Child Psychology 
Final Essay Exam

This final essay exam (taken instead of the final multiple choice exam) requires that you answer three of the following questions. You may answer any two of the first six questions; but you must answer the seventh question.  The answer to each question should be NO MORE THAN 3 typed pages long and no longer  (This is in everyone’s interest)! The exam is due (handed in or emailed to me) on Thursday May 6, 2002 by 11:59:59.9 pm. Your answers should be precise and concise.  In all cases, I will be evaluating the quality of argument, not the length of the paper.  Each question was designed to assess your understanding and synthesis of course material (lectures, discussion, readings, textbook, notes etc) in one of three ways: By you a) connecting material from different sections of the course (e.g., Questions 1 and 3), applying it to real life (e.g., Questions 2 and 4), or using it in the service of understanding oneself or interpreting the behavior of others (Questions 5 and 6). Question 7 involves all three components.  

Question 1.  In the lecture on Brain Development, brain functioning was characterized as becoming faster, more efficient, and better controlled and organized through specialized and non-specialized neurological mechanisms.  Imagine you are a Neuropsychologist writing a grant to explore the role of the brain changes in development. The grant application is asking you to identify a particular developmental change (other than language) that shows the most promise to have neurological underpinnings.  Like any grant applicant, you must justify your thinking: Why do you think there is a correspondence between your candidate ability, skill (etc.) and brain development? Your argument should outline why you think that there is a potential connection between brain development and your candidate acquisition. Remember, you are not attempting to describe how mental functions are caused by neurological ones, only that the parallel between brain development and your particular acquisition is worthy of continued investigation by those interested in such questions about mind/body relationships.  

Question 2.  Imagine you are 4½ years old and in daycare. It is a daycare with lots of different kinds of kids with varying levels of social skills.  Give me your first-hand account of social relations and interactions in a typical day at daycare (in the form of a journal or running narrative), focusing on both your friendships and peer relations.  Discuss the forms of activities in which you engage but concentrate on the nature of social interactions. Pretend that while only 4 ½, you are blessed with a tremendous amount of wisdom and ability to reflect on your social experiences. Use your wisdom and reflection in your account to point out the ways in which your social world (as a preschooler) is in some ways just like your social world (as an adult) at school or at work.  Also address the ways in which your childhood and adult social experiences are very different from each other. 

Question 3.  In lecture and in the textbook, theories of cognitive development in childhood have been presented as fundamentally incompatible. For example, Piaget's view of the development of children's self-directed, or private, speech as egocentrism seems to contrast sharply with Vygotsky's view of it as progressive internalization of thought. Similarly, Piaget’s account of acquisition of conservation as a logico-mathematical insight seems incompatible with the Information Processing claim that it reflects the acquisitions of reasoning strategies or specific knowledge/experience. The Nativist claim that acquiring a “theory of mind” reflects the revision of a theory appears fundamentally different than the Vygotskian notion that children are cognitively socialized into talking about the mental world. Finally Cognitive Developmentalists, Freudians, and Behaviorists disagree about whether the focus of moral development should be moral thought, emotions, or behaviors.  Focus on any one of these phenomena or any other (e.g., math, literacy, logic, development of self, emotions, pretense, gender identity, abstract thinking, etc.) with apparently incompatible theoretical accounts of its development. Then argue either that the theoretical accounts really are incompatible or that there is a way to integrate them. Be explicit about the source of the apparent inconsistency and why they really are incompatible or how you can reconcile them!  
Question 4. Jamie and Paul just had a baby girl -- Susan. They want her to grow up tall, healthy, strong, and rich.  They are interested in her becoming an athlete in hopes that she will receive an athletic scholarship to college and pursue a lucrative athletic career. They do not necessarily care about the area she excels in, but they want her to excel athletically at something.  They are willing to do anything to promote the physical and motor development of their child throughout her childhood to sustain her physical and motor growth in a healthy way. While you do not necessarily approve of what Jamie and Paul are doing, you know they will listen to your advice about doing what they want to do safely and not the more dangerous advice of other, less informed friends of theirs.  What do you say to them about promoting healthy physical and motor growth and athletic skill in childhood?

