Chapter 8: Understanding Cognitive Planning from an Idiographic Perspective: A Case Study

Research on the dynamic side of cognitive development occupies a privileged place in the agenda of research in psychology (Fischer & Bidell, 2006; van Geert, 1998, 2000). However, this fertile research scenario of the dynamic side of cognition is situated on a mindscape of proliferation of theories and methods which capitalize on differences between groups in outcomes of cognitive processes which are incomplete in their overlook of underlying processes (Lewis, 2000). Absence of a dynamic look does not permit a complete understanding of cognitive phenomena.

Usual research in child psychology has focused on getting to know aspects related to the type of abilities a child has—by way of their measurement. There have been efforts to determine how much he/she has, and how much he/she needs to progress to a new stage. This linear view has generated a multitude of studies aimed at experimentally identifying new acquisitions in development and generalizing results to an abstract model of the child. Unfortunately such investigation reduces the conception of child development to a sequence of regular stages by affording more weight to chronological achievement and highlighting the different types of “measurements of variables” rather than looking at growth curves of phases in development (Valsiner, 2004, 2006, 2009). Such interest in generalizing seems to have made it necessary to consult representative samples and use favored statistical treatments whose purpose was to determine the stable, regular and gradual aspects of development, discarding that which did not “fit” within the normal curve, being considered as an error in measurement. These traditional methods reduce the importance of the phenomena by reducing them to “variables”, and mask many of the processes, richness and peculiarities of development (Molenaar, Huizenga, & Nessel-roade, 2003; Rodríguez, 2009, 2010; Valsiner, 2002, 2004, 2009; van Geert & Van Dijk, 2002; van Dijk & van Geert, 2007).