Child Development
What can we learn from children about human evolution, behavior, and sustainability?
The development of social and cognitive abilities in the course of a lifetime can help us understand the causes of human behavior and the origins of our everyday experience.
The role of the Child Development content anchor is to integrate perspectives from developmental psychology to explore how human behavior, cognition, and social capacities emerge and change over the course of an individual lifetime. Linking Child Development with Cultural Diversity also helps to highlight how universal developmental processes interact with culturally specific norms and languages.
Within the OpenEvo framework, child development perspectives help students understand that human behavior and cognition are in some sense highly flexible and shaped by experience – humans can develop drastically different ways of perceiving and interpreting the outer and inner world based on growing up in specific social and cultural environments. These insights can help in perspective taking, in reflecting on the origins of one’s own and others thoughts and behaviors, and in evaluating social-ecological conditions of child development for fostering wellbeing, prosociality, and sustainable development.
“Studying early childhood means learning to understand how humans have become who they are – every individual as well as all of us as a species. This understanding creates perspectives. Perspectives on the fundamental commonalities of all humans as well as the differences between individuals and cultures, on equal opportunities and health and the things that impede them.”
Prof. Dr. Daniel Haun,
Director of the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology,
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Teaching Materials related to this Content Anchor
Below you find all our teaching materials that integrate or explore child development perspectives on the origins of human behaviors.
“Fair” does not always mean the same thing
These lesson materials introduce students to issues of fairness and various interpretations of it. Reflecting on results of a cross-cultural experiment with children, students discuss how we can use our understandings to create a more fair world.
A Teacher’s Guide to Evolution, Behavior, and Sustainability Science
Our interdisciplinary teacher’s guide outlines our educational design concept. It provides introductory readings around core concepts of human sciences and ideas for exploring them in the classroom.
Born good? Babies help unlock the origins of morality
Can infants already distinguish between what is morally right and wrong? This video explores experiments with babies to answer these questions.
Chimps or children – who is better at sharing resources?
A comparative behavioral research experiment exploring the abilities of chimpanzees and of children to cooperate around a shared resource.
Community Science Field Guide to School Culture
Schools are central social environments for young people to grow and develop themselves. How schools are governed, and which norms, values, and institutions get adopted, can all drive major life trajectories for how students think about their own learning and civic capacities and about the world they live in. This community science field guide provides supports for students around the world to investigate and strengthen the cooperation dynamics of their own school governance systems.
Connecting the past, present, and future – Education
Information about the history of education
Cooperative activities with children and chimpanzees
A series of experiments with small children and chimpanzees to investigate their ability and motivation to engage in collaborative activities
DNA-V
Psychologists Louise Hayes and Joseph Ciarocchi have developed the DNA-V model. It contains the metaphors of the “Discoverer“, “Noticer“, “Advisor” and the “Valuer”, to help humans be aware of, make use of, and practice different skills towards valued living.
Evolution, Cooperation, and Sustainability
A lesson collection on evolution, cooperation, and sustainability
Evolutionary Anthropology for interdisciplinary biology education – teaching materials collection
A collection of teaching materials for the book “Evolutionary Anthropology in interdisciplinary biology education”
Evolutionary Anthropology in the Primary School
Evolutionary Anthropology in the Primary School – a pre-service primary teacher module
Human Behavior & Sustainable Development
A lesson collection for the Human Behavior & Sustainable Development module.
Human evolution – Gesturing and shared attention
Teaching resources and information about the evolution and significance of gesturing and shared attention in our species
Human evolution – Human needs, values, and wellbeing
Classroom resources for exploring (the evolution of) human needs, values, and well-being
Imitation in chimps and children (Video, Experiment)
A series of experiments to explore the tendency to imitate in children and chimpanzees
Lesson plan: Evolution and development of upright walking
This document contains a collection of activities and resources related to the evolution and development of upright walking in our species
Reading text – Baby schema
A reading text on the evolution of the baby schema together with cooperative child care
Reading text – Evolution of childhood
A reading text and causal mapping tasks on the (co)evolution of brain size, childhood, premature birth, cooperative childcare and social learning and teaching
Video, Worksheets: Experiments on the social behavior of babies
Using puppets psychologists explore what small children as young as a few months old think about their social environment and whether they can distinguish between “good” and “bad”.