Honors Human Growth and Development, Dr. Cosby, Spring 2017
This course included information about human development from conception through adolescence. Because this was an education class, it was focused more towards students planning to be teachers, but the information was also important for future nurses. I have yet to decide which area of nursing want to go into, but I have considered working with kids or babies, so it was interesting to learn about their development and understand their thought process a little bit better. This course included a lot of discussion and presentations, which forced me out of my comfort zone.
Our inquiry based project was one of few big assignments that we had in this course. We had to research questions based on personal experiences, the book Observing Harry, or a made up child, and we got extra credit for blogging this assignment. I decided to research questions about how divorce affects children. Below is the assignment with the presentation I gave as well.
Inquiry Based Project:
“An inquiry study involves generating thoughtful questions that will evoke further research and study of the issues/subjects of interest to enhance your learning and understanding.”
Topical Areas of Development:
- Physical Development: development involving the body’s physical makeup, including the brain, nervous system, muscles, and senses, as well as the need for food, drink, and sleep
- Cognitive Development: development involving the ways that growth and change in intellectual capabilities influence a person’s behavior
- Personality Development: development involving the ways that the enduring characteristics that differentiate one person from another change over the lifespan
- Social Development: development involving the way in which individual’s interactions with others and their social relationships grow, change, and remain stable over the course of life
Five Perspectives and Theorists:
- Psychodynamic: behavior throughout life is motivated by inner forces, memories, and conflicts of which a person has little awareness or control
- Theorists:
- Sigmund Freud
- Psychodynamic Theory
- 3 aspects of personality: ID, Ego, Superego
- Psychoanalytic Theory: unconscious forces act to determine personality and behavior
- Psychosexual Development occurs as children pass through a series of stages, in which pleasure is obtained through a particular biological function and body part
- mouth (oral stage–birth to 12-18 months)
- anus (anal stage–12-18 months to 3 years)
- phallic (3 to 5-6 years)
- latency (5-6 years to adolescence)
- genital (adolescence to adulthood)
- Erik Erikson
- creator of the phrase “identity crisis”
- Psychosocial Theory: psychosocial development is the approach that encompasses changes in the understanding individuals have of their interactions with others, others’ behaviors, and of themselves as members of society
- 8 stages of development:
- 1. Trust versus mistrust (birth to 12-18 months)
- 2. Autonomy versus shame and doubt (12-18 months to 3 years)
- 3. Initiative versus guilt (3 to 5-6 years)
- 4. Industry versus inferiority (5-6 years to adolescence)
- 5. Identity versus role diffusion (adolescence to adulthood)
- 6. Intimacy versus isolation (early adulthood)
- 7. Generativity versus stagnation (middle adulthood)
- 8. Ego integrity versus despair (late adulthood)
- Sigmund Freud
- Theorists:
- Behavioral: suggests that the keys to understanding development are observable behavior and outside stimuli in the environment
- Theorists:
- John B. Watson
- argued that controlling a person’s environment could produce any kind of behavior
- Classical Conditioning: an organism responds in a particular way to a neutral stimulus that normally does not bring about that type of response
- B.F. Skinner
- Reinforcement: the process by which a stimulus is provided that increases the probability that a preceding behavior will be repeated
- Operant Conditioning: a form of learning in which a response is strengthened or weakened, depending on whether the environmental consequences that follow the behavior are pleasant or aversive
- Albert Bandura
- Social Cognitive Learning Theory: learning through imitation
- John B. Watson
- Theorists:
- Cognitive: focuses on the process that allow people to know, understand, and think about the world
- Theorists:
- Jean Piaget
- Human thinking is arranged into schemes, organized mental pattern that represent behaviors and actions
- The growth of children’s understanding of the world can be explained by two principles:
- Assimilation: the process in which people understand new stimuli or events in terms of their current way of thinking
- Accommodation: the process that changes existing ways of thinking in response to encounters with new stimuli or events
- Information-processing approaches
- 4 stages of cognitive development:
- Sensorimotor (o-2 years)
- Preoperational (2-6 years)
- Concrete Operational (6-12 years)
- Formal Operational (12+ years)
- Jean Piaget
- Theorists:
- Contextual: considers the relationship between individuals and their physical, cognitive, personality, and social worlds
- Theorists:
- Urie Bronfenbrenner
- Ecological Systems Theory/Bioecological Approach
- 5 levels:
- Microsystem
- Mesosystem
- Exosystem
- Macrosystem
- Chronosystem
- 5 levels:
- Ecological Systems Theory/Bioecological Approach
- Lev Vygotsky
- Sociocultural Theory: emphasizes how cognitive development proceeds as a result of social interactions between members of a culture
- Zone of promixal development (ZPD)
- Scaffolding: the temporary support that teachers, parents, and others provide children as they are learning a task
- Urie Bronfenbrenner
- Theorists:
- Evolutionary: focuses on the identification of behavior that is the result of genetic influences; natural selection (Charles Darwin)
- Theorists:
- Konrad Lorenz
- discovered that new born geese are genetically preprogrammed to become attached to the first moving object they see after birth
- Konrad Lorenz
- Theorists: