Developmentally Appropriate Practice: Philosophical and Practical

Developmentally Appropriate Practice: Philosophical and Practical Implications
Author(s): David Elkind
Source: The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Oct., 1989), pp. 113-117
Published by: Phi Delta Kappa International
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20404083
Accessed: 02/02/2010 11:13
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=pdki.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Phi Delta Kappa International is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Phi
Delta Kappan.
http://www.jstor.org
Approprite
Developmentally
Practice:
Philosophical
Practical
Implications
and
True education reformwill
come about only when we re
place the reigning psycho
metric educational psychology
with a developmentally
appropriate one, Mr. Elkind
asserts. Unfortunately, the
prospects for such a shift are
not good.
BYDAVID ELKIND
[
Z
HE IDEAOF develop
mentally appropriate ed
ucational practice - that
the curriculum should
be matched to the child's
level of mental ability
-has been favorably received in educa
this positive re
tion circles.' However,
for de
ception is quite extraordinary,
velopmentally appropriatepractice de
rives from a philosophy of education that
to the "psycho
is in total opposition
metric" educational philosophy that now
dictates educational practice in the ma
jority of our public schools. Perhaps for
this reason developmental appropriate
ness has been honored more
inword
than
in deed.
Inwhat follows I highlight some of the
differences between these two education
al philosophies and contrast a few of their
DAVID ELKIND is a professor of child
study at Tufts University, Medford, Mass. He
is a past president of theNational Associa
tion for theEducation of Young Children and
the author of The Hurried Child (Addison
Wesley, 1981), All Grown Up and No Place
toGo (Addison-Wesley, 1984), and Misedu
cation: Preschoolers at Risk (Knopf, 1987).
Illustrationby Kay Salem
practical implications. My purpose in do
ing so is to argue that true education re
form will come about only when we re
of education.The developmentalphilos
ophy differs from thepsychometricphi
losophy on all four counts. I should men
place the reigningpsychometric educa tion that the developmental philosophy
tionalpsychologywith a developmentally that I present here derives from the re
appropriate
one.
TWO PHILOSOPHIES
Any philosophy of education must in
clude some conception of the learner, of
the learning process, of the information
to be acquired, and of the goals or aims
search and theory of Jean Piaget.2
Conception of the learner. Within a de
velopmentalphilosophyof education, the
learner is viewed
as having developing
mental abilities.All individuals(with the
exception of the retarded) are assumed
to be able to attain these abilities, though
not necessarily at the same age. For ex
OCTOBER
1989
113
0
ample, we expect that all children will at
tain the concrete operations that Piaget
described as emerging at about age 6
or 7. These operations, which function
much like the group of arithmetic opera
tions, enable children who have attained
them to learn and to apply rules. How
ever, not all children will attain these
operations at the same age. According
ly, a developmental
philosophy sees in
in ability as differ
dividual differences
ences in rates of intellectual growth.
This conception of mental ability con
trasts sharply with that of a psychometric
philosophy of education.According to
the psychometric
position,
the learner is
0
0
ing," which in effect allows bright chil
dren to go through the material more
quickly than slower children. This psy
chometric orientation also underlies the
provision of special classes for the gift
ed and for the retarded.
Conception of the learning process.
Within the developmental philosophy
of education, learning is always seen as
a creative activity. Whenever we learn
anything, we engage the world in a way
that creates something new, something
that reflects both our own mental activi
ty and the material we have dealt with.
We never simply copy content; we al
ways stamp it with our unique way of
he developmental approach implies little or no
automatic transfer of learning; the psychometric
approach assumes spontaneous transfer.
seen as having measurable abilities. This
philosophy assumes that any ability that
exists must exist in some amount and
must, therefore, be quantifiable. For ex
ample, intelligence tests - the flagships
of the psychometric
philosophy - are
viewing the world. The child from Con
necticut who heard the Lord's Prayer as
"Our Father, Who art in New Haven,
Harold be thy name" is not the excep
tion but the rule. Everything we learn has
both a subjective and an objective com
designed to assess individualdifferences
ponent.
