Exam 1 (Ch 1-4) Flashcards
What benefits are there in studying child development?
- Knowledge of child development can help parents and teachers meet the challenges of raising and educating children.
- Use to make informed decisions about social-policy questions that affect children.
- Understand human nature
How did Plato and Aristotle view children?
The long-term welfare of society depends on children being raised properly
What is Plato’s approach to raising children?
- emphasis on self-control and discipline
- fit children into the same mold/ideals (i.e. shape child to fit the enviornment)
- children are born with innate knowledge
What is Aristotle’s approach to raising children?
- shape the environment to fit the needs of the individual child (acknowledges that all children are different)
- child start off as a blank slate; knowledge come from experience
How did Aristotle’s stance influence later philosophers?
John Locke: child is a tabula rasa and should start off highly disciplined and then gradually increasing the child’s freedom
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Parents and society should give the child maximum freedom from the beginning
How did Darwin’s work on evolution influence child development studies?
Inspires research in child development in order to gain insights into the nature of the human species.
What is Freud’s stance on child development?
Forces within the child (biological drives) exert a crucial influence on development.
What is Watson’s stance on child development?
Children’s behavior is shaped largely from the rewards and punishments that follow particular behaviors (i.e. shaped by external/environmental factors)
Define: Nature and Nurture
Nature: our biological endowment (what we’re born with), esp the genes we receive from out parents
Nurture: wide range of environments, both physical and social, that influence our development
Define: Continuous Development
Age-related changes occur gradually
-A graph of age vs. level of development would show a smooth gradual positive slope up
Define: Discontinuous Development
Age-related changes include occasional large shifts so that children of dif ages seem qualitatively different
-A graph of age vs. level of development would show a positive stair step up
Name factors that create individual differences. How fast do these differences arise?
Individual differences arise very quickly in development.
Factors: Genes, treatment by other people, subjective reactions to other people’s treatment of them, choice of environment, etc.
Define: Preferential Looking
Test used to see whether babies can differentiate between two different visual stimuli.
-Useful in diagnosing cataracts in young children
Define: The Scientific Method
Def: An approach to testing beliefs
Steps:
- Choosing a question
- Formulating a hypothesis
- Testing the hypothesis
- Drawing a conclusion
What are the three ways of gathering data?
- Interviews
- Naturalistic Observation
- Structured Observation
What are the 2 types of interviews? What is the caveat?
- Structured Interview: a research procedure in which all participants are asked a standard set of questions; no deviation
- Clinical Interview: a research procedure in which questions are adjusted in accord with the answers the interviewee provides; has deviation
Caveat: although interviews can yield a large quantity of data fast and in-depth info about specific children, answers to interview questions are often BIASED
When is naturalistic observation used and what are its limitations?
-Used when the primary goal of research is to describe how children behave in their usual environments
Limitations:
- Variation in naturally occurring contexts is so large–>makes it hard to know which ones influence the behavior of interest
- Researchers don’t always have the opportunity to observe target behavior if it only happens occasionally in natural environment
Define: Structured Observation
What is its limitation?
Def: An identical situation is presented to a number of children and each child’s behavior in situation is recorded. Used to make direct comparisons of dif children’s behavior and makes it possible to establish the generality of behavior across dif tasks.
Limitation: Doesn’t provide as much info about children’s subjective experiences and doesn’t provide as natural a situation.
What is the goal of correlational design studies?
To determine how variables are related to one another (causation).
Define: Correlation Coefficient
Measure of the direction and strength of a correlation
Is correlation the same as causation? Why or why not?
NO
-it’s not possible to tell from a correlation which variable is the cause and which is the effect (i.e. Direction of causation of problem)
Def: Third-Variable Problem
A correlation between two variables may arise from both being influenced by some third variable
What is the difference between correlational and experimental design?
Correlational: Comparison of EXISTING groups of kids or examination of relations among each child’s scores on dif variables
Experimental: Random assignment of children to groups and experimental control of procedures presented to each group
Def: Experimental Design
- Study where the research has the ability (experimental control) to determine the specific experiences that children have during the course of an experiment
- Children in the EXPERIMENTAL group receive an experience of interest, the INDEPENDENT variable
- Children in CONTROL group do not receive this experience
- DEPENDENT variable=a behavior that is hypothesized to be affected by the independent variable