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PSYC 2230 - Midterm 1 > Chapter 1 - The Science of Child Development > Flashcards

Chapter 1 - The Science of Child Development Flashcards

1
Q

What is child development?

A

A field of study devoted to understanding all aspects of human growth from conception through adolescence

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2
Q

What does child development do?

A

Traces physical, mental, social, and emotional development from conception to maturity stemming from continuous or discontinuous development

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3
Q

How were children perceived in the past?

A

As miniature adults

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4
Q

What is continuous development?

A

A view that regards development as a cumulative process of adding on more of the same types of skills that were there to begin with

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5
Q

What is discontinuous development?

A

A view in which new and different ways of interpreting and responding to the world emerge at particular time periods

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6
Q

What is the continuity-discontinuity issue really about?

A

The “relatedness” of development - are early aspects of development consistently related to other aspects?

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7
Q

What is nature?

A

The belief that development is determined by genetic or biological factors

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8
Q

What is nativism?

A

The belief that children are born with innate abilities and genes, and that biology is the determinant of development

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9
Q

What theories did Hall generate?

A

Generated theories based on evolutionary theory and conducted many studies to determine age trends in children’s beliefs and feelings about a range of topics

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10
Q

What is Gesell’s maturational theory?

A

Development is a natural unfolding of a biological plan and experience matters little

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11
Q

What is nurture?

A

The belief that development is determined by experience or environmental factors

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12
Q

What is empiricism?

A

Belief that environmental factors and experiences are the determinants of development

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13
Q

What is tabula rasa?

A

Theory proposed by empiricists that individuals are born without built-in mental content, and therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception

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14
Q

Who is the founder of behaviourism?

A

John Watson

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15
Q

What did Watson believe?

A

The infant’s mind is a blank slate on which experience writes (learning perspective) and that reward and punishment were important for child-rearing practices

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16
Q

What did Skinner believe?

A

The consequences of a behaviour determines whether it is repeated in the future - operant conditioning

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17
Q

What is the nature-nurture issue?

A

What roles do biology (nature) and environment (nurture) play in child development - Virtually all aspects of development are determined by the combined forces

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18
Q

How do children actively influence their development?

A

They seek out new experiences to learn about a concept

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19
Q

What view does active development correspond to?

A

Rousseau’s view of development as a natural unfolding that takes place within the child

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20
Q

How do children passively influence their development?

A

Parents, teachers, and other experiences give the child information, as children are passive recipients of external influences

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21
Q

Who was in agreement with the passive view?

A

Behaviourists

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22
Q

What view does passive development correspond to?

A

Locke’s view of development that a child is a blank space on which experience writes

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23
Q

What is the active-passive child issue?

A

Are children simply at the mercy of the environment or do children actively influence their own development through their own unique individual characteristics - Today we know that experiences are crucial, but it’s often a child’s interpretation that shapes them

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24
Q

Who shared the view that children begin their development journeys well prepared with a stockpile of knowledge?

A

Plato and Rousseau

25
Q

What was Plato’s view of children?

A
  • Children are born with an innate knowledge of abstractions such as courage, love, and goodness
  • Children’s sensory experiences simply trigger knowledge they have since birth
26
Q

What was Rousseau’s view of children?

A
  • Believed that newborns are endowed with an innate sense of justice and mortality that unfolds naturally as children grow
  • Children move through the developmental stages that we recognize today - infancy, childhood, and adolescence
  • Insistent that parents and caregivers being responsive and receptive to their children’s needs is key
27
Q

Who shared the view that children begin their journeys very lightly packed but pick up necessary knowledge along the way through experience?

A

Aristotle and Locke

28
Q

What was Aristotle’s view of children?

A
  • Knowledge is rooted in perceptual experiences
  • Children acquire knowledge piece by piece, based on information provided by their senses
29
Q

What was Locke’s view of children?

A
  • The human infant is a blank slate and experience molds them into a unique individual
  • Parents should constrict, reward, and discipline young children and gradually relax their authority as they grow
30
Q

What is a theory?

A

An organized set of ideas that is designed to explain and make predictions about development

31
Q

What are the five major theoretical perspectives in child-developmental research?

A

1) Biological
2) Psychosocial/Psychoanalytic
3) Learning
4) Cognitive-developmental/Information-processing
5) Contextual/Ecological systems

32
Q

What is the psychodynamic/psychoanalytic perspective?

A

Development is determined primarily by how a child resolves conflict at different ages

33
Q

What is Freud’s psychosexual theory?

A
  • Libido is sexual energy centered in different areas of the body, and the driving force of behaviour
  • Discontinuous; Nature; Passive
  • Energy is the product of neurological maturation
34
Q

What is Erikson’s psychosocial theory?

A
  • Development consists of a sequence of stages, each defined by a unique crisis of challenges, with the outcome determining facets of their personality and performance on other tasks
  • Emphasizes challenges proposed by the formation of trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, and identity
  • Discontinuous; Nature and Nurture; Passive
  • Influenced by social demands
  • Fixed sequence
35
Q

What is the learning perspective?

A

Development is determined primarily by a child’s environment, and experience is all that matters in determining the course of development

36
Q

What is the behaviourism theory?