in the ability to learn and to adapt to new
The conception of learning as a cre
ative or constructive process has a very
important practical implication. Itmeans
that we cannot talk of learning independ
ently of the content to be learned. The
material to be learned will always inter
act with the learning process in some spe
cial way. Long after Piaget discovered
the successive stages and organizations
of mental operations,
he continued to
study the ways inwhich children attained
different concepts, such as space, geom
etry, time, and movement
and speed.3
In so doing he emphasized the fact that
merely knowing the stages of mental de
velopment does not provide special in
sight into how children use the operations
at any given stage to attain any particu
lar concept. The only way to discover
how children go about learning a partic
ular subject is to study children learning.
By contrast, the psychometric philos
ophy views learning as governed by a set
of principles (e.g., intermittent reinforce
ment) and consisting of the acquisition of
a set of skills (e.g., decoding) that are in
dependent of the content to be learned.
Early workers in this tradition enunciat
situations.A psychometric perspective
regards individual differences in per
in
formance as reflecting differences
amount of a given ability.
Both of these opposing conceptions of
human ability contain some truth. How
ever, they have far different pedagogi
cal implications.
From a developmentalperspective, the
important task for educators ismatching
curricula to the level of children's emerg
ing mental abilities: hence the principle
of developmentalappropriateness.Cur
riculum materials should be introduced
only after a child has attained the level
of mental ability needed tomaster them.
This in turnmeans that curricula must be
studied and analyzed to determine the
level of mental ability that is required to
comprehend them.
From a psychometric
point of view,
the most important task for educators is
matching children with others of equal
ability. Bright children are assumed to be
able to learn more in a given time than
less bright children. In practice, this phi
losophy leads to so-called "ability group
114
PHIDELTA
KAPPAN
ed such principles as "mass versus dis
tributed" or "whole versus part" learning,
which were presumed to operate inde
pendently of the content to be learned.
Indeed, early studies of memory
em
ployed nonsense
syllables in order to
eliminate the effect of content on the
study of memory.
The limitations of this approach were
dramatically
demonstrated
by Jerome
Bruner,
Jacqueline Goodenough,
and
George Austin in their seminal work on
problem solving.4Before thepublication
of their work, problem solving was spo
ken of in terms of "trial and error" or
"sudden insight" because most of the
work had been done with animals. What
Bruner and his colleagues demonstrated
was that human subjects, when present
ed with complex problems, employ com
plex problem-solving
activities - in oth
er words,
strategies." Put differently, the
content of the problem determines
the
level of the problem-solving
activities
that humans employ.
this insight seems to have
Nonetheless,
been lost. The current interest in teach
ing young children such things as think
ing skills,5 learning strategies,6 or com
puter programming7
reflects a regres
sion to the idea that thought and content
can be treated separately. It is assumed
that - once children learn thinking skills
or learning strategies or computer pro
gramming - these skills will automati
cally be transferred to different kinds of
content. To be sure, transfer of training
does occur, but it is far from automatic.
Transfer happens when students are ac
learners.8 But what
tive, not passive,
can we possibly mean by activity if not
that students are consciously aware of the
content they are thinking about or apply
ing strategies to?Mental processes are al
ways content-oriented.
The developmental
approach implies
that there is little or no automatic trans
fer from one subject to another, where
as the psychometric
approach assumes
that the skills and strategies of thinking
often transfer spontaneously
to new
areas.
Conception of knowledge. From a de
velopmental perspective,
is
knowledge
always a construction, inevitably reflect
ing the joint contributions of the subject
and the object. This is far from a new
idea, and it harks back to the Kantian
resolution of idealist (all knowledge
is a
mental construction) and empiricist (all
knowledge is a copy of an externally ex
isting world) interpretations of how we
0
0
0M~o
that are different from those of their peers
come to know the world.9 Kant argued
that themind provides the "categories" of
not "wrong." It is, in fact, as developmen
tally appropriate as the older child's grasp
and teachers.Unfortunately, these ideas
knowing, while the realworld provides
of conservation.
