- Student development
Socially, students face and resolve a number of issues—especially the issue of industry (dedicated, sustained
work) during childhood and the issue of identity during adolescence. Erik Erikson has described these crises in
detail, as well as social crises that precede and follow the school years. Students are motivated both by basic human
needs (food, safety, belonging, esteem) and by needs to enhance themselves psychologically (self-actualization).
Abraham Maslow has described these motivations and how they relate to each other.
Morally, students develop both a sense of justice and of care for others, and their thinking in each of these
realms undergoes important changes as they mature. Lawrence Kohlberg has described changes in children and
youth’s beliefs about justice, and Carol Gilligan has described changes in their beliefs about care.
On the Internet
<www.srcd.org/press> This is part of the website for the Society for Research in Child Development, an
organization that supports research about children and youth, and that advocates for government policies on their
behalf. The specific web page recommended here contains their press releases, which summarize findings from
current research and their implications for children’s welfare. You will need to register to use this page, but
registration is free.
association of psychologists in the English-speaking world. From the homepage you can go to a section called
“psychology topics”, which offers a variety of interesting articles and press releases free of charge. Among other
topics, for example, there are articles about obesity and its effects, as well as about factors that support (and/or
detract from) children’s well-being.
Key terms
Development
Puberty
Cognition
Cognitive stages
Jean Piaget
Sensorimotor stage
Object permanence
Preoperational stage
Dramatic play
Concrete operational stage
Decenter
Conservation
Formal operational stage
Hypothetical reasoning
Social development
Erik Erikson
Abraham Maslow
Lawrence Kohlberg
Carol Gilligan
Psychosocial crises
Trust, autonomy, and initiative
IndustryIdentity
Intimacy, generativity, and integrity
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
Deficit needs
Being needs
Self-actualization
Moral development
Lawrence Kohlberg
Carol Gilligan
Morality of justice
Preconventional justice
Ethics of obedience
Ethics of mutual advantage
Conventional justice
Ethics of peer opinion
Ethics of law and order
Postconventional justice
Ethics of social contract
Ethics of universal principles
Morality of care
Survival Orientation
Conventional care62