1ST SEMESTER

A.Y. 2022-2023

MODULE 1
Basic Concepts and Issues on Human
Development
September 15-22,2022

FTC 101
The Child and Adolescent Learners and
Learning Principle

REYNALDO S. GALANG, PhD

Instructor

Institute of Teacher Education

Module 1- Basic Concepts and Issues on Human Development BEED2A
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ELECTIVE 4 (The Child and Adolescent Learners and Learning Principle)

Objectives:

At the end of this lesson, student should be able to:

1. Define human development

2. Distinguish between the traditional and life-span approach of development

 3. Explain how does development takes place

4. State characteristics of human development from a life-span perspective and

heir implications to child care, education and parenting

Overview:

The process of development involves beginnings and endings. Every individual is called

to become what is meant to be- a seed into a full grown herb or a tree, a caterpillar to become

butterfly and a human baby into a mature person. How this development happens is what we

will learn in this module.

Topic Outline

1. Two Approaches to Human Development

2. Characteristics of Human Development from Life-span Perspective

Lesson Proper

A number of researches on human development have been conducted. Many

theories on human development have been forwarded. Researches on human

development continue as existing theories get corrected, complemented or replaced.

Up to present several issues on this topic are still on search for explanation.

In this module, you will be acquainted with human development as a process, the

developmental task that come along with each developmental stage and relevant issues that are

raised about human development.

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Two Approaches to Human Development

If you believe that a certain girl named Jewel and a teen-ager named Adrian will show

extensive change from birth to adolescence, little or no change in adulthood and decline in late

old age, your approach to development is traditional. In contrary, if you believe that even in

adulthood developmental change takes place as it does during childhood, your approach is

termed life-span approach.

 Paul Baltes (Santrock, 2002) an expert in life-span development stated the following

characteristics.

1. Development is lifelong. A baby will continue developing even in adulthood. It does not

end in adulthood.

2. Development is plastic. Plasticity refers to the potential for change. Development is

possible throughout the life-span. No one is too old to learn.

3. Development is multidimensional. Development consists of biological, cognitive and

socio-emotional dimensions.

Development as process is complex because it is the product of biological, cognitive and

socio-emotional processes.

a. Biological processes involve changes in the individual’s physical nature.

b. Cognitive processes involve changes in the individual’s thought. Intelligence,

and language.

c. Socio-emotional processes include changes in the individual’s relationship

with other people, changes in emotions and changes in personality.

4. Development is contextual. Individuals are changing beings in a changing world.

Individual respond to and act on contexts. These contexts include individual’s biological

make up, physical environment, cognitive processes, historical, social and cultural

contexts.

5. Development involves growth, maintenance and regulation. These three are the main

goals of human development.

Principles of Human Development (NAEYC, 2009)

1. All the domains of development and learning-physical, social and emotional and

cognitive are important and they are closely interrelated. Children’s development and

learning in one domain influence and are influenced by what takes place in other

domains.

2. Many aspects of children’s learning and development follow well documented sequences,

with later abilities, skills, and knowledge building on those already acquired.
 3. Development and learning proceed at varying rates from child to child. As well as at

uneven rates across different areas of child’s individual functioning.

4. Development and learning result from a dynamic and continuous interaction of biological

maturation and experience.

5. Early experiences have profound effects, both cumulative and delayed, on a child’s

development and learning: and optimal period exist for certain types of development and

learning to occur.

6. Development proceeds toward greater complexity, self-regulation, and symbolic or

representational capacities.

7. Children develop best when they have secure, consistent relationship with responsive

adults and opportunities for positive relationship with peers.

8. Development and learning occur in and are influenced by multiple social and cultural

contexts.

9. Always mentally active in seeking to understand the world around them, children learn in

a variety of ways; a wide range of teaching strategies and interactions are effective in s

supporting all these kids of learning.

10. Play is an important vehicle for developing self-regulation as well as for promoting

language, cognition, and social competence.

11. Development and learning advance when children are challenged to achieve at a level

just beyond their current mastery, and also when they have many opportunities to practice

newly acquired skills.

12. Children’s experiences shape their motivation and approaches to learning, such as

persistence, initiative and flexibility; in turn, these dispositions and behaviors affect their

learning and development.

Issues on Human Development 4

1. Nature versus Nurture- Which has more significant influence on human development?

Nature refers to an individual’s biological inheritance. Nurture refers to environmental

experiences.

