Article summary with Malleability, plasticity, and individuality: How children learn and develop in context by Cantor a.o. - 2018

Why is the ability to realize the fullest potential of scientific knowledge paradoxically limited by the disciplinary paradigms that have led to the growth of scientific knowledge?

Recent scientific advantages have caused an explosion of knowledge about how children develop and how contextual factors influence their development. At the same time, the particular disciplinary structures and paradigms often reflect and cause delimited questions, measures, and frameworks. Research teams often lack disciplinary and cultural diversity and publish mostly in their own disciplinary journal. The existence of lots of field-specific knowledge from biology, neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences is therefore hard to synthesize.

What is developmental systems theory?

Developmental systems theory (DST) is a theoretical perspective on development, heredity, and evolution. It emphasizes the shared contributions of genes, environment, and epigenetic factors on developmental processes. It views development as an ongoing, constructive enterprise between the individual and multiple biological, psychological, and sociocultural systems and agents over time.

What are the two basic principles of DST?

Developmental systems theory is based around two basic principles:

• Multiple characteristics of individuals and context collaborate to produce all aspects of behavior.
• Variability as well as stability in performance provide important information for understanding human development.

How can DST help integrate the vast amount of scientific knowledge about human development?

DST provides a framework for seeing how factors within an individual and his/her micro- and macro-environments act together to shape how children learn, change, and systematically grow across the developmental continuum. It helps in reviewing the variability in behavior and performance of children and adults. DST offers a means to organize and explain complex relations involving biological and physiological systems, social environments, and appraisals, interpretations, and internalizations of our experiences shape pathways across life and provide opportunities to optimize development.

Which important themes can be found when integrating knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines about human development?

• Human development depends on the ongoing, reciprocal relations between individuals´ genetics, biology, relationships, and cultural and contextual influences.
• Each individual´s development is a dynamic progression over time.
• The human relationship is a primary process through which biological and contextual factors mutually reinforce each other.
• All children are vulnerable. In addition to risks and adversities, micro- and macro-ecologies provide assets that foster resilience and accelerate healthy development and learning.
• Students are active agents in their own learning with multiple neural, relational, experiential, and contextual processes converging to produce their unique developmental range and performance.

What is epigenetic adaptation?

Epigenetic adaptation is the biological process through which the ecology of relationships, experiences, perceptions, and physical and chemical toxins influence lifelong learning, behavior, neural integration, and health. Epigenetic signatures are chemical signals derived from environmental influence. They affect when and how genes are switched on and off, and whether the change is temporary or permanent. This is a process that begins before conception and contributes to the transmission of behaviors and experiences to future generations, as well as to qualitative changes in our genetic makeup.

What are foundational skills?

Foundational skills are skills that all children need for healthy development and learning, including the bonds that children make with adults (which provide emotional security), the skills to cope with and manage stressful situations, and the regulation of emotion and attention to effectively engage and accomplish goals.

What is dynamic skill development?

Dynamic skill development refers to the human brain´s capacity to act in an organized way in a specific context. Skills do not emerge fully formed, but are built up through practice in context in a constructive process over time. Skill construction is an active process with an interdependent, hierarchical character: complex skills emerge as earlier skills are integrated into an inclusive whole. Skills vary within individuals based on goals, emotional states, and contextual supports. A child´s performance can be optimized under conditions of high, personalized support.

How does relational integration influence human development?

Relational integration is found in strong interpersonal connections that respect each other´s autonomy and individuality while linking him/her in empathic communication with others. It promotes neural integration and leads to strengthened links between existing synapses, regions, and functions that are critical for the development of more intricate brain processes and skills. Positive developmental relationships are characterized by warmth, consistency, attunement, reciprocity, and joint activity. These relationships are necessary for developing the affective, cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral competencies that are foundational for developing and learning.

Why is relational integration especially important in the first year of life?

Sensory, social, and emotional experiences offer opportunities to optimize foundational brain circuits. Early attunement balances excitatory and inhibitory systems in the brain and establishes templates for coordinated interpersonal behaviors, attitudes, and expectations about the self, others, and relationships. It makes a healthy development of the neurobiological systems involved in cognition, stress modulation, and self- and emotional regulation possible.