From thepsychometricpoint of view,
are often regarded as wrong rather than
as different and original. One bright
is something that a child ac
knowledge
inde
quires and that can be measured
child, when asked to write something
is thus always a
the content. Knowledge
construction of the mind's interaction
with the world and cannot be reduced to
one or the other.
What Piaget added to the Kantian so
lution - and what makes Piaget a neo
Kantian - was the demonstration that the
categories of knowing (themental oper
ations of intelligence) are not
as Kant had supposed. Rather,
gories change with age. This
a developmental
dimension to
constant,
the cate
idea adds
the Kant
pendently from theprocesses of acquisi
about the color blue, wrote about Picas
so's Blue Period and was teased and
tion. This separation is reflected in the jeered. A greater appreciation for such
distinctionbetween intelligencetestsand differenceswould make the lifeof bright
achievement tests.One consequence of children in our schools a lot easier.
Conception of the aims of education.
the separation between learning and con
tent is that knowledge ismeasured against
an external standard that is independent
of the learner. When compared to such
an external standard, a child's responses
can be assessed as being either "right" or
The aims of developmental education are
straightforward. If the learner is seen as
1650; two plus two equals four, not five.
aims of education
a growing individualwith developing
abilities,
if learning is regarded as a cre
is seen
ative activity, and if knowledge
ianversion of theconstructionof knowl
then the aim of educa
as a construction,
edge.As theirmental operationsdevelop, "wrong."
tion must surely be to facilitate this de
Certainly, there is a right and a wrong
children are required to reconstructthe
realities theyconstructedat theprevious with respectto some typesof knowledge. velopment, thiscreativeactivity, and this
developmental level. In effect, a child The Bastille was stormed in 1789, not in construction of knowledge. Piaget put the
creates and re-creates
reality out of his
from a developmental
or her experienceswith theenvironment. We have to distinguish here between perspective thisway:
what I have elsewhere termedfisdamen
The reality of the young child - his
tal knowledge, which we construct on
or her knowledge of the world - is thus
The principal goal of education is to
our own, andderivedknowledge,which
create men who are capable of doing
different from the reality of the older
child and adult. For example, young chil
dren believe that a quantity changes in
amount when it changes in appearance that, say, the amount of liquid in a low,
flat container is greater when it is poured
into a tall, narrow one. Older children,
whose reality is different, can appreci
ate the fact that a quantity remains the
same in amount despite changes in its
appearance. In other words, older chil
dren recognize that quantity is conserved.
From a developmentalperspective, the
young
child's conception
of quantity
is
is constructed by others and which we
must acquire at second hand. 10 The
terms right and wrong are useful only in
connectionwith derived knowledge.
The developmental approach intro
duces the idea that there can be differ
ences in knowledge without any refer
ence to "right" or "wrong." The idea of
difference, ratherthanof correctness, is
important not only with respect to fun
but also with re
damental knowledge,
spect to creative thinking.For example,
many bright children come up with
ideas
new things, not simply repeating what
other generations have done - men
who are creative, inventive, and dis
coverers. The second goal of education
is to formminds which can be critical,
can verify, and not accept everything
that is offered. The greater danger
today is of slogans, collective opin
ions, readymade trendsof thought.We
have to be able to resist them individu
ally, to criticize, to distinguish be
tween what is proven and what is not.
So we need pupils who are active, who
learn early to find out by themselves,
partly by their own spontaneous activi
ty and partly through material we set
up for them; who learn early to tell
what is verifiable and what is simply
the first idea to come to them."
The aim of developmental education,
then, is to produce thinkers who are cre
ative and critical. This aim will not be
achieved, however, by teachingthinking
skills to children and adolescents. Rath
er, the way to pursue this aim is by creat
ingdevelopmentallyappropriatelearning
PRESCHOOL
that challenge the child's
environments
emerging mental abilities. Creative think
ing and critical thinking are not skills to
be taught and learned. They reflect ba
sic orientations toward the self and the
world that can be acquired only when
children are actively engaged in con
structing and reconstructing their physi
cal, social, and moral worlds.
