Alexandra Buchlmayer: “Social and Behavioral Development

Social and Behavioral Development in Correlation with Educational Approach

Alexandra Buchlmayer

Introduction

For my Child and Adolescent Development class, we had to write an observation paper based on our choice of observation on children. I chose to do the four- to six-year-old age range, which meant I was to go to either a daycare center or school. Instead of focusing on children at one school, I wanted to compare the social skills and behaviors of students in two different learning environments. As an ardent Catholic, I decided to choose Catholic schools as my observation ground. I compared students from a child-centered learning program, meaning the students have more authority over what they learn and interact with during each class period, and students from a typical academic program where the teacher has primary instruction on what is learned. My goal was to determine whether children develop better socially and behaviorally under one educational approach versus another.

Participants

I observed students from The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd (COGS) at St. Matthew Cathedral Parish and School and students from Our Lady of Hungary Catholic School (OLH), both in South Bend, Indiana. The children in both schools were between the ages of five and six. There were four males and five females at COGS, most of which were Caucasian, while a few were Hispanic. There were four males and six females at OLH, all of which were Hispanic except one African American female. The students observed at OLH all seemed to be of a lower socio-economic status than those of COGS.

Overview of the Day

The teacher at COGS reviewed practical-life lessons for a majority of the day. These included teaching all the students how to pour with big creamer cups and beads, instructing them on how to scoop rocks into bowls using a large spoon, and having them practice grabbing liquid-filled balls with large tongs. She then split the class into two sections: those who had learned the upcoming theology lesson and those who had not. Once the class

was split, the second-years were allowed to rehearse the previously taught practical life lessons, while the first-years received a lesson on how to set up a prayer table. The first-years were then dismissed to practice lessons while the second-years received a new theology lesson on the tabernacle. Finally, the students cleaned up and left.

The students at OLH arrived and received breakfast at a much less structured pace than those at COGS. After prolonged breakfast and bathroom break, learning commenced; the students gathered around their teacher and began to discuss the calendar and weather. Next, the teacher taught the students phonics and then had them grab whiteboards to practice writing with her. Afterwards, the teacher taught them what “equals” meant in math and had them practice in their workbooks. The students were then shown educational videos to review what they had just learned in English and mathematics. After a long period of learning, they were given free time to play, followed by a read-aloud lesson on the Bible. Finally, I left, and they went to lunch.

The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd

There was one situation involving a boy, Reginald, who displayed private speech. Private speech is the behavior of talking quietly to oneself, typically seen in young children, because at such an age, processing is difficult to do just through thinking. As I was sitting on the stool in between the door and a shelving unit, I observed Reginald, who was laying on the carpeted floor, coloring his green folder with red and black colored pencils. He used the five stickers that he was allotted for his folder, as faces for his characters. At first, I thought Reginald was talking to me, but I quickly realized that he was talking aloud to himself as he drew. He said aloud that he was drawing eyes on all his monsters, but that he was not going to give one of the black ones legs, and that the red one was an evil one. He used private speech to categorize which stickers, representing heads, were to be evil and good. The upside-down stickers were the evil monsters, and he said those ones get red bodies, while the good ones, with upright sticker-heads, were deemed the good ones. It was then that he looked up and explained all of that to me rather than to himself.

Reginald’s actions connect directly to two topics from our book. First and most predominantly is that of private speech. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget coined the term “egocentric speech” to reflect “his belief that young children have difficulty taking the perspectives of others. Their talk, he said, is often ‘talk for self’

in which they can express thoughts in whatever form they occur, regardless of whether a listener can understand.”1 Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, however, did not agree with Piaget’s analysis of children’s talking-aloud behavior. He believed that it was difficult for young children to think without using speech and that language serves as “the foundation for all higher cognitive processes, including controlled attention, deliberate memorization and recall, categorization, planning, problem solving, and self-reflection.”2 Vygotsky also believed that children become more adept at processing their thoughts without using speech as they grow older and activities become easier, but until then, they use what he calls private speech. Private speech, according to Vygotsky, aids children in categorization; this can be seen in the above narrative about Reginald, as he reflected aloud and to himself about which stickers and drawings he would categorize as good or evil. Children who freely use private speech tend to be more attentive, involved, and perform better than their more reserved peers when it comes to tackling challenging activities. In Reginald’s case, at the very least, it kept him very attentive to the task at hand and allowed him to be detailed in his work. Along with private speech, Reginald also displayed some fine-motor development while he was drawing. As professor of psychology Laura Berk explains, by the ages of three or four, children start drawing their “first representational forms” with “the universal ‘tadpole’ image, a circular shape with lines attached,” while by ages five to six they typically shift to “more realistic drawings” that involve a “more conventional human…with the head and body differentiated.”3 Reginald did not follow with this predicted timeline, as his drawings were still much more like the tadpole images of a four-year-old, even though he was six. A possible explanation for Reginald’s somewhat slow motor development is that males tend to fall behind their female counterparts when it comes to that area of development. According to Berk, “girls have an edge in fine-motor skills” and therefore, Reginald is just not up to speed, but he may be more advanced in some of his gross-motor skills, like running or maintaining stability, than his female counterparts.4

