Читать книгу Infants and Children in Context - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 84

 1.1 Describe the periods, domains, and contexts of development.Development begins at conception and continues prenatally and through several periods from infancy to adolescence. Each period is characterized by a predictable pattern of physical, cognitive, and socioemotional developments that unfold across a variety of contexts in which the developing person interacts, such as home, school, and peer group.

 1.2 Explain three basic issues in developmental science.Developmental scientists sometimes disagree on several fundamental questions about how development proceeds and its influences. First, in what ways is developmental change continuous, characterized by slow and gradual change, or discontinuous, characterized by sudden and abrupt change? Second, to what extent do people play an active role in their own development, interacting with and influencing the world around them? Finally, is development caused by nature or nurture—heredity or the environment? Most developmental scientists agree that some aspects of development appear continuous and others discontinuous, that individuals are active in influencing their development, and that development reflects the interactions of nature and nurture.

 1.3 Summarize six theoretical perspectives on human development.Freud’s psychosexual theory explains personality development as progressing through a series of psychosexual stages during childhood. Erikson’s psychosocial theory suggests that individuals move through eight stages of psychosocial development across the lifespan, with each stage presenting a unique psychosocial task, or crisis. Behaviorist and social learning theory emphasizes environmental influences on behavior, specifically, classical conditioning and operant conditioning, as well as observational learning. Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory describes cognitive development as an active process and proceeding through four stages. Information processing theorists study the steps involved in cognition: perceiving and attending, representing, encoding, retrieving, and problem solving. Sociocultural systems theorists, such as Vygotsky, look to the importance of context in shaping development. Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model explains development as a function of the ongoing reciprocal interaction among biological and psychological changes in the person and his or her changing context. Evolutionary developmental psychology integrates Darwinian principles of evolution and scientific knowledge about the interactive influence of genetic and environmental mechanisms. Dynamic systems theory views children’s developmental capacities, goals, and context as an integrated system that influences the development of new abilities.

 1.4 Describe the methods and research designs used to study human development and the ethical principles that guide researchers’ work.A case study is an in-depth examination of an individual. Interviews and questionnaires are called self-report measures because they ask the persons under study questions about their own experiences, attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and behavior. Observational measures are methods that scientists use to collect and organize information based on watching and monitoring people’s behavior. Physiological measures gather the body’s physiological responses as data. Scientists use correlational research to describe relations among measured characteristics, behaviors, and events. To test hypotheses about causal relationships among variables, scientists employ experimental research. Developmental designs include cross-sectional research, which compares groups of people at different ages simultaneously, and longitudinal research, which studies one group of participants at many points in time. Cross-sequential research combines the best features of cross-sectional and longitudinal designs by assessing multiple cohorts over time. Researchers must maximize the benefits to research participants and minimize the harms, safeguarding participants’ welfare. They also must respect participants’ autonomy by seeking informed consent and child assent.