Читать книгу Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence - Laura E. Levine - Страница 79

In addition to learning a great deal about child development, we want you to be able to think critically about the information. This means that you will need to be actively engaged with the material so that you can reflect on it. We expect you to ask questions and examine the assumptions that underlie research rather than just accepting information at face value. No single book can contain all the information you need on any topic, so don’t hesitate to look for answers to your own questions and seek out divergent opinions on topics that intrigue you. Expose yourself to a wide range of ideas. Some will make sense to you and some will be harder to accept, but keep an open mind. As you learn more about research methods in Chapter 2, you will become better able to examine the evidence behind the ideas you find rather than just relying on what someone else has said.

Science is an organized body of knowledge that accumulates over time so it is always changing and growing. Throughout the book you will find features called the Journey of Research that present a brief historical sketch of how some important ideas in the field have developed over the years. Our current understanding of a topic will make more sense to you when you understand the origin of those ideas. The fact that an idea has been around for a long time—or that many people endorse it—does not necessarily mean it is true. Remember that for a very long time, everyone believed the Earth was flat. Likewise, just because an idea is new doesn’t necessarily mean it is better than what we believed before. New research findings need to be tested and replicated (that is, produced again by others) before we can gain confidence that they are accurate and reliable. The best suggestion here is to be open to new ideas but to be cautious about jumping on a bandwagon until there is good evidence that the bandwagon is going in the right direction.