Our Lady of Hungary Catholic School

Near the end of my observation, the children were given a

1 Laura Berk, Exploring Child & Adolescent Development (Pearson, 2018), 222. 2 Ibid., 222. 3 Ibid., 211-212. 4 Ibid., 214.

fifteen-minute recess inside, as it was raining outdoors. As soon as they were released to play, Matilda stood on a chair and asked if anyone wanted to play teachers with her. To her dismay, no one responded; she stepped down and colored instead. Had she received a response, this would have initiated cooperative play, through make-believe play; however, she ended up in parallel play along with others drawing. Cooperative play is a form of play where all children are working toward a common goal. Parallel play, on the other hand, is where children work alongside each other, but without interaction. There were five children using coloring books while lying on their stomachs on the carpet circle. Two of them, Diego and Dora, took part in associative play while coloring because Dora noticed that both of their books contained dinosaur stickers. Diego became excited about this, and they spent time talking about each other’s stickers. They then went back to quietly drawing side-by-side. The other five kids were working together to build train tracks and Legos. Their play was collaborative as they handed each other pieces and discussed how to move forward toward their common goal. The two kids playing with Legos lost interest quickly and joined the three playing with the train tracks. Enrique started teasing Shakira by taking a toy car from her and running around the classroom with it as she chased him. Shortly after, the teacher told the students that she was looking for those who clean up upon first being asked and most students started to clean right away; however, a few continued to play with stickers until prompted again to clean. Mildred Parten produced four levels of activity to describe young children’s social development, after conducting research in 1932. It progresses from nonsocial activity to parallel play to associative play, before eventually reaching cooperative play. Parallel play can be defined as a situation, “in which a child plays near other children with similar materials but does not try to influence their behavior.”5 I observed parallel play and the progression to more advanced types of behavioral interactions between a group of five students practicing their drawing skills. They were in close proximity to each other working on similar activities but did not seem interested in social interaction. However, Diego and Dora moved up to associate play, which is when “children engage in separate activities but exchange toys and comment on one another’s behavior.”6 They did this when they discussed the commonality of stickers in their coloring books and continued to talk as they drew next to each other. The five kids working on the train

5 Ibid., 251. 6 Ibid., 251.

track and Legos together exemplified cooperative play, “a more advanced type of interaction, [where] children orient a common goal, such as acting out a make-believe scene,” as they had a common goal in mind.7 Also, had Matilda gotten her way of playing teacher with the others, her make-believe play would also have been an advanced form of cooperative play.

Comparisons

After spending significant time at both OLH and SOGS, I observed that children from OLH were more able to develop socially because their teacher allowed them to share and play together, while the teacher at COGS was much stricter when it came to working separately on their own mats and not sharing materials. Her strictness was partially due to COVID-19 restrictions, but COGS still typically requires its students to work on their own mats. While the teachers’ levels of strictness affect the children socially, providing a more sociable environment at OLH, it also affects the kids behaviorally. The use of operant conditioning, primarily positive punishment, “presenting an unpleasant [stimulus] to decrease the occurrence of a response,” by way of reprimanding the children affects whether the children will continue to behave negatively.8 Operant conditioning is a way of learning through reinforcements or punishments. For example, the teacher at the COGS continually reminded the children to keep their masks up, not to talk while the teacher was talking, to sit where they were supposed to, not to touch what they were not supposed to, and not to run. Also, as a specific example, one student, Quintin, purposely stepped on another, Reese’s, finger and would not express remorse or apologize. The teacher, in turn, made him go to the back of the line and had a long talk reprimanding him. This exemplifies operant conditioning to get a child to curb adverse behaviors. However, the opposite happened at OLH. The teacher did not give out any consequences for the children talking out of turn, fidgeting, or playing with masks. A specific example of this apathy comes when Enrique was teasing Shakira by running around the classroom with the toy that he took from her. The teacher did not reprimand him for taking her toy or for running. She simply reminded him to be careful. The lack of punishment to combat negative behaviors will consequently lead the children to build unhealthy habits.

7 Ibid., 251. 8 Ibid., 121.

Conclusions

My goal while observing a child-centered program and an academic program was to determine where children better develop socially and behaviorally. Through my observations, socially, children develop in an academic setting where they get free time to play together and structured class discussions to work together. This I found evident at Our Lady of Hungary School. However, children seem to behave better when they receive consistent positive punishment for unfavorable behaviors, which was demonstrated at the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. There are some limitations to my conclusions. This includes the realization I had upon observing COGS that the hour the students are with that specific teacher is only one hour of their typical academic program at St. Matthew Cathedral School, therefore leaving observations of enhanced behavior questionable as to whether they really came from COGS or their regular classes. Also, as I try to draw conclusions on COGS enhancing behavioral development and OLH improving social development, it is important to recognize that these teachers are individuals and therefore, findings may not be applicable to the generalized child-centered and academic programs, as not all teachers reprimand with the same intensity. In determining whether children develop better socially and behaviorally under one educational approach versus another, I found that children develop better socially in a typical academic setting, whereas children develop better behaviorally in a child-centered learning environment.

Bibliography

Berk, Laura E. (2018). Exploring Child & Adolescent Development. London: Pearson, 2018.