Principles for Developmentally Based Education
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Because development and learning are so complex, no one theory of education is sufficient to explain learning
completely. Nevertheless, a broad-based review of the literature on early childhood education generates a set of
general principles to inform early childhood practitioners. The principles embodied in developmentally based
education are based on current research studies that document how children develop and learn. The original
positions statement was developed in 1988 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children
(NAEYC) and endorsed by many educational associations. Using information gained from a review of current
research studies, written critiques of the positions, and the solicitation of recommendations form educators across
the country, the NAEYC revised the original positions statement in early 1997←. The following revised
principles are sufficiently reliable generalizations that teachers should consider as they make educational
decisions.
1. Domains of children’s development – physical, social, emotional, and cognitive – are closely related.
Development in one domain can limit, facilitate, or influence development in other domains. For this reason
curriculum planning is critical to help children ages four through six develop conceptual understandings that
apply across related subject-matter disciplines.
2. Development occurs in a relatively orderly sequence, with later abilities, skills, and knowledge building
on those already acquired. Research studies indicate that relatively stable, predictable sequences of growth
and change occur in children during the first nine years of life. Predictable changes occur in all domains of
development, although the ways in which these changes are manifest and the meaning attached to them may
vary in different cultural contexts.
3. Development proceeds at varying rates from child to child as well as unevenly within different areas of
each child’s functioning. Each child is unique, with an individual pattern and timing of growth, as well as an
individual personality, temperament, learning style, and family and life experiences. Age is only a crude index
of developmental maturity. Recognition that individual variation is expected and valued requires that
educators have high expectations and standards for all children, yet not to rigid in the ways in which students
reach these expectations. Group-nor expectancies can be especially harmful for children with special learning
and developmental needs.
4. Early experiences have both cumulative and delayed effects on individual children’s development;
optimal periods exist for certain types of development and learning. If an experience occurs occasionally,
it may have a minimal effect; but positive or negative experiences occurring frequently can have powerful.
Lasting effects. Recent research studies on brain development are also contributing to this knowledge base.
← From Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs, edited by Sue Bredekamp and
Carol Copple. Washington, D.C.; National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1977.
Summarized by Ada J. Hand, California Department of Education, October 1977.
State Preschool
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Early Head Start
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General Child Care
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Head Start
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Migrant Head Start
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State Based Migrant
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Child Care Resource & Referral
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Drawer 4
Federal Block Grant/Alternative Payment
5. Development proceeds in predictable directions toward greater complexity, organization, and
internalization. Learning during the early childhood period proceeds from behavioral knowledge to
symbolic or representational knowledge; that is, from the concrete to the abstract. The earliest form of
symbolic representation in childhood is play, which begins at about eighteen months of age and becomes
increasingly complex throughout the primary years. Children learn to use their imagination and mental
imagery to represent ideas, objects, and situations.
6. Development and learning occur in and are influenced by multiple social and cultural contexts.
Children’s development is best understood within the sociocultural context of the family, educational setting,
community, and broader society. These various contexts are interrelated, and all have an impact on the
developing child. For example, even a child in a loving, supportive family within a healthy community is
affected by the biases of the larger society, such as racism or sexism, and may show the effects of negative
stereotyping. The goal is that all children learn to function well in the society as a whole and move
comfortably among groups of people who come from both similar and dissimilar backgrounds.
7. Children are active learners, drawing on direct physical and social experience as well as on culturally
transmitted knowledge to construct their own understandings of the world around them. Children learn
as they actively strive to make meaning out of their daily experiences, observations, and interactions with
materials, children, and adults. After children form their own hypotheses about life around them, they observe
and reflect on their observations, ask questions, and formulate answers. When a child’s model is challenged
by new experiences, he adjusts the model or alters his mental structures to account for the new information.
Children’s knowledge and understanding are deepened when teachers encourage them to reflect on the
children’s experiences and activities.
