Lecture I Flashcards
(14 cards)
What are 6 central themes of study in development?
- Path of Development (continuous or discontinuous?)
- Mechanisms of Change (interaction of nature/nurture)
- The Active Child (children create their learning environment)
- Individual differences (what can we expect normative development to look like?
- The child in context (SES, sociocultural influences)
- Promoting children’s welfare (guiding parental, educational, and legal practices)
What are some examples of nature vs nurture philosophies in Ancient Greece and the enlightenment?
Plato - nature
Aristotle - nurture
John locke - emphasized nurture, “blank slate”
Jean-jacques Rousseau: children are noble savages with innate sense of right/wrong, plan for development.
What are examples of continuous change in children?
Vocabulary growth
What are examples of discontinuous change in childreN?
Babbling to talking, crawling to walking
What do Learning Theories focus on? What are two examples? What are strengths and weaknesses?
- How experience shapes behavior (more passive than active child emphasized by Piaget)
- Behaviorism (skinner, reinforcement/punishment, behavior, behavior determined by consequences) and Social Learning Theory (bandura, children learn by observation and imitation, only imitate when something is popular/rewarded)
- strength is emphasis on observable behavior, clear implications for intervention
- weakness is that its reductive, not everything is based off of rewards and punishments
What do cognitive development theories focus on? what are two examples? what are strengths and weaknesses?
- Construction of knowledge and thought over time
- Jean Piaget’s Theory (child is scientist, active child, discontinuous development, universal stages, formed basis of field) Info Processing Theory (cognition is like computer, hardware and software
- Strengths - emphasize biological processes, present testable ideas, emphasize active learning
- Don’t address social/emotional lives, Piaget’s theories underestimate what ppl are capable of
What does ecological & system’s perspective focus on, what are the levels of bronfenbrenner’s theory, what are strengths and weaknesses
- Focus on role of cultural/historical context in shaping development
- microsystem (immediate environments), mesosystem (how those overlap), ecosystem (influence of secondhand environments), macrosystem (cultural values, laws, customs)
- helps explain cross-cultural variation, more inclusive definition of environment
- role of biology is unclear
What are three main categories of research?
observational (descriptive), correlational (relationships between variables), and experimental (cause and effect relationships)
What are examples of observational research and pitfalls to be wary of when conducting them?
naturalistic observation (careful of observer bias, participant reactivity, surveys (careful of sample bias)
Under what circumstances would you choose to do correlational research? What are pitfalls to be wary of?
If variables can’t be manipulated (things like poverty, crime, alcohol consumption)… Need to be careful of theird variable problem, and directionality problem
What are three types of research specifically used in development studies?
Cross sectional (examine children of different ages at the same time, doesn't give info about stability or changes) longitudinal (examine same group of children over a long period of time, impractical and costly) micro genetic (examine children intensively over a short period of time, insight on process of change but not informative about change over long periods)
Example of mechanisms of change
“effortful attention” developed through both environmental and biological factors, experiences can change wiring of brain by influencing gene expression, genes can influence neurotransmitter production, if paired with low-quality parenting can lead to less developed ‘effortful attention’.
also, sleep promotes learning by building connections between areas of the brain (like hippocampus and prefrontal cortex)
What are different types of reliability in psych experiments?
interrater reliability: is the measurement reliable based off the measurer? test the similiarity of two raters taking the same measurements
test-retest reliability: do you get the same results twice
what are different types of correlations and how are they measured?
positive correlation, as one thing goes up the other goes up, “1” is strongest positive
negative correlation, as one thing goes up the other goes down, “-1” is strongest negative
