Chapter 1: Introduction to Child Development

Why should someone study development?

To better understand human nature and how we grow, evolve, and become who we are.

To better understand how environment shapes us

To understand ourselves better

To raise our children better

To better choose and design social policies for children's well being.

What are the 7 major themes in child development?

Nature and Nurture

The Active Child

Continuity/Discontinuity

Mechanisms of Change

The Sociocultural Context

Individual Differences

Research and Children's Welfare.

What was Plato's belief about children's development?

They are born with innate knowledge.

What was Aristotle's belief about children's development?

All knowledge comes with experience and the mind of an infant is like a black board on which nothing has yet been written.

What was Rousseau's belief about children's development?

Children should be given maximum freedom from the beginning as they learn primarily from their own spontaneous interactions with objects and other people.

How did Darwin contribute to the study of children's development?

His evolutionary theory influences the thinking of modern developmentalists on a wide range of topics and his observations on the motor, sensory and emotional growth of his infant son represented one of the first methods for studying children.

How is Alfred Binet significant in the field of study for child development?

Him and his colleagues pioneered the systematic testing of children's intelligence and were among the first to investigate differences among children of the same age.

Define: Psychoanalytic Theory

Freud's theory. Biological drives, especially sexual ones, are a crucial influence on development.

How did John Watson contribute to the study of children's development?

He was the father of Behaviorist Theory. Proposed that children's development is determined by environmental factors, especially with operant conditioning.

Define: Nature

Refers to our biological endowment - the genes we receive from our parents.

Define: Nurture

Refers to the wide range of environments, both physical and social, that influence our development.

What is more prevalent in development? Nature or Nurture?

Every characteristic we possess is created through the joint workings of the two; they shape development.

Ex. Identical Twin Studies

How do children shape their own development?

Through their selection of what to pay attention to. Their preferences help them learn about important parts of the world.

List some things children (the active child) do that helps them develop?

Infants' preference for attending their mother's face leads to reciprocal interactions than can strengthen mother-infant bond.

Playing by themselves/make believe. As they grow older, they rely less on their parents to help with determine their environments and choose their own friends and activities, exerting a large impact on their future.

Define: Continuous

Development that occurs in a process of small changes. Age related changes occur gradually.

Define: Discontinuous

Development that occurs in a series of sudden changes. Age related changes occur like this which is why children of different ages seem qualitatively different.

Define: Stage Theories

Development occurs in progression of age related qualitative shift.

Through scientific research, researchers have found that development change occurs...

Through gradual changes rather than sudden and it occurs skill by skill, task by task, rather than in a broadly unified way.

What is the notion of the tabula rasa?

Originates from Locke's belief that the child's mind is like a blank slate.

How does change occur?

Interactions of genes and environments determines both what changes occur and when they do.

Define: Effortful Attention

An aspect of temperament involving voluntary control of one's emotions and thoughts.

What processes are involved in effortful attention?

Inhibiting impulses, controlling emotions, and focusing attention.

What does it mean if effortful attention is not achieved?

Difficulty in exerting this is associated with behavioral problems, weak math and reading skills, and mental illnesses.

How do aspects of the brain influence effortful attention?

The anterior cingulate and limbic area develop during childhood and underlies improving this attention.

Neurotransmitters are also associated with it.

Define: Sociocultural Context

Physical, social, cultural economic, and historical circumstances that make up any child's environment.

What are the most important parts of children's sociocultural contexts?

The people with whom they interact but also the characteristics of their society. These contexts differ within and between cultures.

In a sociocultural context, what problems do those in poor families face?

High health/mental problems, high obesity, high drop out rates, and high teen pregnancies. There are high racial disparities in these statistics as well.

How do individual differences arise in children?

Their genes, treatment by others, subjective reaction to how they are treated, and their choice of environment.

What happens when an infant has a cataract?

Surgery within the first year produces a good later outcome.

Surgery after causes amblyopia (irreversible vision loss).

What is an effective treatment to prevent amblyopia in the weaker eye?

Patching the stronger eye. For some reason, this doesn't cause vision problems.

Define: Scientific Method

An approach to testing beliefs that involves choosing a question, formulating a hypothesis, testing it, and drawing a conclusion.

What is necessary in order to make the scientific method work?

The researchers must use measures directly relevant to the hypotheses being tested.

Define: Reliability

The degree to which independent measurements of a given behavior are consistent.

What are the two types of reliability?

Interrater Reliability and Test-Retest Reliability.

