This document summarizes child development at the elementary level. It discusses physical, motor, cognitive, and socio-emotional development in early childhood according to various theories and models. Cognitive development progresses through Piaget's stages of sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational thought. Kohlberg and Erikson describe theories of moral and psychosocial development. Socialization prepares children to fit into social groups. Parents influence children through parenting styles like authoritarian, permissive, or authoritative.

1. CHILD DEVELOPMENT AT ELEMENTARY LEVEL
 Child‘s development is divided in to three stages, early
childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence.

2. Physical and Motor development
Early child development (ECD) encompasses physical, motor, cognitive and socio
emotional development
 Physical Development
Physical growth is quite dramatic and rapid during infancy.
 Motor Development
Motor development includes gross motor development and fine motor
development.
Gross motor refers to physical skills that use large body movements involving the
entire body while fine motor refers smaller and more precise movements.
Fine motor skills: Skills that require hand-eye coordination. By ages 2 to 3 years,
children can mold clay into rough shapes, build towers out of blocks and scribble
with a crayon.

3. Cognitive and intellectual development
 Children not only grow physically but also mentally during early childhood.
Children‘s abilities to observe, understand, produce language and interact
with the world flourish in an amazing way.
 According to Piaget, children in the early childhood build on skills learned and
mastered before infancy stage.
 Their play becomes increasingly imaginary filled with fantasies, involving
more characters and scenarios, games with sophisticated rule.
 In early childhood, children master the Symbolic thought ability to picture,
remember, understand, and replicate objects in their minds.

4. Con…
 Conservation is a person's ability to understand that certain physical
characteristics of objects remain the same, even if their appearance has
changed. Children‘s ability of conservation in early childhood is not accurate
in case of volume or number.
 Transformation is a person's ability to understand how certain physical
characteristics change while others remain the same in a logical, cause and
effect sequence. In early childhood children do not readily understand how
things can change from one form to another.
 Egocentrism is the inability to see the world by someone else's point of view.
In early childhood children have egocentrism, they explain situations from
their own perspective and understanding.

5. Piaget‘s stages of cognitive development
 Sensori motor ((birth to about age 2)
Knowledge of the world is limited but is constantly developing due to the child's
experiences and interactions.
 Pre-Operational (2 to 7 years old)
Children in this stage incorporate inductive reasoning, which involves drawing
conclusions from other observations in order to make a generalization.

6. Con…
 Concrete operation (7 to 11 years old)
During this stage, children begin to think logically about concrete events
 Formal operation (Adolescence to adulthood)
Teens begin to think more about moral, philosophical, ethical, social, and
political issues that require theoretical and abstract reasoning

7. Information Processing
The Information Processing model is a way of examining and understanding the
cognitive development of children. This model, conceptualizes children's mental
processes through the metaphor of a computer processing, encoding, storing, and
decoding data.
 (i) Attention
 (ii) Memory
 (iii) Language

8. Factors that affect children cognitive
development
 Biological factors
(a)Sense organs
(b) Intelligence
(c) Heredity
(d) Maturation
 Environment factors
(а) Learning opportunities
(b) Economic status
(c) Play
(d) Family and society

9. Personality and Social Development
 Theories of personality development
 (i) Piaget theory of cognitive development
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, also known as a developmental stage
theory was created by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–
1980).
It is a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human
intelligence and deals with the nature of knowledge and how humans acquire,
construct, and use this knowledge.
Piaget believed that, cognitive development was an organization of mental
processes that result from biological maturation and environmental experience.

10. Kohlberg theory of moral development
 Lawrence Kohlberg started as a developmental psychologist and then moved
to the field of moral education.
 Kohlberg believed that people progressed in their moral reasoning through a
series of six stages which could be more generally classified into three levels.
 The first level of moral thinking is that generally found at the elementary
school level.
 The second level of moral thinking is that generally found in society, hence
the name "conventional."
I. The first stage of this level is characterized by an attitude which seeks to do
what will gain the approval of others.
II. The second stage is one oriented to abiding by the law and responding to the
obligations of duty.
 The third level of moral thinking is one that Kohlberg felt is not reached by
majority of adults.
I. Its first stage is an understanding of social mutuality and a genuine interest
in the welfare of others.

11. Erik Erikson’s Theory of psycho-social
development
 Erik Erikson‘s Theory of Psychosocial Development emphasizes the
sociocultural determinants of development and presents them in eight stages
of psychosocial conflicts that all individuals must overcome or resolve
successfully in order to adjust well to the environment.
 According to Erikson‘s theory, an individual encounters a certain crisis that
contributes to his/her psychosocial growth at each of the eight stages of
psychosocial development.
 1) Trust versus Mistrust, 2) Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt, 3) Initiative
versus Guilt, 4), Industry versus Inferiority 5) Identity versus Role Confusion,
6), Intimacy versus Isolation 7) Generativity versus Stagnation, and 8) Ego
Integrity versus Despair.

12. Socialisation
 The term socialisation refers to the process of interaction through which the
growing individual learns the habits, attitudes, values and beliefs of the social
group into which he has been born.
 Socialisation is a life-long process that makes children responsive to the
society.
 It prepares them to fit in the group and to perform the social roles.
 Socialisation takes place at different stages such as primary, secondary and
adult.

13. Influence of the parents on their
children
 (i) Authoritarian parents
 (ii) Permissive parents
 (iii) Authoritative parents
 (iv) Divorce

14. The cognitive and intellectual
development
 I) Cognitive tasks, skills and process
 II) The types of cognitive process
(i) Attention process
(ii) Memory
(a) Strategies of remembering
(b) (i) Organization
(c) (ii) Imagery
(iii) Concrete operation thought
(iv) Conservation
(v) Moral reasoning

15. Types of adjustment problems
 Anxiety
 Depression
 Aggression
 Fears

16. References
 Bowen, A., Agboatwalla, M., Luby, S., Tobery, T., Ayers, T., & Hoekstra, R. M.
(2012). Association between intensive handwashing promotion and child
development in Karachi, Pakistan: a cluster randomized controlled
trial. Archives of pediatrics & adolescent medicine, 166(11), 1037-1044.
 Suleman, Q., Aslam, H. D., Shakir, M., Akhtar, S., Hussain, I., Akhtar, Z., &
Khan, W. (2012). Effects of family structure on the academic achievement of
students at elementary level in Karak District, Pakistan. Journal of
Sociological Research, 3(2), 234-247.
 Piaget, J. (1983). Piaget's theory. In P. Mussen (ed). Handbook of Child
Psychology. 4th edition.Vol. 1. New York: Wiley