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In this volume leading developmentalists address the question of how children's thinking develops in context by drawing on the theories of Vygotsky, Gibson, and Piaget.Analyses of the ecology and the dynamics of behavior have become popular, emphasizing the particulars of people acting in specific environments and the many complex factors of human body and mind that contribute to action and thought. This volume brings together many of the current efforts to deal with development in this richly ecological, dynamic way.The research reported demonstrates that recent years have produced major shifts in approach. Activities are studied as they naturally occur in everyday contexts. Children's active construction of the world around them is treated as fundamentally social in nature, occurring in families, with peers, and in cultures. Behavior is studied not as something disembodied but within a rich matrix of body, emotion, belief, value, and physical world. Behavior is analyzed as changing dynamically, not only over seconds and minutes, but over hours, days, and years.

The purpose of this book is to explore meaningful integrations of developmental processes and functioning with conceptualizations of'context'-- a term traditionally denoting physical settings, social arenas, or perceptual or social backdrops in relation to a focal point. However, the study of context has taken a considerably more unique and vibrant form in recent years -- the term is becoming more than a substitute for background independent variables. Rather, the contributions of context to behavior, thought, feelings -- and vice versa -- are becoming central issues in many research domains. This text is a collection of empirical and theoretical accounts for understanding context; its focus is on integrating the study of context with the science of developmental psychology. Although the authors work in many different areas of the field, and with different populations, they all converge on a central methodological/conceptual theme of contextualism, which is presented as the dynamic integration of intraindividual factors with environmental and social/environmental factors.

One of the paradoxes in developmental theory is the child's simultaneous intrapsychic and interpsychic development. While the child is growing in mental capacity and struggling to define self, behaviors are also being learned whose function is to integrate self into a social network, which often means that egocentric behaviors are in conflict with sociocentric ones. This theory draws upon processes that promote both individual and social growth into a unified theory of development. A construct pertinent to almost all dimensions of psychological research, psychological distance is conceptualized as either the distance between what the learner understands and what still has to be understood (intrapsychic), or ways in which others adjust information for the learner in order to be fully comprehended (interpsychic). Psychological distance appears to serve both organizing and explanatory functions across seemingly diverse sets of theoretical and research questions, such as differentiation of self in personality development; conceptual representation in cognitive development; dialogue in the development of communication skills; information processing in cognitive science; regulatory mechanisms in the growth of control processes; and concept formation in cross-over areas of cognition, learning and thinking skills. This volume is based on papers presented as part of the Invitational Conference honoring Irving E. Sigel, Distinguished Research Scientist, at Educational Testing Service. In each of the chapters different models are utilized to account for the construct of psychological distance, and as such, to suggest extensions of Sigel's seminal work in this area. Together, these contributions form the basis of a discussion of psychological distance as a developmental construct -- a construct which permits serious consideration of individual differences as a function of both the process and the product of cognition and ecology.

This volume marks the 20th Anniversary Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society. Some of the American contributors were among the first to introduce Piaget to developmental and educational psychology in the United States, while some of the international contributors worked with Piaget to develop his program of genetic epistemology and continue to make significant contributions to it.Within this volume the possibility of Piaget's paradigm is reviewed not only as the stuff of normal science, yielding fascinating empirical questions that linger within it, but also, and more importantly, as the stuff of revolutionary science, with continuing potential to comprehensively structure our thinking about developmental theory.The constructive contribution Piaget's theory has for developmental theory emerges as four central themes in the volume: understanding the intentional or semantic aspect of mental life without abandoning the Piagetian assumption that is rational and committed to truth testing; examining mental life and its development as a dialectical relation of function and structure--a relation Piaget introduced in his study of the developmental relation between procedural and operational knowledge; exploring new and interdisciplinary perspectives on equilibration as the driving force of constructive adaptive processes; understanding social and historical forces in individual and cultural development--not necessarily as forces antithetical to Piaget's perspective but as forces that take on new meaning within his framework which avoids erroneous dichotomies such as the distinction between subjective and objective knowledge.

This volume juxtaposes two different domains of developmental theory: the Piagetian approach and the information-processing approach.Articles by experts in both fields discuss how concepts of development and learning, traditionally approached through cognitive-developmental theories such as Piaget's, are analyzed from the perspective of a task analytic, information-processing approach.