Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence. Laura E. Levine
Chapter 12
The History of Intelligence Tests for Children 411
Chapter 13
The Self-Esteem Movement 437
Resilience: Trait or Process? 465
Chapter 14
Explanations for Homosexuality 484
Chapter 15
Kohlberg’s Life History and His Theory 523
Chapter 16
The Influence of Parents and Peers 569
Preface
This second edition of Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence: An Active Learning Approach continues to reflect our primary goal of creating significant learning experiences for students who want to understand children and their development. In this chronologically organized book we provide current evidence-based knowledge about the development of infants, children, and adolescents with the pedagogical goal of helping students understand, retain, explore, and apply that knowledge. A central, organizing feature of this text is the learning activities embedded within each chapter. These activities take a variety of forms so that they stay fresh and interesting to the student and are integrated with the flow of information in the chapter rather than being stand-alone features that are easily skipped or ignored. We also provide opportunities throughout the book for students to learn about how our understanding of child development has evolved through the scientific process to reach our current state of knowledge.
This book can be used effectively by students who want to apply theory and research about child development to interactions with infants, children, and adolescents in many settings. The chronological approach allows students to integrate knowledge about the different facets of physical, cognitive, and social-emotional growth to bring about an understanding of the whole child at each age. The coverage and pedagogical features in this book have been conceived and carefully executed to help students discover the excitement of studying child development and to equip them with tools they can use long after they take this class.
Philosophical Approach
Beyond giving students a solid understanding of child development, we incorporate principles in this book that help build lifelong learning skills. They include:
An Emphasis on Learning How to Learn
Long after they leave the classroom, students who interact with children and adolescents will need to find information to answer questions that arise. We want to encourage students’ independent pursuit of knowledge about child development so we provide them with tools that will help them do that. They are introduced to the use of databases such as PsycINFO and learn to evaluate Internet sources to identify legitimate, research-based sources of information.
Critical Thinking Skills
The media in all of its forms is filled with information about children and their development. When students encounter this information, they need to critically evaluate the content of what they find. In Chapter 1, we talk about how to be a good consumer of information on development and lead students through a critical evaluation of a website. In addition, the true/false questions that appear throughout each chapter continuously challenge students to reflect on what they believe about children and to evaluate the sources of those beliefs. The instructor teaching site and student study site provide peer-reviewed research articles that students can explore independently to add to their understanding of important topics. This ability to critically evaluate ideas about children and their development will be beneficial to students who plan to go on for graduate study, those who will work professionally with children and families, those who will advocate on behalf of children, and those who will use these ideas when caring for their own children.
A Focus on What Constitutes Evidence
We help students realize that although there is a place for “what I think” and for individual examples, the strength of a social science rests on marshaling convincing evidence within an agreed framework. Basic concepts about research and the scientific method are presented in Chapter 2, but are reinforced throughout the book.
Our philosophical approach is reflected in the pedagogical features that make this text a unique and powerful educational tool.
Pedagogical Features
Features intended to engage students are often included in textbooks as “add-ons,” but our active learning philosophy is at the heart of the pedagogy provided throughout this book. To this end, Active Learning activities do not appear in “boxes,” which we believe students often skip or ignore. Rather they are an integral part of the text itself. The chapter narrative leads directly into the Active Learning feature, and the feature smoothly transitions back into the narrative at its end. As educators, we know that students must act on the material presented in a course to make it their own. We all try to do this in a number of ways in our classrooms, but for the student, reading a textbook is a solitary and often passive process. To help guard against this passivity, our unique pedagogical features are designed to capture and hold students’ interest and turn reading into an active process.
Challenging Misconceptions: Test Your Knowledge
One of the challenges in teaching a child development course is to help students give up some of the intuitive ideas or simplistic thinking they have about the topic. Many students enter courses on child and adolescent development confident that they already know most of what they need to know about development and that this is “all just common sense,” but experienced instructors know that some of the most important information in their courses is, in fact, counterintuitive. Unfortunately, students’ long-held ideas and beliefs are often quite difficult to change, and students can complete a course in child development with their misconceptions intact. It is our intention to pique student interest in these topics by challenging their assumptions. We believe that the most effective way to dislodge misconceptions is to challenge them directly. To do that, each chapter begins with a true/false quiz that contains interesting and provocative questions, many of which reflect common misconceptions. Students can immediately check whether their answers are correct by using the key at the bottom of each quiz. Unexpected or surprising answers to these questions draw the students into the chapter where they will find the questions in the margin of the chapter and information related to the topic of the questions highlighted in the text. The initial question plants a seed that is reinforced when they again read about the topic in the context of the chapter.
Active Learning
A variety of learning activities in the text complement and enhance the ideas presented in each chapter. Activities might ask students: (a) to reflect on their own experiences while growing up (and perhaps compare those experiences to the experiences of classmates), (b) to immediately test their understanding of a concept, (c) to conduct an observation or interview related to text material, (d) to carry out a simple firsthand experience and reflect on what they’ve learned from it or to watch a SAGE-created video that illustrates the activity, or (e) to seek out information that goes beyond the text through the use of library resources or the Internet. Each activity is designed to consolidate student learning through personal experiences that illustrate the ideas presented in the book.
Journey of