Читать книгу Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence - Laura E. Levine - Страница 18

It is not unusual for students in child and adolescent development courses to expect that by the end of the semester, they will have simple answers to a number of very complex questions. Of course we can seldom provide these simple answers. Instead, we need to help students understand that the science of child development is an ongoing endeavor and that we continue to build and add to our understanding each day. Although it is important that students learn about our current best knowledge, this information is more meaningful when students understand it in the context of our evolving ideas about a given topic. To help students better understand this material, we keep the focus of the text on the current state of knowledge and use the Journey of Research feature to provide the historical contextual information on the topic. This helps students understand that what they learn today in their class may be information that changes—sometimes substantially—in the future as our body of knowledge grows. This is, after all, how the scientific process works.