Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence. Laura E. Levine
the web, so the author of a web page does not necessarily have any particular expertise. Their information may simply be wrong, or it may be opinion masquerading as fact. This is especially a risk when you are researching a controversial topic. While commercial sites may provide some amount of legitimate information, their real intent is to sell you a product.
Peer review: A process in which professionals critique an article and make suggestions for improvement before it is published.
Although the Wikipedia website is popular with college students, anyone can write an article or edit an existing post on the site. An author does not have to have any expertise on a topic to post an entry. For these reasons, Wikipedia is not considered a reliable source of information for most purposes. If you do use a site like this, use it only as a starting point for background information. Many Wikipedia entries include a bibliography of professional books and articles that may help send you in the right direction to find scientific information on the topic you are researching.
By completing Active Learning: Evaluating Information on the Web, you can use the same guidelines many libraries use to evaluate a webpage that interests you.
Active Learning: Evaluating Information on the Web
Begin this activity by picking a topic related to child development that you would like to know more about. For example, what is the effect of violent video games on children’s level of aggression, or how does parental divorce affect teens’ romantic relationships? Find a website devoted to this topic through a search engine such as Google and evaluate it using the criteria below.
Name of the site you found:__________________
URL:__________________
Source: Kapoun, J. “Teaching undergrads Web evaluation: A guide for library instruction,” C&RL News (July/August 1998): 522–523. Reprinted by permission of Jim Kapoun.
What is your overall evaluation of the accuracy and helpfulness of this site?
____________________________________
____________________________________
Next, log on to PsycINFO through your campus library website and search for the same research topic. Be sure to enter specific search terms for the topic you’ve chosen, not a full sentence or phrase; for example, enter video games on one line and aggression on the next rather than entering effect of video games on aggression on one line. Chances are your search will return many published articles. If it doesn’t, try changing one or more of your search terms. For instance, if you searched for teenagers, you could try searching for adolescents. Choose one or two of the articles that you find that give you electronic access to the full text of the articles and look over the information.
What are advantages and disadvantages of using the Internet versus PsycINFO for finding information on child development? How much do you trust the information in each? What gives you confidence in the results you found?
Becoming a Critical Thinker
In addition to learning a great deal about child development, we want you to be able to think critically about the information. This means that you will need to be actively engaged with the material so that you can reflect on it. We expect you to ask questions and examine the assumptions that underlie research rather than just accepting information at face value. No single book can contain all the information you need on any topic, so don’t hesitate to look for answers to your own questions and seek out divergent opinions on topics that intrigue you. Expose yourself to a wide range of ideas. Some will make sense to you and some will be harder to accept, but keep an open mind. As you learn more about research methods in Chapter 2, you will become better able to examine the evidence behind the ideas you find rather than just relying on what someone else has said.
Science is an organized body of knowledge that accumulates over time so it is always changing and growing. Throughout the book you will find features called the Journey of Research that present a brief historical sketch of how some important ideas in the field have developed over the years. Our current understanding of a topic will make more sense to you when you understand the origin of those ideas. The fact that an idea has been around for a long time—or that many people endorse it—does not necessarily mean it is true. Remember that for a very long time, everyone believed the Earth was flat. Likewise, just because an idea is new doesn’t necessarily mean it is better than what we believed before. New research findings need to be tested and replicated (that is, produced again by others) before we can gain confidence that they are accurate and reliable. The best suggestion here is to be open to new ideas but to be cautious about jumping on a bandwagon until there is good evidence that the bandwagon is going in the right direction.
Guarding Against Generalizations
As you learn about child development, it is easy to assume others have had the same or similar experiences to yours with the same or similar consequences. Your own experiences are meaningful and real. They are part of what has made you the person you are today and help shape the person you will be tomorrow. That fact is never in question, but trying to generalize from your particular experience to general statements about everyone else’s experience is always dangerous. Likewise, when we conduct research we cannot necessarily generalize findings based on one population to another population that might have different characteristics.
The opposite of this is also true. The conclusions drawn from research may not describe what your personal experiences were, but this does not mean the research is invalid. Rather it reminds us that research describes the outcome for groups, not for every individual within a group. When we say men are more physically aggressive than women, for instance, it does not mean every man is more aggressive than any woman, only that on average there is a difference between the groups, and within the groups there is a good deal of individual variability.
Avoiding Perceptual Bias
Sometimes students think that child development is just common sense and that they already know everything they need to know. Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. We can’t rely on folk wisdom, or ideas that are widely accepted but have not been scientifically tested, to tell us what we need to know about development. Having such preconceived ideas can also affect how you process new information. As you read this book, it will be easier for you to remember the facts you encounter that fit well with what you already believe to be true, and to forget or ignore those that don’t. This tendency to see and understand something based on the way you expected it to be is called a perceptual bias and it can affect your learning. That is one reason we use what might be common misconceptions to begin each chapter. Testing your knowledge about the topics in the chapter before you begin reading will make you more aware of information in the chapter that will challenge your initial ideas. You will want to spend a little more time and effort making sure you understand this information.
Perceptual bias: The tendency to see and understand something based on the way you expected it to be.
To get a preview of the types of misconceptions you may have about child development, try to answer the questions in Active Learning: Testing Your Knowledge of Child Development. Each of these questions appears later in the book. Pay special attention to the information that challenges the ideas that you are bringing with you to this class.
Active Learning: Testing Your Knowledge of Child Development
Answers: (1) F; (2) F; (3) F; (4) T; (5) T; (6) T; (7) F; (8) F; (9) T; (10) T
How did you do? Many of these questions represent common beliefs that have been contradicted by research findings, so it wouldn’t be surprising