Introduction
Development is an elusive concept. It can be used for human development (as in developmental psychology), or for living beings in general (as in developmental biology), or for products of the human mind (cultural development), or for any interacting dynamic complex system (as in non-linear dynamic systems theory). It is related to concepts like: growth, learning, maturation, systematic change, but much richer and more specific in meaning.
For years I have been studying all that is relevant for understanding this mysterious concept and I feel ready to share some my insights through this website.
Two sources of inspiration have been Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology, because of it’s enormous broadness, and Dynamic systems theory, for its generality.
Since my work is in developmental psychology my focus will be on children’s development.

About

Jan Boom (1956) studied Philosophy and Psychology at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. His PhD (1993) was prepared at the Department of Philosophy and History of Education in Nijmegen as part of the program “Philosophy of Development”. He works at the Department of Developmental Psychology at the Universiteit Utrecht since.
His long time interest has been in trying to understand development with a focus on cognitive (Piaget) and moral (Kohlberg) development. Originally, in the dissertation (The Concept Developmental Stage) his research was focused on the conceptual level, in recent decades the focus has been broadened to include the methodological and statistical level.

Recent projects include (involvement in) Beyond Flatland; Intervention models as interrupted time-series, Overlapping waves model of Development, Youth and Identity, etc.  He is consultant for numerous Ph.D. and Postdoc projects. He is Board member of the Jean Piaget Society (JPS); Board member of the Dutch Developmental Psychology Society (VNOP), and chair of Kuhmerker Dissertation price committee of the Association of Moral Education (AME).

Conferences:
Involved in organizing the Dutch Mplus users group meetings in Utrechthttps://mplus.fss.uu.nl/8th-meeting/
Co-organizer of the 18th European Conference on Developmental Psychology August 2017 in Utreccht http://www.ecdp2017.nl/
Organizer of the 48th Annual Conference of the Jean Piaget Society: The Dynamics of Development: Process, (Inter-)Action, & Complexity
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 31 – June 2, 2018 http://piaget.org/Symposium/2018/index.html

Areas of expertise

Modeling Development:
– Growth Modeling with Mplus and Amos
– IRT Modeling with Mplus
– Latent Class Analysis with Mplus
– visulization with Wolfram’s Mathematica
Conceptual Analysis of Development:
– Historical background of the notion of Development
– Dynamic Systems Theory and Development
Teaching:
– Cognitive and Moral Development
– Methodology for developemental psychology students