Ecological Perspective On Child Development

In recent years, more and more early childhood educational researchers have begun to apply the "child development" theory of ecological field to early child development and its relative researches. However, there are diverse branches and numerous points of view in ecology. What's more, early educational researchers are not so familiar with ecological theories. It is necessary to comb and explore ecology theory and its application on child development.So, this thesis selects 6 representative ecological theories, compares and analyzes their perspectives on "child development", hope to obtain some primary ideas to study child development from ecological perspective. The comparisons are mainly in two aspects:One is the comparison, of child development theories. Through comparison, it is found that, though the six ecological theories are diverse to some extent in concrete theory argument on child development, in macro-point of view, they in agreement with others. In details: these theories are all hold the most basic hypothesis of ecology that children develop in environment. As regards the inter-relationship between children and environment, though existing differences, the dominant view is that children and environment interact with each other and have close relationship. The environment is an entity. Meanwhile, it is necessary to describe it with child's subject factors. At the same time, all these theories believe that the environment is a structure system of many relationships, and also a diverse and changeable system.The other is the comparison of the research methodology on child development. Similar to the situation of the child development theories, though each theory diverse in methodology on concrete ideas, they show the same tendency: i.e. they all emphasizes on research in natural situation, strongly or slightly; emphasizes on using description method, strongly or slightly; and by and by, turn from emphasizing on discovering objective facts to acknowledging researcher's subjective selection and interpretation.