Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

Undergraduate coursework in child development requires college students to be proficient in their understanding and assessment of holistic development of young children as defined within the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional domains. Traditionally, undergraduate courses at the 100 and 200 level require college students to critically consider scenarios and evaluate level of child development based on traditional text-based scenarios describing child behaviors or engagement in tasks.

Specifically, considering Piaget's theory of cognitive development (Piaget, 1974), it's critically important in a course that covers early child development that college students (pre-service professionals) be able to identify and correctly assess level of child development within the cognitive domain, differentiating between substages of the sensorimotor development stage of Piaget’s cognitive theory of development. Environments in which children interact are, of course, nuanced. The context of interaction cannot only skew the determination of a true assessment of level of child development, but it can also serve as a distractor to the evaluator. Thus, the best practice for gauging assessment of child development in the cognitive domain, according to Piaget’s stages, would be field work. However, field work is not readily possible in undergraduate early coursework, so most course tasks at this level involve textual descriptions in a case study format.

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