Robert S. Siegler

How do children acquire the vast array of concepts, strategies, and skills that distinguish the thinking of infants and toddlers from that of preschoolers, older children, and adolescents? In this new book, Robert Siegler addresses these and other fundamental questions about children's thinking. Previous theories have tended to depict cognitive development much like a staircase. At an early age, children think in one way; as they get older, they step up to increasingly higher ways of thinking. Siegler proposes that viewing the development within an evolutionary framework is more useful than a staircase model. The evolution of species depends on mechanisms for generating variability, for choosing adaptively among the variants, and for preserving the lessons of past experience so that successful variants become increasingly prevalent. The development of children's thinking appears to depend on mechanisms to fulfill these same functions. Siegler's theory is consistent with a great deal of evidence. It unifies phenomena from such areas as problem solving, reasoning, and memory, and reveals commonalities in the thinking of people of all ages. Most important, it leads to valuable insights regarding a basic question about children's thinking asked by cognitive, developmental, and educational psychologists: How does change occur?

The Process of Change in Children's Thinking

Emerging Minds

William Damon

Richard M. Lerner

Nancy Eisenberg

Deanna Kuhn

This advanced text for psychology, human development, and education provides students with state-of-the-art overviews of the discipline in an accessible, affordable format. Unique both in the depth of its coverage and in the timeliness of the research that it presents, this comprehensive text conveys the field of child and adolescent development through the voices of scientists who themselves are now shaping the field.

An Advanced Course

Child and Adolescent Development

Part of the authoritative four-volume reference that spans the entire field of child development and has set the standard against which all other scholarly references are compared. Updated and revised to reflect the new developments in the field, the Handbook of Child Psychology, Sixth Edition contains new chapters on such topics as spirituality, social understanding, and non-verbal communication. Volume 2: Cognition, Perception, and Language, edited by Deanna Kuhn, Columbia University, and Robert S. Siegler, Carnegie Mellon University, covers mechanisms of cognitive and perceptual development in language acquisition. It includes new chapters devoted to neural bases of cognition, motor development, grammar and langauge rules, information processing, and problem solving skills.

Handbook of Child Psychology, Cognition, Perception, and Language

Judy S. DeLoache

Worth is proud to publish the Third Edition of How Children Develop by Robert S. Siegler, Judy S. DeLoache, and Nancy Eisenberg—the leading textbook for the topically-organized child development course. Providing a fresh perspective on the field of child development, the authors emphasize fundamental principles, enduring themes, and important recent studies to provide a unique contribution to the teaching of child development.

Robert S. Siegler

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