Download history, theories, and methods

HISTORY, THEORIES, AND METHODS OF
CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 1
Beyond the Book
Modifying Child Behavior Using the Principles of Operant Conditioning
Write a short paper making recommendations to a parent dealing with their 2year-old’s temper tantrums to get a cookie in the grocery store. Identify parent
responses that would reinforce the tantrums and make them increase as well as
behaviors that would extinguish the behavior. Also, address the possible
consequences of spanking in this situation.
Child Rearing Over Three Generations
Interview your parents and grandparents about their experiences as children,
including sleeping arrangements, infant feeding, discipline, household chores
and responsibilities, after school activities, and rules for dating in adolescence.
Be creative in thinking about other changes and differences in how children have
experienced childhood, even in recent times. Organize your findings into a chart,
listing the experiences down the left-hand side of the paper and the three
generations across the top. Highlight and discuss the differences that surprise
you the most.
Correlational Research and the Effects of Divorce on Children
Discuss the following questions with your classmates:
1. Why do we think there might be consequences of divorce on child
development? What kinds of naturalistic observational research may have
supported these conclusions?
2. What might be some of the specific consequences of divorce on child
development? What kinds of correlational studies might have been
conducted by developmental psychologists to examine whether or not
there were reliable and valid relations between divorce and these
consequences? What are the possible confounding variables in this type
of research?
3. What might be some of the issues concerning age differences in
relationships between divorce and negative consequences? How could
these be examined?
4. What kind of evidence might we have that divorce causes negative
consequences? What other explanations might there be for any
correlational findings between negative consequences and divorce? What
kind of research needs to be conducted to determine cause and effect in
this case? This research would involve independent and dependent
variables: what is(are) the independent variable(s) and is(are) the
dependent(s) variables in these studies?
5. Would any of this research be questionable with regard to ethical
concerns? What might those be and how should a researcher deal with
them?
Original Works
Go to the following website: psychclassics.yorku.ca. This site contains full text
copies of many original works by famous historical figures in psychology. Search
this site for Freud’s paper on childhood and concealing memories and Darwin’s
biographical sketch of his infant son. Find the citations and write a brief 1-page
summary of the contents of each article.
A Little More Information
Using the Internet, locate two life facts or research facts not stated in the
textbook about the following theorists: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke,
Alfred Binet, John B. Watson, G. Stanley Hall, William Perry, Gisella LabouvieVief, Arnold Gessell, Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, Charles Darwin,
Urie Bronfenbrenner, and Lev Vygotsky.