A
  • Children develop and learn through associations between stimuli and responses
  • Classical and operant conditioning
  • Continuous; Nurture; Passive
37
Q

What is Bandura’s social cognitive theory?

A
  • Emphasizes children’s efforts to understand their world using reinforcement, punishment, and the behaviour of others
  • Imitation/observational learning
  • Continuous; Nurture; Active
  • Children learn by watching those around them but how they interpret the situation varies
  • Whether children imitate others depends on who the other person is, whether that person’s behavior is rewarded, and the child’s beliefs about their own talents
38
Q

What is the cognitive-developmental/information-processing perspective?

A

Development reflects children’s effort to understand the world and focuses on how children think and how it changes as they grow

39
Q

What is Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory

A
  • The different stages of thinking that result from children’s changing theories of the world and are then tested by experience
  • Discontinuous; Nature and Nurture; Active
  • Children realize their theories have basic flaws and radical revisions occur three times in development (2, 7, and before adolescence)
40
Q

What is the information processing theory?

A
  • Encoding and storing information is key to development
  • Memory size and speed; Maturity and storage size
  • Continuous; Nature and Nurture; Active
41
Q

What is the contextual/ecological systems perspective?

A

Development is influenced by immediate and more distant environments, which typically influence each other

42
Q

What is Vygotsky’s social cognitive developmental theory?

A
  • Emphasizes the role of parents and other adults in conveying culture to the next generations
  • Focused on ways that adults convey to children the beliefs, customs, and skills of their culture
  • Language is a key element because it’s how adults communicate
  • Discontinuous; Nature and Nurture; Active
43
Q

What is Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory?

A
  • Parents, siblings, extended family, friends, teachers, and institutions like school, place of work, or church from a person’s culture
  • N/A; Nature and Nurture; Active
44
Q

What are the steps to doing child-development research?

A

1) Identify a question to be answered or a phenomenon to be understood
2) Form a hypothesis that is a tentative answer to the question or a tentative explanation of the phenomenon
3) Select a method for collecting data that can be used to evaluate the hypothesis

45
Q

In terms of measurement, what is naturalistic observation?

A

Captures children’s behaviour in its natural setting but difficult to use with behaviours that are rare or that typically occur in private settings

46
Q

Since researchers can’t keep track of everything a child does, what must they do beforehand?

A

Decide which variables (factors subject to change) to record

47
Q

What is a correlational research design?

A

Observe variables as they exist in the world and determine their relations
- Behaviour is measured as it occurs naturally and tells us whether variables are related
- Cannot determine cause and effect
- Results usually expressed as a correlation coefficient

48
Q

What is the range for correlation coefficients?

A

-1.0 to +1.0

49
Q

What does it mean when the correlation coefficient is equal to zero?

A

Two variables are completely unrelated

50
Q

What does it mean when the correlation coefficient is greater than zero?

A

Scores are positively related - larger values on one variable are associated with larger values on the second variable

51
Q

What does it mean when the correlation coefficient is less than zero?

A

Scores are inversely/negatively related - larger values on one variable are associated with smaller values on the second variable

52
Q

What is an experimental research design?

A

Manipulate independent and dependent variables - Children assigned to experimental or control/comparison group
- Independent variable changed to cause a particular behaviour change so that the dependent variable can be measured
- Cause and effect can be concluded

53
Q

What are the 3 strategies used to incorporate different age groups into experimental and correlational research?

A

1) Longitudinal approach
2) Cross-sectional approach
3) Longitudinal/sequential approach
*Each of the designs can be combined with the two general research designs resulting in 6 prototypic designs

54
Q

What is a longitudinal developmental design?

A
  • One group of children is tested repeatedly as they develop (same group over time)
  • Only way to chart an individual’s development and look at the continuity of behaviour over time
  • Expensive, participants drop out, and repeated testing can distort performance
55
Q

What is a cross-sectional developmental design?

A
  • Children of different ages are tested at the same time
  • Convenient (solves most problems associated with longitudinal studies)
  • Cannot study continuity of behaviour; cohort effects complicate interpretation of differences between groups
56
Q

What is a longitudinal-sequential developmental design?

A
  • Different sequences of children are tested longitudinally
  • Provides information about continuity; researchers can determine the presence of practice and cohort effects
  • Provides less information about continuity than a full longitudinal study and is more time-consuming than a cross-sectional study
57
Q

What are cohort effects?

A

Variations over time, in one or more characteristics, among groups of individuals defined by some shared experience such as year or decade of birth, or years of a specific exposure

58
Q

What must researchers do to ensure that their experiments are ethical and do not violate the rights of the participants?

A

1) Minimize the risk to research participants - social, financial, psychological, physical, etc.
2) Describe the research to potential participants so they can determine whether they wish to participate - obtain informed consent and parents’ permission if the child is under 18
3) Avoid deception - If participants must be deceived, inform the parent so they can consent and decide whether it is in the child’s best interest to reveal the deception
4) Keep results anonymous or confidential - Only the investigator conducting the study knows the identity of individuals if necessary and materials may have code names or real names under lock and key or password protected

PSYC 2230 - Midterm 1 (7 decks)

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