week 5

9/24/2019 Week 5 - Instructor Guidance: PSY104: Child and Adolescent Development (PTG1939B)

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Week Five Instructor Guidance

Welcome to Week Five of Child and Adolescent Development   

So here we are in the last week of class. We have covered a lot of ground in the last four weeks, and you have been exposed to lots of information about how development occurs in the physical, cognitive, and psychosocial domains. You have also been building a proposal for a Community Child Development Center that you will be presenting to the city council. I hope that this assignment has helped you to connect the theory to the real world. In our discussion, we will look at the different types of educational approaches and their respective strengths and weakness. Schools play a huge role it the development of children in our culture.

As we wrap this up, I want to thank you for letting me be part of your educational journey. It has been a pleasure working with you.

Language Development

When you think about what occurs in the first two years regarding the development of language, it is really remarkable. And while language development is not specifically identified as one of the three domains to address in your Community Center, I would argue that language is integral to both cognitive and psychosocial development. Go back and look at the activities you have created thus far; how many of them involve some kind of verbal communication. Most of them, right?

While all normal children have basically the same capacities to learn language as described in your text, their environment makes a big difference in how they develop. Numerous studies have shown that the level of verbal stimulation children receive in infancy has a lasting effect on both the size of their vocabularies and the rate of acquisition of new words into adulthood. Furthermore, socioeconomic status (SES) has been identified as an important factor (Hart & Risley, 2003; Pan, Rowe, Singer, & Snow, 2005; Schady, 2011).

The Hart and Risley (2003) study followed 42 families for two and a half years from the time the child was seven months and meticulously tracked their language development. The families came from diverse socioeconomic (professional, working class, and welfare recipients) backgrounds and ethnicities. They found that there is a strong correlation between parents’ education and vocabulary. Now this is not really surprising. But what was interesting about the study was the differences between the average amount of time that the child spent talking (measured by average utterances per hour) in

9/24/2019 Week 5 - Instructor Guidance: PSY104: Child and Adolescent Development (PTG1939B)

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each of the SES categories. For example, children raised by professional parents talked 25 percent more than the children from working class families and almost twice as much as children raised in welfare homes. The same statistics held true when they looked at the number of words used by the children in the three categories. This is not about bad parenting. The lower SES families loved and cared for their children as much as those in higher income brackets. It is about the amount of time spent talking and the number of words the children were exposed to. The studies found that the disadvantages created in the earliest years continues to self-perpetuate BY age four, there can be as much as a 13 million word difference!

The implications of this and the other studies are clear; regardless of socioeconomic status, it is important to talk to young children as much as possible and expose them to as many words as possible in order to provide them with the greatest advantages in life.

So does knowing this impact some of the activities you will select this week as you flesh out the remaining rooms in your Community Child Development Center? Here are some guidelines to consider from the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC):

1. We already knew that vocabulary acquisition was important to children’s success in school. 2. This new research tells us that how children process words (vocabulary) is also important. 3. Teachers can learn from the new research and adapt how they speak to children. 4. Teachers can make sure to give children time to process instructions and additional time to respond. 5. Programs that reach children very early on (like home visiting services that educate parents on

children’s language development) and early education programs can make a difference. (Snow, 2013)

Readings –

9/24/2019 Week 5 - Instructor Guidance: PSY104: Child and Adolescent Development (PTG1939B)

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Mossler, R. (2nd ed.). (2014). Child and Adolescent Development. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education.

Chapter 9: Language Development Chapter 10: Intelligence and Developmental Disabilities Section 15.1: Preschool: Giving Children a Head Start?

Discussion— Our topic this week is Education Options. First, begin by providing a brief summary of what Montessori education is, as well as what typical education (i.e. common core or similar curriculum at public/private schools) provides.

Then, after providing those definitions and summaries, create a list which provides three benefits and three drawbacks of each style of education.

As you are doing this, be thinking about benefits for different domains of development (physical, cognitive, and psychosocial). Would one style of education benefit a specific domain of development more than the other?

Also consider the different stages of development. In what ways do the educational needs of children and teens change as they age? Would one type of education be more beneficial for one age group than another?

Reading Review--Don’t forget to go to the reading review and complete the 20 questions from the reading this week.

Written Assignment—So this is it! You are finishing your proposal in which you pretend to show off what you’ve learned to a board of people who want to build a community center. How exciting! You want to convince them that the ideas you’ve come up with for activities and classes in this center are the best (based on research), and that they should invest in them. Make sure that you use the template and that you proof your final work carefully. This is your chance to shine.

References

Hart, B., & Risley, T. (2003). Meaningful differences in everyday experiences. Brookings Publishing Baltimore.

Pan, B. A., Rowe, M. L., Singer, J. D., & Snow, C. E. (2005). Maternal correlates of growth in toddler vocabulary production in low-income families. Child Development, 76(4), 763-782.

Schady, N. (2011). Parents' Education, Mothers' Vocabulary, and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: Longitudinal Evidence From Ecuador. American Journal Of Public Health, 101(12), 2299. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2011.300253

Snow, (2013). New Research on Early Disparities: Focus on Vocabulary and Language Processing. Retrieved from http://www.naeyc.org/blogs/gclarke/2013/10/new-research-early-disparities-focus- vocabulary-and-language-processing