A Developmental Perspective

In addition to drawing on the model of the human cognitive system, we interpret findings in the Compendium from time to time following a simple developmental model of the major processes, knowledge bases and sequences of development that people go through in becoming literate.

The developmental model is based on the understanding that, living in social groups with shared cultural experiences, we form normative expectations for what people at different ages can and cannot be expected to do. In a typical case, one will not use a form of addressing a person's cognitive system that the person is not expected to be able to process. For instance, one does not typically hand a written note to a two-year-old that asks for personal information such as a name. But one would ask for the child's name using oral language. Here the normative assumption is that, typically, a two-year-old can talk and comprehend simple oral language but generally cannot read.

Similarly, one does not ask an infant for information because it is assumed that typically infants cannot comprehend and speak oral language well enough to communicate. But facial expressions, gestures, laughing sounds, etc., might be used in a communicative manner to play with the infant and receive responses such as laughing, smiling, hand and arm movements, etc.

In short, in our literate society, we have expectations for how infants, two-year-olds, six-year-olds, adolescents, and adults develop their cognitive systems over time. We have an implicit developmental model of literacy that guides our use of communication methods in different circumstances.

In several research projects, the implicit developmental model of literacy was made explicit and included a large number of concepts from cognitive psychology. This model of "the typical case of a child growing up in our literate society" is presented schematically in Figure 2 (see Sticht, Beck, Hauke, Kleiman & James, 1974 for an extended discussion of an earlier version of the developmental model of literacy and a review of literature related to hypotheses derived from the model; Sticht, 1992 reviews testing data interpreted in terms of the developmental model).

Before addressing the details of the model, several orienting comments regarding the figure are in order. First the figure is meant to portray a developmental sequence when examined from left to right. The sequence begins with the newborn infant, and goes through stage 4 in which literacy skills are functional. The broad arrowhead on the far right is meant to imply continued development over the lifespan. The development of literacy, language, and knowledge is a lifetime activity.

Examining Figure 2 from top to bottom, the top series of boxes is meant to represent the environment in which the person exists. This is the environment "outside the head." This external environment makes available information displays that the person can explore and transform into internal representations of the external information. These internal representations are developed by the processes in the second series of boxes labeled, on the far left, Information Processes in Working Memory. These processes go on "inside the head," and merge information picked up from the external information displays with information picked up from the third series of boxes, labeled on the far left as Long Term Memory. Thus, the processes in the working memory are used to pick-up and merge information from outside the brain with information in long term memory inside the brain to construct an internal representation of the world as currently experienced, including the meaning of symbolic information when this is a major domain of information being extracted from the external world at a given time.