Question 5.  What would have been the ideal family, peer, and school contexts in which you could have developed as a child? This question asks you to outline the ways in which your family, school, and peer contexts were ideal or could have been more ideal.  This is not an opportunity to bash or praise the way you were brought up. Rather, it is a chance to reflect on what was possible in your life, a true scholarly endeavor. Answering this question offers you an opportunity to integrate 1) our classroom discussions of the ideal miscrosystems (i.e., family, peer, school contexts) for promoting child development; 2) the theory and research regarding these contexts presented in lectures, the textbook and readings; and 3) your own ideas and life experiences.  Introduce your answer by very briefly describing yourself at a particular age from 2 to 11, providing information about personal characteristics at the time which may be relevant to this discussion and the cultural context in which you grew up (rural Idaho, suburban Utah, or urban L.A., etc.). Then for each of the three microsystem contexts (family, peers, schools), write a paragraph outlining the two or three features you believe were ideal or could have been more ideal given the reality of being a child growing up in the context you grew up in. Each feature of the ideal context you cite should be fully justified as ideal by reference to research, theory, or argument. Focus on two or three important ideal features for each context, but for each one explain why it is ideal. Finally, comment on the ways in which you think you would be different if you had indeed grown up in the ideal context you describe.  

Question 6.  In the following scenario you are asked to answer a parent's question. Your answer should bring developmental research and theory to bear on the specific issues being addressed by the parent.

You are on a bus traveling home after a trip to the mall with your friend Woody and his 6-year-old son, Dylan.  You are talking to Woody when Dylan pulls a candy bar out of his pocket.  Noticing this, Woody turns to Dylan and asks, "Where did you get that?  I didn't buy it for you!"  "I took it from the candy store", is Dylan=s response.  Woody, looking and sounding very stern, says, "You stole that candy bar. Give it to me!"  Woody then promises to spank Dylan when they get home. “The punishment for stealing is a spanking!” Woody exclaimed, which causes Dylan to cry.  In an unsympathetic tone, Woody says to Dylan, “Maybe you will learn not to do that again!”   Woody then turns to you and says, “This is how my father dealt with me when I first started stealing and it taught me a lot.”  “I really don’t speak him all that hard” he continues,  “It is the fear that I am trying to instill.  You are in a Child Development course, isn’t fear of punishment the way kids learn right and wrong?

Question 7:  To be answered by everyone

Imagine that you want to promote the linguistic, cognitive, and socio-emotional development of your young or middle childhood child based on principles of developmental psychology.  Outline a hypothetical day (spare no expense!), explaining the activities you have planned and how they are designed to promote development.  Be sure to be specific about how a particular activity will promote development in one domain or another. You will be graded on the quality of the kinds of activities you propose and the argument you make about their theoretical significance.  

Comment on the plan you made by figuring out which (if any) theoretical view of development you have adopted.  Which of the approaches best fits your way of thinking about development? Explain!

	Do you assume, like Piagetians and other general stage theories (Psychoanalytic), that the linguistic, cognitive and socio-emotional domains are interrelated (i.e., as you promote development in one domain, you are also promoting development in the other domains) and that development involves the stage-based acquisition of general mental structures (i.e., constructing general logico-mathematical structures) that underlie development in every domain?

	Alternatively, do you assume, like Chomsky and other Nativist and Ethological psychologists, that the cognitive, linguistic, and socio-emotional domains are relatively independent of each other (development in one may be unrelated to each other) and that development involves better exploiting or expanding upon innate mental structures and capacities?

	Perhaps you are more similar to Vygotsky and Ecological psychologists who suggest that development is a social process whereby development in the cognitive, linguistic and social-emotional domains occurs by children internalizing their social interaction (i.e., children internalize psychologically what is learned socially about appropriate ways of thinking, understanding, and controlling their behavior)?

	Maybe you are like Information Processing psychologists who think that development in performing specific tasks or abilities in each domain depends on such factors as children's development of processing speed, mental capacity, knowledge, strategies, and metacognitive abilities (i.e., their ability to think about, monitor, direct, and evaluate their cognitive process)?

Finally, you may adopt the perspective of Dynamic System Theory, which proposes unique and individual patterns of connections between distinct domains (i.e., where for a given child in a given context the acquisition of one skill in one domain may promote other changes in other domains) and development is conceived of as a web-like pattern of interactions between various acquisitions.