Historical Roots of Developmental Science

Developmental Science aims to generate a new body of knowledge that encompasses and integrates findings from various well-defined academic disciplines concerned with developmental processes of human and non-human organisms. Although all development related research traditions surely have their own distinct history, certain theoretical ideas formulated by James Mark Baldwin, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Albert Bandura among others can be considered intellectual cornerstones in the history of Developmental Science. However, the claim for interdisciplinary developmental research put forth by theses theorists and more recently by scientists such as Clarence Luther Herrick and Zing-Yang Kuo did not receive much attention. It has only been in the past few decades that through the establishment of several interdisciplinary research centres and through the increasing number of publications—in the form of compendia, textbooks, and journals—the long standing endeavour to promote Developmental Science as independent research tradition slowly begin to take an effect.