to it. The cognitive process allows for the baby understands that the smile is a
premeditated action, while the socio-emotional process is involved in both the positive
emotional feeling that is mirrored in the act of smiling and in the constructive link with
another human being (Santrock, 2008). A child's psychological progress exhibits the
intricacy of influences and functions as well as the diverse dissimilarities of the factors that
disrupt it and the connections, be it within the stages of development or the transverses of it.

2.0

THEORY

Piagetian Approach
According to Piaget, this period of cognitive development is referred to at the
concrete operational stage. The Piagetian approach emphasizes more on mental thought
processes. Specifically, there are three stages when cognitive growth occurred; organization,
adaptation, and equilibrium. By following these three stages, the children can be tested on
either they can understand the system of new knowledge that they are going to learn, adapt
themselves to the new information regard their surrounding or seek balance for their
cognitive processes. At this stage too, children can understand spatial notions, causality,
categorization, can reason better, conservation as well as number and mathematics (Papalia,

Olds & Feldman, 2007). Children can also concentrate better than they were younger,
meaning now, have the ability to extract distractions and their memory improves more
(Cherry, n.d.).
Information Processing Approach
This approach attempts to conduct the study on cognitive development by observe and
examine mental processes involved in mental information processing (Papalia, Olds &
Feldman, 2007). In this approach, we will also view on childrens improving memory ability
in which they are able to store and retrieve more information when needed and are more
refined in organizing that info (1). Moreover, this information processing somehow related to
stimulus and response in order to observe whether the child can handle all the information
that were told to them very well. By observing the childs response towards the stimulus, it
will enable us to detect the children understanding and make them understand about their
own mental processes and on how to enhance their learning better.

3.0

CASE STUDY

To conduct the case study, we prepared series of questions that are related to our subject of
choice and present them in a manner that is understandable to the child and yet fun.
For the first question, we asked the child if she understood the concept of a see-saw.
We then, further amplify the concept of a see-saw in which the weight on both sides has to be
equal for it to be balanced. Therefore we presented a diagram with certain weight was on one
side of the see-saw and included choices for her to choose from where we asked her which
added with which weight can result to a balanced see-saw. The second question was inspired

from a video that we watched during lecture. Instead of using physical object, we sketched
drawing (what was intended to be sticks or rulers or any rectangular object with height) with
different unscaled measurements of rectangles and asked the child to arrange the drawing into
ascending order in terms of height (shortest to tallest). For the third question, she was asked
to categorize the drawings for instance, there were illustrations of desk, flower, and
television. Then, the child required classifying them into respective categories.
The next activity allowed us to test the child linguistic capabilities we were informed
that she is learning three languages as school. She was given words and was required to
translate them.

4.0

DISCUSSION

Based on the results, the children have surpassed four tests that were required to test her
developmental process. For the first question, the children had been tested with a concept
which was a concept of a see-saw. The question was given to test her logic, causality and
mathematical ability. As for the result, we can identify that she has a strong logic, causality
and mathematical ability (Piagetian Approach) since she knew that weight plays an important
roles in determining the balance of the see-saw (logic), she knew every part have a different
weight (causality) and to balance the see-saw, she needs a correct weight for both end of
planks (mathematical). For the second question, the children had been tested with a sketch of
a different unmeasured shape of rectangles. She managed to arrange the different shape of
rectangles in an ascending order and it proves that she has a strong spatial notions and
reasoning. She managed to envisage which rectangles should be next and arranged them in an

ascending order (spatial notion). She arranged them in accordance to what the question want
and arranged them correctly in accordance to their respective height (reasoning). For the third
question, an illustration has been prepared to test her skills in categorization and
concentration. She able to recognized and differentiate desk, flower, and television.

Conclusion
Children in the middle childhood were proven to be in the concrete operations stage
where they can compel their mind to solve a substantive problem in their live. As the result
shows in the case study the interviewed child can easily unravel the questions that have been
needled. Every progress that have been achieve in her development such as reasoning,
mathematic logical thinking, and processing information were influents by her surrounding
and been inherited from her parent's. In this stage of development, children that have
different background from the case study may result different outcome. A child that has been
raised in a perfect environment and a stable family condition will tend to adept all of the
cognitive development faster. It is important for the parents to provide positive environment
and be an ideal example for their child, in order to help their child cognitive process to
develop faster.

References
1. Oswalt, A. (2010). Attention, memory and meta-cognition. Retrieved from
https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/attention-memory-and-meta-cognition/
2. Cherry, K. (n.d.). Cognitive development in middle childhood. Retrieved from
http://psychology.about.com/od/early-child-development/a/cognitive-development-inmiddle-childhood.htm
3. Papalia, E., Olds, S., & Feldman, R. (2008).Human development(8th Ed.). Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia: McGraw-Hill.

APPENDIX