Abby Black

FHS-2600-400
Theory Comparison
To begin with, Erik Erikson has eight stages of development, but the first four stages are
about childhood development. His psychosocial theory deals more with the social and emotional
development more than the physical and cognitive aspect. In each of his stages, he has two
opposite words against each other, like trust vs mistrust. According to Erikson, at the assigned
age to the stage, that is where you learn one thing or the other. For example in the first stage of
trust vs mistrust, infants learn whether or not they trust their caregiver if the caregiver is meeting
their needs.
The next psychologist is Abraham Maslow. Maslow is known for his self-actualization
theory. People start life at the bottom of the pyramid. The only way you can move up to the next
stage is if you have met all the needs of the previous stage. Not everyone meets the highest stage
of self-actualization, but many people make it a goal to get there at the highest of his pyramid.
He is similar to Erikson by his theory also viewing mainly the social and emotional aspects of
development.
Next is Jean Piaget. Although he has some physical and social aspects, he is mostly all
about cognitive thinking. Piaget has four stages in his cognitive theory. In the beginning stage,
children learn their senses, motor skills, and object permanence. In his second stage, children
learn conservation. As shown in the conservation youtube video. the first little girl thought there
was more juice in the tall skinny glass even though the lady never added any more juice to it
from when it was even in the short, wide glass. His two other stages talks about solving problems
logically and more concrete.

Lev Vygotsky has a sociocultural theory. He doesnt really have set stages, but he says
that children learn through interaction with different children and scaffolding. With scaffolding,
children learn to solve problems mostly by their own, but with the teacher there to support them.
Along with interaction, speech is also important for learning. Vygotsky says that children learn
through communicating. (Bredekamp pg 117). While they learn to communicate, they also learn
how to play and pretend they are adults in different roles. He has all four of the different
developments of physical, cognitive, social, and emotional.
B.F. Skinner focuses on behaviorism. He has a concept called operant conditioning which
uses good and bad consequences to control a behavior (Bredekamp pg 120). Along with positive
and negative reinforcement, Skinner has the idea of shaping. Not only should people reward
children for the good and punish the bad, but teachers or parents should reward the child for each
step toward a goal that they reach. This will motivate the child and want them to keep on doing
what they were going towards.
The Reggio Emilia Approach focuses on the different kinds of media like drawing,
writing, photography, etc. These different media types help children see and understand different
parts of the world. The teachers in this approach stay with the same children for three years. The
children also learn by doing different short and long term projects.
All these theorists differ in different ways. The majority of the psychologists had different
set stages that go with different age groups. However, there were a couple psychologists, Maslow
and Skinner, who didnt have set stages. But even the ones with stages said that some people stay
in a stage longer than others. Each psychologist had a main focus of development, but all of the
different kinds can be cooperated in there in some way.

For me, there isnt a clear theorist that has a better theory on child development that
helped me learn. Each of them addressed different things and they all made sense. I would like to
research the Reggio Emilia Approach more, because this was the first time I have ever heard of it
and I would like to learn more. From also being a psychology major, I have heard these theorists
names plenty of times which may be why I have a better understanding.