2. Continuity versus Discontinuity- Does development involve gradual, cumulative change

(continuity) or distinct changes (discontinuity). To make it more concrete, here is a

question: Is our development like that of a seedling gradually growing into a mango tree?
 Or is it more like that of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly?

3. Stability versus Change-Is development best described as involving stability or as

involving change? Are we what our first experiences have made of us or do we develop

into someone different from who we were at an earlier point in development?

The issues presented can be translated into questions that have sparked animated

debate among developmentalists. Are girls less likely to do well in math because of their

feminine nature or because of society’s masculine bias? How extensively can an elderly

be trained to reason more effectively? How much, if it all, does our memory decline? For

children who experienced a world of poverty, neglect by parents, and poor schooling in

childhood, can enriched experiences in adolescence remove the “deficits” that they

encountered earlier in their development (Santrock, 2009)?

Up to this time debate continues. Researches are on-going. Development is not all

nature or all nurture, not all continuity or discontinuity and not all stability or all change

(Lerner, 1998 as quoted by Santrock, 2002). Both nature and nurture, continuity and

discontinuity, stability and change characterize our life-span development.

The key is the interaction of nature and nurture, rather than either factor alone

(Rutter, 2001 as quoted by Santrock, 2002).

Both genes and environment are necessary for a person even to exist. Heredity

and environment operate together-or cooperate and interact to produce a person’s

intelligence, temperament, height, weight, ability to read, and so on.

If heredity and environment interact, which one has a greater influence or

contribution?

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How the First Nine Months Shape the Rest of Your Life

What makes us the way we are? Why are some people predisposed to be anxious,

overweight or asthmatic? How is that some of us are prone to heart attacks, diabetes or high

blood pressure?

There’s a list of conventional answers to these questions. We are the way we are because

it is in our genes. We turn out the way we do because of our childhood experiences. Or our

health and well-being stem from lifestyle choices we make as adults.

 But there’s another powerful source of influence you may not have considered: your life

as a fetus. The nutrition in the womb; the pollutants, drugs and infections you were exposed

during gestation; your mother’s health and state of mind while she was pregnant with you- all

these factors shaped you as a baby and continue to affect you to this day.

This is the provocative contention of a field known as fetal origins whose pioneers assert

that the nine months of gestation constitute the most consequential period of our lives.

PERMANNENTLY (underscoring mine) influencing the wiring of the brain and the functioning

of organs such as the heart, liver and pancreas. In the literature on the subject which has

exploded over the past 10 years, you can find references, to the fetal origins of cancer,

cardiovascular disease, allergies, asthma, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, mental illness. At the

farthest edge of fetal-origins research, scientists are exploring the possibility that intrauterine

conditions influence not only our physical health but also our intelligence, temperament, even

our sanity.

As a journalist who covers science, I was intrigued when I first heard about fetal origins.

But two years ago, when I began to delve more deeply into the field. I had more personal

motivation: I was newly pregnant. If it was true that my actions over the next nine months would

affect my offspring for the rest of his life, I needed to know more.

Of course, no woman who is pregnant today can escape hearing the message that what

she does affects her fetus. She hears it at doctor’s appointments, see it in the pregnancy

guidebooks: Do eat this, don’t drink that, be vigilant but never stressed. Expectant mothers could

be forgiven for feeling that pregnancy is just nine-month slog, full of guilt and devoid pleasure,

and this research threatened to add to the burden.

But the scientists I met weren’t full of dire warnings but of the excitement of discovery-6

and the hope that their discoveries would make a positive difference. Research on fetal origins is

prompting aa revolutionary shift in thinking about where human qualities come from and when

they begin to develop. It’s turning pregnancy into a scientific frontier: the National Institutes of

Health embarked last year on a multidecade study that will examine its subjects before they’re

born. And it makes the womb a promising target for prevention, raising hopes of conquering

public-health scourges like obesity and heart disease through intervention before birth.
Time Magazine, October 4, 2010
The Importance of Genetics in Human Development

Differences in gene expression—whether as a result of standard regulation processes or

through mutation—are crucial to an individual’s physical and psychological development. The

exact extent to which genes, as opposed to an individual’s environment, determine or influence

psychological development is hotly debated; this controversy is known as the “nature-vs.-nurture

debate.” However, an individual’s genetic makeup at the very least serves as a crucial baseline

(which may then be mediated by the environment) for such characteristics as the ability to begin

learning spoken language, such personality traits as a tendency toward aggressive versus

submissive behavior, and risk levels for such diseases as alcoholism and addiction.