Which developmental patterns characterize variation in infants´ attachment?

Children develop a working model of close relationships grounded in early experiences. Three developmental patterns can be distinguished:

• Secure attachment with caregivers supports development through opportunities to explore surroundings, build language skills through language-rich and responsive interactions, and build social competence through successful social interactions.
• Insecure avoidant
• Insecure anxious/ambivalent

Sometimes a fourth pattern is added, namely disorganized attachment, which is associated with abuse and trauma.

What is self-regulation?

Self-regulation skills and attributes are a foundational set of competencies that help with managing cognition, emotion, attention, and action, and support goal-directed behavior. They involve multiple regulatory-related processes that range from automated physiological functions to effortful, complex cognitive processes. Self-regulation is a complex dynamic skill and is formed through many interrelationships between and among various subskills and collaborating internal systems.

What is the role of self-regulation in human development?

By stimulating the brain´s self-organizing and reorganizing properties and integrating subsystems of skills, the continuous feedback loop between emotion regulation, executive functions, motivation, and stress management creates the capacity to self-regulate. Self-regulation skills are important for higher-order learning (e.g. decision making, problem solving), metacognition, conflict resolution, perseverance, and resilience, and contribute to short- and long-term social, emotional, cognitive, academic, financial, and health outcomes.

What is intentional self-regulation?

Intentional self-regulation occurs when a person consciously sets out to attain a goal and/or when routine activities are impeded. It is a constructive process whereby children set goals for their learning and then continue to monitor and control their cognition, metacognition, motivation, and behavior based on the assessment of their goal attainment. Intentional self-regulation skills include effortful control, the ability to implement goal-related strategies, and the ability to optimize goals to align with personal and social values and desired abilities.

What are executive functions?

Executive functions are a set of neurocognitive attention-regulation skills involved in the conscious, goal-directed modulation of thought, emotion, and action. They involve both top-down, intentional control of behavior as well as bottom-up, automatic reactions. Commonly the executive functions consist of attention control, cognitive flexibility/attention shifting, working memory, and inhibitory control.

What is the role of the executive functions in human development?

The development of executive functions begins early and can be intentionally nurtured, for example by preparing children to pay attention, follow rules, and actively engage in learning. They are necessary for more complex self-regulation-related skills, such as focus, self-control, communication, and engaged learning. The executive functions are very important for learning readiness and school success.

What is the science of individuality?

Science of individuality is a framework that believes that individuals vary in how they learn, behave, and develop, that these processes vary according to context, and that there are patterns within that variability. It doesn´t believe in the existence of one ideal developmental pathway for everyone, but instead strives to understand patterns in individual variation across contexts to be able to build toward generalizable models of growth and learning.

What is the Specificity Principle?

The Specificity Principle views development as multidimensional, modular, and reflective of the interactive context of a child´s life, producing distinctive pathways across time and at specific points in time. It looks at the moderating influence of practices and interventions to produce a specific set of competencies, behaviors, performances, or growth. Researchers, according to the science of individuality, should assess developmental pathways of different individuals through this principle, to be able to capture the range of variability in human development and skill acquisition.

What is the “constructive web” when applied to learning processes?

The constructive web is a framework through which to understand the dynamic interrelationships between children’s development, knowledge, complex skill constructions, and environmental supports. When applied to learning processes it:

• Acknowledges the many relational, curricular, instructional, and environmental factors that support or undermine learning.
• Recognizes that skills do not emerge in isolation or a complete form, but codevelop hierarchically through multiple domain-specific practices in context.
• Assumes the need for effective scaffolding, sequencing, and pacing within a child´s unique developmental range.
• Characterizes students´ learning trajectories as joint products of their individual attributes and the dynamic web of contextual supports that surrounds them.

How do prior knowledge and experiences influence the learning process?

The prior knowledge that children have before they come to school is what formed their automated beliefs, attributions, conscious and unconscious knowledge, and metacognitive and cognitive skills. It affects how children receive and process new information. Teachers should try to connect to this prior knowledge to engage the children in the learning process and to increase their neural integration and learning of new information. 

How does motivation influence the learning process?

