Psychology 2660A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Backtracking

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2660A/B
• Professor: Elizabeth Hayden

Document Summary

The study of development, learning, and motivation that takes place in and out of schools. Learn how to enhance people"s learning abilities. Goal to understand and improve the teaching and learning process. Orderly and adaptive changes over the lifetime. Result in adaptive, organized, effective and complex behaviour. Development can be physical, personal, social, and cognitive. General principles of development: people develop at different rates, expectations of specific ages, ages = guidelines/averages, development is orderly, progression of abilities, cannot leap-frog developmental points, development is gradual, sudden changes unexpected, may be apparent backtracking. Maturation: physical maturation constrains cognitive maturation, cannot speed up development beyond what is allowed by, the brain continues to develop until early 20s maturation. Activity: cognitive development from active exploration of environment. Stage: distinct stages, qualitative difference in behaviour. Learning: how information is absorbed, processed, retained. Contextual: effects of culture and social environment.