The aim of psychometric education is
to produce children who score high on
tests of achievement. In other words, the
OCTOBER
1989
115
0
0
0
From a developmentalpoint of view,
the recommendation of the Holmes
he developmental approach seeks to create stu
dents who want to know, not students who
know what we want.
Group that we do away with the under
graduate major in education and substi
tute a year or two of graduate training and
internshipwill not producebetter teach
ers. There is a need for teacher training
at the undergraduate level - not in tradi
tionaleducationcourses, but in child de
velopment.
Curriculum. From a developmental
the ac
aim of education is to maximize
of curious, active learnersmust precede point of view, there are several princi
quisition of quantifiableknowledge and theacquisitionof particularinformation. ples thatshouldguide theconstructionof
skills. Perhaps formerSecretaryof Edu To put thedifferencemore succinctly, the thecurriculum.First, a curriculummust
cationWilliam Bennett stated this view developmentalapproach seeks to create be constructedempirically, not a priori.
of the aims of education as well as any
studentswho want toknow,whereas the There is no way to figure out how chil
one:
psychometricapproachseeks toproduce dren learna subjectwithout studyinghow
they actually go about learning it. Thus
studentswho knowwhat we want.
We should want every student to
know how mountains are made, and
that formost reactions there is an equal
and opposite reaction. They should
know who said "I am the state" and
who said "Ihave a dream." They should
know about subjects and predicates,
about isosceles triangles and ellipses.
They should know where the Ama
zon flows and what the First Amend
ment means. They should know about
the Donner party and about slavery,
and Shylock, Hercules, and Abigail
Adams, where Ethiopia is, and why
there is a Berlin Wall. 12
it is truly a scandal that curriculum pub
lishers not only fail to do research on the
materials they produce, but also fail even
IMPLICATIONS OF A
DEVELOPMENTAL PHILOSOPHY
Now
to field-test them! Inno otherprofession
that we have looked at these two
contrastingeducationalphilosophies,we
can review a few of the implications for
the practice of education of adopting a de
velopmentalperspective.Once again,my
interpretationis largely based on the
Piagetian
idea of the development
of in
telligence.
Teacher training.Studentsofmost dis
ciplines must
learn the basic material
of
their discipline. A physics studenthas
In this statement Bennett echoes a
theme that was also sounded in A Nation
at Risk, which was published three years
earlier and decried the poor performance
of American
students on achievement
tests, especially when compared to the
performance of children from other na
tions.Moreover, Bennett's remarksfore
shadowed the best-selling critiques of
and
education by Allan Bloom
U.S.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., which charged that
American education was failing to pro
vide childrenwith the basic knowledge
of western civilization.'3
Young people should certainly be ex
posed to Shakespeare,
they should know
the basics of geography, and they should
be familiar with current events. A de
velopmental approachto educationdoes
not deny the importance of such knowl
edge. The difference between the two ap
proaches is amatter of which acquisition
comes first. Those who hold a develop
mental philosophy believe thatchildren
who are curious, active learners will ac
that Ben
quire much of the knowledge
nett, Bloom, and Hirsch call for - and
many other things as well. But, from a
the creation
developmental perspective,
116
KAPPAN
PHIDELTA
to learn about the rules that govern
the
physicalworld; a chemistrystudentmust
learn how the basic chemical elements
interact; a biology student must learn
about plants and animals. Education
is
perhaps the only discipline wherein stu
dents do not learn the basic material of
the discipline at the outset. Students take
courses in curriculum,
in methods,
in
educationalphilosophy, in assessment,
and in classroom management. They take
only one (or at most two) courses in
educationalor developmentalpsycholo
gy.
But the basic material of education is
not curriculum. Nor is it assessment or
methods. The basic material of education
is children and youth. A teacher training
program that is truly developmentally ap
propriate would have its students major
in child development.
Trained in this
way, a teacher would be, first and fore
most, a child development specialist. Stu
dents with a strong foundation in child
can integrate what they
development
learn about curriculum, assessment, and
management with what they know about
how children of various ages think and
learn.
would we allow a product
to be placed
on themarket without extensive field
testing.
