Chp.1 - Intro to Child Development

Question 1

Periods of Development

Answer 1

1) Prenatal (conception - birth)

2) Infancy and toddlerhood (birth - 2 yrs)

3) Early childhood (3-5 yrs)
- Child is learning language, gaining sense of self, gaining independence, learning the world

4) Middle childhood (6-11 yrs)
- Children refine their motor skills
- They learn about social relationships beyond the family

5) Adolescence (12 yrs - adulthood)
- Period of physical and cognitive change
- Experience puberty and sexual maturation
- Begin considering concepts such as love, fear, freedom

Question 2

Continuity VS. Discontinuity

Answer 2

Discontinuous development
- assume that developmental change occurs in stages that are different from each other and occur in sequence

Continuous development is
- more slow and gradual
Ie. continuous theorists see an adult not as possess new skills, but as having more advanced skills that were already present in the child

Question 3

What is a Confirmation bias?

Answer 3

• tendency to look for evidence that we are right and in doing so we ignore contradictory evidence

Question 4

What is the Social Learning Theory ?

Answer 4

• Albert Bandaranaike - lead contributor to social learning theory
• actions are not learned through conditioning, rather through watching others
• vicarious reinforcement - we do things because we hope it’ll pay off for us
• there is interplay between the environment and the individual: we are the product of our surroundings, and we influence our surroundings

Question 5

What is cognitive equilibrium?

Answer 5

• agreement or balance in what we sense in the outside world and what we know in our minds
• ie. if we experience something we can not understand, we restore the balance by changing our thoughts or altering the experience to fit into what we do understand