Define: Interrater Reliability

The amount of agreement in the observations of different raters who witness the same behavior. Without this, you can't tell if any rating is accurate.

Define: Test-Retest Reliability

The degree of similarity of a child's performance on two or more occasions.

Define: Validity

The degree to which a test measures what it is intended to measure.

List two types of validity

Internal Validity and External Validity

Define: Internal Validity

Degree to which effects observed within experiments can be attributed to the variables that the researcher intentionally manipulated.

Define: External Validity

Degree to which results can be generalized beyond the particulars of the research.

How do researchers gather data?

Interviews, naturalistic observations, and structured observation.

What are two types of interviews that researchers can hold?

Structured and clinical interviews.

Define: Structured Interview

Research procedure in which all participants are asked to answer the same questions.

Define: Clinical Interview

Procedure in which questions are adjusted in accord with the answers the interviewee provides.

Advantages and disadvantages of performing a structured interview?

Asking large numbers of children identical questions about their feelings and beliefs provides a quick and straightforward way for researchers to learn what is typical at different ages and how the beliefs and feelings are related to each other.

Advantages and disadvantages of a clinical interview?

Can yield a great deal of data quite quickly and provide in-depth information about individual children. However, children's responses can be biased.

List two types of observations scientists can do to observe children.

Naturalistic and Structured Observation

Define: Naturalistic Observation

The method of choice. Examination of ongoing behavior in an environment not controlled by the researcher. The downside to this is that it is hard to know which context influenced the behavior of interest and many important behaviors occur occasionally in everyday environment, reducing opportunities to learn about them.

Define: Structured Observation

A method that involves presenting an identical situation to each child and recording the child's behavior. It ensures that all children studied are in identical situations and allows direct comparisons but doesn't provide as extensive information about individual child's experience as do interviews nor provide open-ended everyday data.

Define: Variables

Attributes that vary across individuals and situations.

Ex. Age, gender, and expectations.

What is a major goal of child development research?

Determine how variables/other major variables are related to each other both in terms of associations and in terms of cause-effect relations.

Define: Correlational Designs

Studies intended to indicate how variables are related to each other.

Define: Correlation

The association between 2 variables.

When variables are strongly correlated, knowing a child's score on either variable allows accurate prediction of the child's score on the other.

Define: Correlation Coefficient

Statistic that indicates the direction and strength of a correlation.

What are the two issues that arise with correlation?

Direction of Causation Problem and Third Variable Problem.

Define: Direction of Causation Problem

A correlation does not indicate which variable is the cause and which is the effect.

Define: Third Variable Problem

The correlation between two variables may actually be the result of some third unspecified variable.

What are correlation designs good for?

When the goal is to describe relations among variables rather than to identifty cause-effect relations among them.

Define: Experimental Designs

A group of approaches that allow inferences about causes and effects to be drawn.

What two techniques are important for experimental designs?

Random assignment and experimental control.

Define: Random Assignment

Assigning participants to the groups at random.

Define: Experimental Control

Ability of researchers to determine the specific experiences that children have during the course of an experiment.

What is the difference between people in the control group and experiment group?

Children in the experimental group gain "experience of interest".

What are experimental designs good for?

Establishing causal relations but cannot apply to all issues of interest.

What are the 3 designs for studying development?

Cross Sectional Designs, Longitudinal Designs, and Microgenic Designs

Define: Cross Sectional Designs

A research method in which children of different ages are compared on a given behavior or characteristic over a short span of time.

What is a downside to Cross Sectional Designs?

Do not yield information about the stability of individual differences over time or about the patterns of change shown by individual children.

Define: Longitudinal Designs

A method of study in which children are studied twice or more over a period of time. It is good at revealing stable individual differences over time.

Downside to Longitudinal Designs?

Difficult to locate the children to test again and some children may drop from the study. This calls into question the external validity of the findings.

Define: Microgenetic Designs

Method of study in which children are studied repeatedly over a period of time. Provide insights into process of change and into individual differences in change processes over brief periods.

Downside to Microgenetic Designs

They do not yield information about stability and change over long time periods. Used when the basic pattern of age-related change has already been established and the goal becomes to understand how the changes occur.

When studying children, what do researchers have to make sure to do?

Anticipate potential risks that the children in their studies may encounter and minimize them. Make sure benefits of the research outweight any potential harm.

What did studies on Romanian orphans reveal about their development?

Romanian children adopted before 6 months had a 2% mental retardation.

Those adopted after had 33% retardation and 20% had abnormal behavior: no differentiation between parents from strangers, don't form friendships well, and have low body weight.