In a truly developmental
system of edu
cation, teacherswould have the oppor
tunity to construct and test their own
materials.
They could see what works
and what doesn't, and they could try out
different sequences and methods. The
way curriculum materials work will al
ways depend on the specific group of
in any given
children in the classroom
year. So a curriculum should never be
final; it shouldalways be open, flexible,
and innovative. Such a curriculum is ex
citing for the teacher and for the pupils
and makes both learning and curriculum
innovationcooperative ventures.
I believe
that a curriculum
Second,
should be localized,
for
particularly
elementary schools. I know that this is
contrary to trends in other countries,
which have uniform curricula for all chil
dren. Japan and France are but two of the
countries with such uniform national cur
ricula. England, too, will be initiating a
uniform national curriculum in 1990. But
the
such national curricula eliminate
possibility of localizingmaterials to in
clude particulars from the environment
inwhich children actually live and learn.
Such localized curricula hold a great
deal of intrinsic interest for children. For
example, in learning math, children liv
ing in Hawaii might be asked to match
coconuts and palm trees, whereas chil
dren living in the Northeast might be
asked to match acorns and oaks. Like
it would add to children's enjoy
wise,
ment if the stories they read took place
D 0D-DD_ 0 &
in their own communityor one similar
to it. In social studies, too, children are
cooperatively andwho experimentwith
curriculum materials
are teaching as well
trulybe developmentally appropriateif
itsunderlyingphilosophy is psychomet
ric.
as learning.
One way to highlight the difference
How can we change that underlying
between authentic teachingand psycho educationalphilosophy? Itmight seem
be sure, childrenlike storiesaboutplaces metrically oriented teachingis to look at that what is required is a paradigm shift
and events that are new to them. None
how each typeof instructionhandles the of the sort described by Thomas Kuhn as
theless, they also enjoy reading stories asking of questions. In psychometrical characterizingmajor scientific revolu
that relate directly to the world they live
ly oriented teaching, the teacheroften tions.14Yet neither the developmental
in.Children,no less thanadults,appreci asks students questions to which the thinking of Freud nor that of Piaget has
ate both fantasy and the realism of local
teacheralreadyknows theanswers.The been sufficientto effect sucha shift.This
reference.
purpose is to determinewhether the stu may reflect the fact that educational prac
Finally, we need to studycurricula to dents have the same information as the tice is dictatedmore by social, political,
determine their level of developmental teacher.But asking questions towhich and economic considerations than it is by
difficulty. Developmental difficulty is one already has the answers is not authen
science. Unfortunately, amajor shift in
quite different frompsychometric diffi
tic behavior.A much more meaningful educational philosophy is more likely
culty. The psychometric difficulty of a approach is to ask children questions to to come about as a result of economic
delighted to find a picture of a building
that they have actually been in, rather
than one that they have never seen. To
curriculum or a test item is determined
by the number of children of a particu
lar age who successfully learn the mate
rial or who get the item correct. A cur
riculumor test item isgenerally assigned
to the grade or age level at which
of the children can succeed.
75%
Developmental difficulty, by contrast,
must be determined by examining the ac
tual "errors" children make in attempting
to master a problem or task. For exam
ple, when young children who have been
taught the short a sound are asked to learn
the long a as well, they have great diffi
culty. The problem is that they are be
ing asked to grasp the fact that the same
letter can have two different sounds. Un
that the same symbol can
derstanding
stand for two different sounds, however,
requires the attainment of themental abil
ities thatPiaget calls concreteoperations.
A
teacher who
holds
a developmental
philosophy would thus avoid teaching
phonics until he or she was quite sure that
most of the children could handle con
crete operations. Because
the develop
mental difficulty of any particular prob
lem or task can be determined only by
active investigation,
part of the ex
perimental work of teaching would be to
explore the developmentaldifficulty of
the available curriculum materials and to
try out new materials
that might work
differently or better.
Instruction.Developmentally speak
ing, it is as impossible to separate the
learning process from the material to be
learned as it is to separate learning from
instruction.This is authentic teaching.
