psychology

PSYA02: Introduction to Clinical, Developmental, Personality and Social Psychology Summer 2021

University of Toronto Scarborough

Term Writing Activity

peerScholar is an online portal and tool that allows you to 1) submit a draft of an activity, 2) provide your peers feedback on their submission and receive feedback on your own work, and 3) re-submit a final draft. All technical instructions, due dates, and procedures for using peerScholar will be announced on Quercus. This document simply describes the activity itself that you will be submitting to peerScholar. This term, your writing activity pertains to Module 4 (Developmental Psychology). Your task is to 1) choose a specific aspect of human development described in lecture or in the textbook, 2) briefly summarize what is already known about your chosen developmental process, 3) hypothesize how the developmental process might differ if the research were to be conducted in a different cultural context, and 4) suggest how to measure your prediction. 1) Choosing a developmental process or behaviour Your first task is to choose a developmental process (from any age) described in lecture or the textbook. For example, you could choose one of the following. There are many more that you could choose that are not on this list, so feel free to choose something different:

• Perceptual development in utero • Motor development in infancy • Attachment in infancy • Identity development in adolescence • Theory of mind development in childhood • The development of happiness and relationships in older adulthood

This portion of your paper should be brief, as you simply need to articulate which developmental process you are examining. Try to be as specific as possible. Note: topics such as “cognitive development” or “perceptual development” may not be specific enough. Try to choose a specific behaviour/process/phenomenon within a larger domain. 2) Summarize what is already known about your chosen process/behaviour Your textbook and the lecture slides may contain information about what is already known about a specific process. Some of the questions you might answer are: What are the milestones in the process? At what ages do they occur? What individual differences exist between humans who are undergoing this process? What research has been conducted on how the process develops? Where were the data for that research collected and analyzed? In order to successfully complete this portion of the paper, you must cite at least one scholarly source in addition to your textbook and/or the lecture slides. Although the textbook and lecture slides can and should be used for citations, you must also cite at least one more source. The most straightforward way to find this source is to use the references in your textbook.

For example, in Module 4 of the textbook (Altman et al., 2017), memory development is discussed:

“As individuals age into adulthood, their frontal lobes mature. As evidence of this, research suggests that adolescents achieve adult levels of performance on response inhibition at around age 14, processing speed at age 15, and working memory tasks at 19 (Luna, Garver, Urban, Lazar, & Sweeney, 2004).”

If you had chosen to discuss the development of memory, you could use the textbook’s reference list to find the Luna and colleagues (2004) article through the U of T Library, and then summarize and cite that source in your paper. In this and all sections of your paper, it is essential that you paraphrase the source material in your own words. The use of direct quotes is discouraged. Scholarly sources do not include articles in traditional, online, or social media (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, The New York Times, CBC News). If you use one of these sources, it does not count toward your required two sources, and you should be very careful to discuss the source in such a way that acknowledges that it is not scholarly and has not been peer reviewed. 3) Hypothesize/predict how the developmental process might differ if the research were

conducted in a different cultural context As we discuss frequently in lecture, the majority of psychological research is conducted in Western societies and may not always be generalizable to the entire human population. Your main task for this paper is to suggest how the psychological process that you are investigating might somehow develop differently in a different cultural context. Some questions that you might answer in this section include: How might the ages at which the process occurs differ in a different culture? How might cultural traditions (including, but not limited to, religion, food, language, music, social behaviours, etc.) affect the development of this particular phenomenon? WHY do you believe that the pattern might differ? To complete this section, you should choose a specific world culture or community, and you should support your claims with at least one scholarly source. These scholarly sources must be book chapters, journal articles, and/or governmental/agency datasets, but they do not necessarily need to be from psychological sources. For example, if you are interested in exploring how religious traditions might affect the development of a particular human behavior, you might need to draw on scholarly sources from journals examining religion, sociology, or anthropology, rather than psychology. All of these materials can be found through the U of T Library. Again, you must cite at least one scholarly source in this section. Lecture slides, textbook, and non-scholarly Internet sources can be used, but they do not count toward this requirement of using one scholarly source. 4) Suggest how to measure your prediction.

Finally, you should make a suggestion as to how you would measure the development of the behavior or phenomenon you have chosen in the cultural context that you have chosen. For example, you might wish to describe how you would adapt an already existing study (maybe one that you cited in the paper) by implementing it in a different cultural context. How would you expect the results of this new study to differ from (or remain the same as) the existing literature on the process? Some notes about formatting your paper

• Your paper should be around 1200 words. Papers more than 200 words above or below this limit will be penalized. The in-text citations and reference list count toward this limit, so the word count that peerScholar produces for you is the word count that your TAs will use to mark your paper. Note that this is not a very long paper, so you may find it more challenging to be concise rather than to write enough. Your peers may help you in finding places to cut words.

• You must cite all work that you reference, including from the textbook, lecture slides, and external sources. All citations should be in APA format.

o The lecture slides should be cited as follows, replacing the highlighted date and lecture title information as appropriate:

§ Danielson, K. (2021). “Human Development, Lecture 2”. PSYA02: Introduction to Clinical, Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology. University of Toronto, Scarborough. Retrieved 28 May 2021. <q.utoronto.ca>

o The textbook should be cited as follows: § Altman, M., Jacobi, L., Avilla, R., Beston, B., Brown, K., Burton, E.T.,

Carducci, B., Hummel, J., Lukowski, A., Martinez, R.L., O'Donovan, A., Poplock, S., Slonecker, E., Swisher, M., VanArsdall, J., Vervaeke, J., & Wehe, H. (2017). Introduction to psychology: A Top Hat interactive text. Top Hat Monocle. https://tophat.com/marketplace/beta/oer- introduction-to-psychology-meaghan-altman/737/

• You must include both a reference list and in-text citations in APA format throughout the paper. If you are unsure of how to cite in APA format, Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) has resources to help you.

• Although APA format is required for this paper, no title page, abstract, or running headers are required.

• Be extremely careful about plagiarism. Copying and pasting information from sources is never a good idea, even if you think you will go back later and correct it. Every term in this course students are referred to the University’s Academic Integrity office for plagiarism, either by using former students’ work or by copying material from online sources. Ignorance of the rules is not an excuse for plagiarism. Please be very careful about citing sources and about phrasing material in your own words.

• You must cite at least two scholarly sources in your paper. The textbook and the lecture slides DO NOT count as scholarly sources, but you are welcome to use them in addition to the scholarly sources you find.

• Consider visiting the Library or the Writing Centre’s online resources for personal help with finding sources and writing the paper!

• Mechanics and grammar will be considered by the TAs when marking the paper. If you are concerned about your writing skills, you should consider visiting the Writing Centre or UTSC English Language Development Support.

o https://utsc.utoronto.ca/twc/ o https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/eld/writing