Before birth, a fetus has of course had limited opportunity to be shaped by its

environment, beyond factors such as the mother’s diet, substance use, and anxiety level. For this

reason, genetics play a particularly important role in prenatal development.

Prenatal development is the process that occurs during the 40 weeks prior to the birth of a

child. There are three stages of prenatal development: germinal, embryonic, and fetal. Prenatal

development is also organized into three equal trimesters, which do not correspond with the three

stages. The first trimester ends with the end of the embryonic stage, the second trimester ends at

week 20, and the third trimester ends at birth.

Fetal Stage

The remainder of prenatal development occurs during the fetal stage, which lasts from

week 9 until birth (usually between 38 and 40 weeks). When the organism is about nine weeks

old, the embryo is called a fetus. At this stage, the fetus is about the size of a kidney bean and

begins to take on the recognizable form of a human being. Between 9 and 12 weeks, reflexes

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begin to appear and the arm and legs start to move (those first movements won’t be felt for a few

weeks, however). During this same time, the sex organs begin to differentiate. At about 16

weeks, the fetus is approximately 4.5 inches long. Fingers and toes are fully developed, and

fingerprints are visible. By the time the fetus reaches the sixth month of development (24

weeks), it weighs up to 1.4 pounds. Hearing has developed, so the fetus can respond to sounds.

The internal organs, including the lungs, heart, stomach, and intestines, have formed enough that

a fetus born prematurely at this point has a chance to survive outside of the womb.
Evaluation/Assessment/Activity

A. Give your own definition of human development.

_________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

B. Differentiate traditional to life-span approach to human development

________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

C. Fill in the concept map on the characteristics of life-span perspective on human

development.

Characteristics
of human
development

D. True or False. 8

______________ 1. Development is a pattern of change.

______________ 2. Development is either growth or decline.

______________ 3. From both traditional and life-span perspectives development is

lifelong.

______________ 4. In the development process, there are things that hold true to all
people.

______________ 5. Individuals develop uniformly.

 ______________ 6. Development is predictable because it follows an orderly process.

______________ 7. Development is unidimensional.

______________ 8. Development takes place in a vacuum.

______________ 9. The effect of biological process on development is isolated from the

effect of cognitive and socio-emotional processes.

_____________ 10. Development and learning occur in and are influenced by multiple
social and cultural contexts.

E. Watch. Reflect. Conclude.

1. Watch “ Lonely Only” in you tube. Write a two sentence-reflection.

_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________

2. Watch “Only Children: Debunking the Myths About Single Children”. Can this be

considered as a myth nowadays?

3. Watch the battle between “nature and nurture”, Irene Gallego Romero, TEDxNTU.

What conclusions can you derive from the battle between nature and nurture?

_____________________________________________________________________

F. View on Youtube of Helen Pearson: Lessons from the longest study on human

Development (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dv2Hdf5TRg). Fill out the matrix

given below. Use a separate sheet when needed.

Problem Research Methodology

 Source: bibliographical format

Findings Conclusions

How are the findings of this research useful to teachers?

______________________________________________________________________________

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G. Read a research related to fetal origins. Fill out the matrix given below. Use a separate

sheet when needed.

Problem Research Methodology

 Source: bibliographical format

Findings Conclusions

How are the findings of this research useful to teachers?

______________________________________________________________________________

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References:

Bergin, C. and Bergin D. (2018). Child and adolescent development in your classroom. (3rd ed.)

USA: Cengage Learning.

Corpus, B. et.al. (2018). The child and adolescent learners and learning principles. Lorimar

Publishing Inc. Manila, Philippines.

http://www.cdipage.com/development.html

Lumen Boundless Psychology. Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-

psychology/chapter/prenatal-development/

Paul, A. (2010). How the first nine months shape the rest of your life. Time Magazine. Vol. 176

No. 4

Sandler, L. (2010). The only child myth. Time Magazine. Vol. 176 No. 3

Santrock, J. W.(2002). Life-span development. (8th ed.). McGraw-Hill Companies. NewYork.

USA.

Santrock, J.W. (2005). A topical approach to life-span development. McGraw-Hill Companies.

NewYork, USA.

OFFICIAL MCC MODULE DISCLAIMER

It is not the intention of the author nor the publisher of this module to have monetary gain
in using the textual information, imageries, and other references used in this publication. This
module is only for the exclusive use of bona fide student of Mabalacat City College.

In addition, this module or no part of it thereof may be reproduced, stored in retrieval

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, and
or/otherwise, without the prior permission of Mabalacat City College.

Prepared by:

REYNALDO S. GALANG, PhD

Instructor

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