In recent years, discussions of cognitive development have become polarized regarding whether children’s
development precedes learning or whether learning precede development. Current attempts to resolve this
apparent dichotomy acknowledge that essentially both theoretical perspectives are correct in explaining
aspects of cognitive development during early childhood. Strategic teaching can enhance children’s learning,
yet direct instruction may be ineffective if it is not attuned to the cognitive capacities and knowledge of the
child at that point in development.
Because active learning is time intensive, group instruction and student-choice periods need to be long
enough for children to have in-depth intellectual experiences, negotiate problems, and use language. When
children are truly engaged, even young children have long attention spans. The teacher’s challenge is to
provide novel experiences that are just beyond the child’s level of experience and understanding so that the
child is challenged, but not bored, frustrated, or anxious.
8. Development and learning result form interaction of biological maturation and the environment, which
includes both the physical and social worlds that children live in. Human beings are influenced by
heredity and environment, both of which are interrelated. Behaviorists contend that the environment
determines learning, while maturationists would argue for predetermined heredity. Although each perspective
is somewhat true, current theory on development is viewed as the result of an interactive, transactional
process between the growing, changing individual and his or her experiences in the social and physical
worlds. In a developmentally based classroom, the teacher provides a type of scaffold whereby children are
challenged to higher levels of development while they receive support form the teacher. The teacher does not
wait for children to mature or “be ready” for particular skills, concepts. Or knowledge, but instead stimulates
development through rich, organized, appropriate activities and environments and time for students’
reflection.
9. Play is an important vehicle for the social, emotional, and cognitive development of children, as well as
a reflection of their development. Play gives children opportunities to understand the world, interact with
others in social ways, express and control emotions. Develop imagination, and extend language. Research
studies demonstrate the importance of sociodramatic play as a tool for learning curriculum content with four
through six-year-old children. When teachers provide a thematic organization for play; offer props, space, and
time; and become involved in the play by extending and elaboration of the children’s ideas, their language
and literacy skills can be enhanced.
10. Development advances when children have opportunities to practice newly acquired skills as well as
when they experience a challenge just beyond the level of their present mastery. Research studies
demonstrate that children need to be able to negotiate learning tasks successfully most of the time if they are
to maintain motivation and persistence. Faced with repeated failure, most children will stop trying, Most of
the time, teachers should give young children tasks that require effort to accomplish and present content at the
children’s level of understanding. At the same time, young children need opportunities to work at their
“growing edge.” In giving a child a task just beyond his or her independent reach, the adult and more
competent peers contribute significantly to a child’s development as they provide the supportive “scaffolding”
that allows the child to take the next step. The principle of learning is that children can do things first in a
supportive context and then later independently and in a variety of contexts.
(Jamila and Minh play with a new manipulative, the peg grading board—a wooden board into which colored
pegs of graduated height can be inserted. At first they randomly place the colored pegs, but then Jamila points
out that the pegs can go “like steps” from little to big. Minh watches as Jamila inserts the pegs. They take out
the pegs and Minh tries it successfully.)
11. Children demonstrate different modes of knowing and learning and different ways of representing
what they know. Human beings come to understand the world in many ways and have preferred modes of
learning and expressing that learning. Research studies by learning theorists and developmental psychologists
have described learners in different ways. The classroom environment should be personalized to maximize the
various intelligences; however, this approach should not be interpretedted to mean that classroom lessons
should necessarily be represented in Gardner’s seven different types of knowledge.
12. Children develop and learn best in the context of a community where they are safe and valued, their
physical needs are met, and they feel psychologically secure. For young children preschool or the
elementary school becomes a home away form home. Optimum development will occur when teachers create
an environment where the children and their families feel welcome, loved, and accepted and where a child’s
individual approaches to materials, ideas, and people are respected. Because children’s physical health and
safety too often are threatened today, schools may work with other agencies to ensure that children have
adequate health, safety, nutrition, mental health, and social services.