Child Development Process

CHAPTER 3

1. A major focus of this chapter was the interaction of nature and nurture. Consider yourself and your family (regardless of whether you were raised by your biological parents). Identify some aspect of who you are that illustrates each of the four relations described in the text, and answer these questions. (a) How and when was your sex determined? (b) What are some alleles you are certain or relatively confident you share with other members of your family? (c) What might be an example of a gene–environment interaction in your parents’ behavior toward you? (d) Give an example of your active selection of your own environment that might have influenced your subsequent development.  

2. “50% of a person’s IQ is due to heredity and 50% to environment.” Discuss what is wrong with this statement, describing both what heritability estimates mean and what they do not mean.

3. Relate the developmental processes of synaptogenesis and synapse elimination to the concepts of experience-expectant and experience-dependent plasticity.

4. What aspects of brain development do researchers think may be related to the traits and behaviors of adolescents?

5. Think back over the last day or so. What aspects of your environment may relate to the epidemic of obesity described in this chapter?

 6. Consider Figure 3.15, which addresses malnutrition and cognitive development. Imagine an undernourished 6-year-old child living in the United States. Go through the figure and generate a specific example of something that might happen to this child at each point in the diagram. Now do the same for a 6-year-old living in a poor, war-torn country.

CHAPTER 4

1. Piaget’s theory has been prominent for more than 80 years. Do you think it will continue to be prominent for the next 20 years as well? Why or why not?

2. Do you think that the term egocentric is a good description of preschoolers’ overall way of seeing the world? On the basis of what you learned in this chapter and your own experience, explain your answer and indicate in what ways preschoolers are egocentric and in what ways they are not.

3. Information-processing analyses tend to be more specific about cognitive processes than do analyses generated by other theories. Do you see this specificity as an advantage or a disadvantage? Why?

 4. Does the evolutionary perspective of core-knowledge theories seem sound to you? Explain and give examples of how learning in core-knowledge domains may or may not have contributed to human evolution.

 5. Imagine that you are trying to help a 6-year-old learn a skill that you possess. Using the ideas of guided participation and social scaffolding, describe how you might go about this task.

6. Dynamic-systems theories reflect influences of each of the other theories reviewed in this chapter. Which theoretical influence do you think is strongest: Piagetian, information processing, core-knowledge, or sociocultural? Explain your reasoning.

CHAPTER 5

1. The major theme throughout this chapter was nature and nurture. Consider the following research findings discussed in the chapter: infants’ preference for consonance (versus dissonance) in music, their preference for faces that adults consider attractive, and their ability to represent the existence and even the height of an occluded object. To what extent do you think these preferences and abilities rest on innate factors, and to what extent might they be the result of experience?  

2. As you have seen from this chapter, researchers have learned a substantial amount about infants in the recent past. Were you surprised at some of what has been learned? Describe to a friend something from each of the main sections of the chapter that you would never have suspected an infant could do or would know. Similarly, tell your friend a few things that you were surprised to learn infants do not know or that they fail to do.

3. Suppose you were the parent of a young infant, and you were concerned that your baby might not be able to see very well. How could a developmental psychologist test your baby’s vision?

4. Explain why researchers did the following things, each of which seems somewhat odd if one does not know the rationale behind it. What hypotheses were they trying to test? (a) Suspended infants in water up to their waists (b) Put a patch over one eye and showed infants a misshapen window (c) “Hid” a toy under a transparent container (d) Pretended to be unable to pull the end off a dumbbell

CHAPTER 6

1. Drawing on the many references to parental behaviors relevant to language development that were discussed in this chapter, give some examples of ways parents are known to influence their children’s language development.

2. Language development is a particularly complex aspect of child development, and no single theory accounts successfully for all that is known about how children acquire language. Which of the three theoretical views that were presented seem to you to do the best job of explaining what you learned about language development in this chapter?

3. What are overregularization errors, and why do they offer strong evidence for the acquisition of grammatical rules by children?

 4. Many parallels were drawn between the process of language acquisition in children learning spoken language and in those learning signed language. What do these similarities tell us about the basis for human language.

CHAPTER 7

1. Why is it useful for people to organize categories into hierarchies, such as animal/dog/poodle or vehicle/car/Prius?

 2. Did you have an imaginary companion or know someone who did? What functions did the invisible friend serve, and why do you think that you or the other person stopped imagining the companion?

3. Why do you think 5-year-olds are so much better at falsebelief problems than 3-year-olds are?

4. Self-produced movement enhances children’s representation of space. What evolutionary purpose might this serve?

5. Describe the thoughts that might go through a 5-year-old’s mind when the child sees two Santa Clauses walking past each other.

 6. Do you think infants possess a basic understanding of arithmetic? Why or why not?

CHAPTER 8

1. Intelligence can be viewed as one thing, several things, or many things. List the characteristics that you think are the most important components of intelligence and explain their relevance.

 2. Individual differences in intelligence are more stable than individual differences in other areas of psychological functioning such as emotional regulation or aggression. Why do you think this is so?

3. Do you think that in the future, broader theories of intelligence such as Gardner’s or Sternberg’s will replace the more narrowly focused approaches to intelligence that are currently dominant? Or do you think that the latter approaches will remain dominant? Explain.

 4. Participation in Head Start does not lead to higher IQ or achievement test scores by the end of high school, but it does lead to lower rates of dropping out or being placed in specialeducation classes. Why do you think this is the case?

5. Explain Chall’s (1979) statement: “In the primary grades, children learn to read; in the higher grades, they read to learn.”

CHAPTER 9

1. What influences of Freud’s theory of development can you identify in modern society?

 2. The concept of self-socialization plays a prominent role in social cognitive theories. Explain what is meant by this term. To what extent and in what ways do the other major theories reviewed in the chapter allow for the possibility of selfsocialization?

 3. Consider your behavior when preparing for and taking tests and when receiving feedback on your academic performance. Do you see yourself as having primarily an incremental/ mastery orientation or an entity/helpless orientation to academic achievement?

4. Imagine yourself raising a child. Identify one or two things from each of the four types of theories discussed in this chapter that you think might be helpful to you as a parent.

 5. Consider Box 9.2 on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (pages 370–371) and analyze what is discussed there in terms of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model.

CHAPTER 10

1. How might differences in children’s intelligence contribute to (a) the emotions they display and (b) their understanding of emotions? What other factors might contribute to children’s understanding of their own and others’ emotions?

2. List at least five aspects of temperament. What aspects of adults’ personality might each predict?

3. Suppose that you wanted to assess changes with age in children’s regulation of emotion. Think of five different tasks you could use to assess age-related changes. Which would be best to use in early childhood and which would better reflect changes at older ages?

4. Recall from Chapter 7 the development of children’s theory of mind. How might advances in children’s understanding of theory of mind relate to their understanding of emotion?