Havighursts Developmetal Task Theory

According to Robert Havighurst, growth and development occurs in six stages

the infancy and early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle
age, and later maturity. Each of these six stages has developmental tasks an individual
learns throughout its life span and most of these tasks are greatly affected by the
technology of todays generation and along with this are the negative and positive
results.
During the infancy and early childhood, an individual learns to walk, talk, eat,
control the elimination of body waste, differentiate sex, form concepts and learn
language to describe physical and social reality, and get ready to read. People from the
previous generation and the people in this preset generation have different approaches
in doing these developmental tasks. This is because of technology that the present
generation is enjoying. For instance, infants or children on their early childhood learns to
talk only by imitating the sounds they hear from the adults while those from this present
generation, apart from imitating from the adults, they also learn from their gadgets.
There are now different videos and applications in the internet which helps infants learn
language without much help from the adults. Children also learn to talk from watching
movies and other TV programs suited for them. Most children now are bilingual or can
speak two languages, mostly English apart from their mother tongue. This is even
though their parents, teachers or elders are not teaching them other language; they
acquire this skill from watching TV programs and movies. Apart from language itself,
children also learn how to read with the use of technology. Different applications can be
installed in their handheld devices which promised to teach children the basics of
reading. However, these gadgets have negative/disadvantages too. The radiation
caused by these devices may have a harmful effect on the infants or childrens health.
When children reach middle childhood, their developmental task includes
learning physical skills necessary for ordinary games, building wholesome attitudes
toward oneself as a growing organism, learning to get along with age-mates, learning
an appropriate masculine or feminine social role, developing fundamental skills in
reading, writing and calculating, developing concepts necessary for everyday living,

developing conscience, morality, and scale of values, achieving personal

independence, developing attitudes toward social groups and institutions. In general,
this stage is where children explore the outside world. They play, socialize, and learn
the basic lessons in life. Through playing, they develop their physical skills, social skills,
morality, and attitudes, and learn how a boy or a girl should act appropriately. But
children nowadays have different way of doing these tasks from the children of the
previous generation. Instead of playing outside with their playmates, they play with their
gadgets. With this they may not develop those skills necessary for this stage. Playing
with technological devices may be fine but children wont be able to learn from other
people and may not acquire the skills and knowledge they could have learned from
playing with other children.
In the adolescent stage, an individual achieves mature relations with age-mates
of both sexes, achieves their social role, accepts ones physique and use the body
effectively, achieves emotional independence, prepares for marriage life and economic
career, acquires a set of values as a guide to behavior, and desires and achieves
socially responsible behavior. With technology, an individual may communicate to the
world with just one click. For instance, many of us meet a lot of people in different
social-networking sites in the internet. We talk, chat, call, and socialize on-line. Yes, this
is true and is very helpful. However, this form of communication shouldnt be abused.
Children should also interact with other people personally. By just communicating with
the use of technology, children will not be able to acquire the relations they should have
with others, use their body effectively, acquire values which are learned through
personal interactions with others, and that they may not be able to achieve socially
responsible behavior.

Vygotskys Social Influences on Cognitive Development

Lev Vygotsky believed that children are curious and actively involved in their own
learning and discovery and development of new understandings/schema. According to
him, much important learning by the child occurs through social interaction with a skillful
tutor. The tutor may model behaviors and/or provide verbal instructions for the child.
Vygotsky refers to this as cooperative or collaborative dialogue. The child seeks to
understand the actions or instructions provided by the tutor then internalize the
information, using it to guide or regulate their own performance (McLeod, 2007).
As mentioned earlier, most children or learners depend on their technological
devices for understanding instead of consulting experts, their teachers or parents. For
instance, parents let their infants or young children learn the alphabet by letting them
watch videos featuring these. This could have been more fun, exciting and effective if
its them themselves taught the children for they could suit the level of understanding of
the children unlike those videos, the children would only memorize the songs but wont
understand it deeply. Another example, if you are a 21 st century learner and you are
given an assignment about the periodic table to research, you are most likely to surf the
internet than to consult your previous science teacher about the task. Probably because
consulting the internet is more convenient, faster and undeniably more reliable than
consulting someone. But consulting someone could have been more accurate because
you can understand better in a person-to-person communication. That someone or that
person could explain to you further, connect concepts related to the topic which he/she
thinks may be of help to you, or simplify his/her instruction or explanation to suit your
level of understanding. As what Vygotsky said, the tutor (e.g. teachers, parents) could
be a model behavior or could provide verbal instructions for the child to follow. These
verbal instructions can be provided best by a tutor and not by any sort of technological
gadgets. However, most children nowadays depend on technology for learning.
Tendency is, learners may pass evaluation test but actually didnt understand what it is
about. The level of comprehension may not be as high as it is when the topic is being
explained by your teacher or parents themselves compared to the explanation or
instructions provided by technological gadgets.

Banduras Operant Conditioning

Albert Bandura believed that humans are active information processors and think
about the relationship between their behavior and its consequences. Children observe
people around them behaving in various ways (Bandura, 1961). Individuals that
observed are called models. In society children are surrounded by many influential
models, such as parents within the family, characters on childrens TV, friends within
their peer group and teachers at school. These models provide examples of behavior to
observe and imitate, e.g. masculine and feminine, pro and antisocial etc. Children pay
attention to some of these people and encode their behavior. At a later time, they may
imitate the behavior they have observe (McLeod, 2011).
Nowadays, children especially adolescents dont just settle for the kind of TV
programs or videos suited for their age. There is now thousands of information, videos
and such in the internet which may be age-restricted yet remain open for anyone. And
because of high technology, they have easy access to whatever they wanted to watch
and learn. Most parents are completely oblivious about what their children are up to.
This is where children learn bad habits and enjoyments. For instance, because of their
easy access to the internet, children nowadays are updated to the kind of life the
western countries are living. It is from them that they learn to party, drink and hang out
with their peers late at night. This will serve as their models, providing examples of
behavior, which they will eventually imitate and gradually turn to live that kind of lifestyle.
Because of this, children are often leaded to the wrong path. Instead of going to school,
they would choose not to. Instead of doing their homework, they would choose not to.
However, technology also helps the children in a positive way. Through technology,
children knew good public figures who may serve as a good role model from the TV or
from the internet. For instance are the famous local artists who in spite of their work still
tried hard to study to gain a degree.