Motivation is a psychological process that determines whether students begin a task, persist at it, and invest mental effort to succeed. Intrinsic motivation is associated with deeper focus, confidence, creativity, and achievement. Research shows that motivation accounts for a large part of learning, as well as the transfer and application of what has been learned.

How do competency-related beliefs influence the learning process?

Competency-related beliefs are beliefs about what one is capable of with regard to a particular task or situation. When students feel competent and believe that their intelligence and ability can be improved through effort, and when they feel in control of their learning, they are more motivated to learn and are more effective learners.

What is the Belief-Control-Expectancy Framework?

The Belief-Control-Expectancy Framework suggests that student beliefs about themselves and their learning goals influence expectations about what they are able to control. There are four factors in the framework, namely values, self-efficacy, emotions, and attribution errors. These factors influence beliefs about control and expectancies for success, and influence a student´s ability to start, persist, and apply sufficient mental effort to complete and succeed at a task.

How does metacognition influence the learning process?

Metacognition is the awareness of one´s own thinking and learning. Metacognitive skills enable students to process, manipulate and refine information, to organize and recognize patterns in information, to evaluate their thinking and learning strategies, to intentionally transfer knowledge to new situations, and to apply knowledge to solve complex problems. Metacognitive processes support neural integration and enables students to learn from their mistakes. Finally, metacognitive abilities can enhance motivation.

What are the conditions for learning?

The conditions for learning (CFL) refer to the relational dimensions of learning, physical and emotional safety, and a sense of belonging and purpose. CFL have direct and indirect effects on learning, and can be positive or negative. Students learn best when the conditions for learning:

• Promote motivation, engagement, and purpose.
• Ensure emotional, physical, and identity safety.
• Foster connection, respect, support, and challenge.

Very important within the conditions for learning is the presence of positive developmental relationships between students and teachers.

How can cultural responsiveness and competence create positive conditions for learning?

Cultural incompetence heightens anxiety and stress, and places extra demands on working memory and cognitive resources. Cultural competence contributes to effective learning by addressing or preventing factors that directly interfere with student´s learning and by creating supportive environments and personal readiness in adults to address cultural disconnects and disabling conditions. Through context-sensitive communication between the teacher and the student, the relational and neurobiological conditions for learning can be enhanced (for example by using cultural knowledge as a scaffold to connect existing knowledge to new concepts and content).

How can stress influence learning?

During a stress response the hormonal and neurochemical systems in the body are activated. The body produces cortisol and adrenaline, two hormones that increase heart rate, blood pressure, inflammatory reactivity, and blood sugar levels. This heightens vigilance and alertness, but reduces nonessential functions such as complex thinking. Also, exposure to chronic stress is associated with changes in brain architecture and the development of the brain structures and their integration.

Which types of stress responses have been identified by the American Academy of Pediatrics?

Three types of stress responses have been distinguished:

• A positive stress response is characterized by mild and/or brief elevations in stress hormones, heart rate, and blood pressure. It is part of a healthy child development.
• A tolerable stress response activates the body´s alarm systems to a greater degree due to more severe or longer-lasting threats. But, in the presence of supportive relationships, long-term physiological effects can be prevented.
• Toxic stress responses occur when stress exposure is frequent, prolonged, and without the presence of adequate adult support. The chronic elevation of stress hormones can disrupt the maturation of the developing brain and physiological systems, with negative implications for learning.

What is resilience?

When referring to individuals, resilience can be defined as the potential or manifested capacity of an individual to adapt successfully through multiple processes to challenges that threaten the function, survival, or positive development. Resilience is not a trait, but best characterized by substantial heterogeneity, dependence on contextual supports, and equifinality. Children´s resilience varies as a function of individual sensitivities and dispositions, socialization practices, the type, timing, and intensity of adversities, and the support they have available to them.

What are the principles of the developmental systems perspective on resilience?

• Human adaptation and development in continuous, multilevel coactions with the environment.
• Multiple interacting systems.
• A capacity for adaptation conceptualized at multiple levels.
• Manifestations of resilience reflecting current and historical contexts.
• A capacity for adaptation in challenging circumstances involving multiple interacting systems.
• Constant change and adaptation.
• Self-organizing properties.
• A recognition that resilience is not a fixed trait, but emerges through coaction with contextual, supportive, and relational factors.