The Harvard Graduate School of Education Dynamic Development Lab Understanding Dynamic Skill Theory

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Together, the Dynamic Development Research Group (DDRG) has built an approach to understanding and analyzing variation and order in the organization of people's behavior, especially in cognition and emotion, which is called dynamic skill theory. Contrary to prevailing psychological approaches, which tend to limit people to one narrow model, dynamic skill theory portrays much of the rich complexity and diversity in human behavior. This theory provides a toolkit of concepts and methods for analyzing the changes in behavior that occur with development, learning, context, and emotion. Through its analysis of the natural variation in human behavior, skill theory provides powerful tools for relating cognitive and emotional development to brain development. Dynamic skill theory provides tools for predicting and explaining many such changes and relating them to changes in the organization of cortical functioning in the brain. The tools have proven useful for explaining changes arising from development, learning, emotion, and context. They facilitate specification of developmental levels, skill transformations, context, support, domain, emotional script, and person in social situations. A range of developmentally appropriate methods are used to assess both change and continuity. Skill theory provides a toolbox and blueprints with which to analyze development (or other types of change in organization) in any domain and thus to facilitate education, clinical intervention, and all sorts of practical activities focusing on change. A fundamental assumption of skill theory is that many of the traditional dichotomies do not reflect truly separate functions in real people. For example, cognition and emotion, organism and environment are not separate processes or entities. These traditionally dichotomous categories may be separable for some theoretical purposes, but in real people behaving in the real world, they are intertwined, collaborating to produce action and thought. What changes is the organization of behavior, not cognition, emotion, or some other invented category.  Back   [Welcome] [The Lab] [Projects] [Research] [Courses] [Publications] [Links]