From this perspective,
the teacher is al
so a learner, and the students are also
which one doesn't have the answers.
Finding the answers can then be a learn
than as a result of scientific
in
novation.
ing experience for teacherand students
alike. The authentic teacher asks ques
tions to get information and to gain un
not to test what students
derstanding,
know or understand. Such questioning
reflects the fact that the authentic teach
er is first and foremost
an enthusiastic
learner.
Assessment. Developmental assess
ment involvesdocumentingthework that
a child has done over a given period of
time. Usually
this is done by having a
child keep a portfolio that includes all of
his or her writing, drawing, math ex
plorations, and so on. In looking through
such a portfolio, we can get a good idea
of the quality of work that the child is
capable of doing and of his or her prog
ress over the given period.
Psychometricassessmentinvolvesmeas
uring a child's achievement
by means
of commercial or teacher-made tests. A
child's progress is evaluated according
to his or her performance on such tests.
Unlike a portfolio of work, the psycho
metric approach yields a grade that sym
bolizes both the quantity and the quality
of the work that the child has done over
a given period of time. Although some
testing can be useful, it is currently so
overused thatmany children and parents
are more concerned about grades and
test scores than about what a child has
learned. The documentation of a child's
work tends to avoid that danger.
I have tried to demonstrate that, while
the idea of developmentally
appropriate
practice has been well received among
educators,
it really has little chance of
teachers.The teacherwho experiments being widely implemented.Without a
with the curriculum is learning about the
change inunderlyingphilosophy, chang
curriculum and about the children he or
she teaches. And children who work
necessity
es in educational practice will be super
ficial at best. No classroom or school can
1. Sue Bredekamp, Developmental^
Appropriate
Practice
National Association
(Washington, D.C:
for the Education
of Young Children,
1987).
2. Jean Piaget,
The Psychology
of Intelligence
& Kegan Paul, 1950).
(London: Routledge
3. Jean Piaget and B?rbel Inhelder, The Child's
Conception
of Space (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1956); Jean Piaget, B?rbel Inhelder, and Alina
The Child's Conception
Szeminska,
of Geometry
(New York: Basic Books,
1960); Jean Piaget, The
Child's Conception
of Time (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1967); and idem, The Child's Concep
tion of Movement
and Speed (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1970).
4. Jerome S. Bruner, Jacqueline J. Goodenough,
and George A. Austin, A Study in Thinking (New
York: Wiley,
1956).
5. Joan Boykoff Baron and Robert J. Sternberg,
Teaching Thinking Skills: Theory and Practice (New
York: Freeman,
1987).
6. Edwin Weinstein
and Richard Edwin Mayer,
The
of Learning Strategies,"
inMerlin
Teaching
C. Wittrock,
ed., Handbook
of Research on Teach
ing, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan,
1986).
7. Seymour Papert, Mindstorms
(New York: Ba
sic Books,
1980).
8. David N. Perkins and Gavriel Salomon, Teach
vol. 46,
ing for Transfer," Educational Leadership,
1988, pp. 22-32.
9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
(New
York: Wiley,
1943).
10. David Elkind, Miseducation:
at
Preschoolers
Risk (New York: Knopf,
1987).
11. Quoted
in Richard E. Ripple and Verne E.
A Report of
Rockcastle,
eds., Piaget Rediscovered:
on Cognitive Studies and Curricu
the Conference
:School of Educa
lum Development
(Ithaca, N.Y.
tion, Cornell University,
1964), p. 5.
12. William
First Lessons: A Report on
in America
(Washington,
of Education,
Department
1986), p. 3.
13. Allan Bloom,
The Closing
of the American
Mind
(New York: Simon & Schuster,
1987); and
E. D. Hirsch,
Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every
to Know
American
Needs
(Boston: Houghton
Elementary
D.C: U.S.
J. Bennett,
Education
Mifflin,
1987).
14. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
2nded.
Revolutions,
(Chicago: University of Chica
go Press,
1970).
K)
OCTOBER
1989
117