Introduction
The Child Development Assessments are designed to give you a practical feel for what child developmentalists actually do in our field of study. Most people have an idea that child psychologists study children and maybe, if necessary, also treat children who have problems, but the actual ‘how’ we do that or in ‘what way’ we do that is not always general knowledge. The CDAs are developed so that you can get a realistic feel for what many developmental psychologists do on a day-to-do basis. The hope and goal is for you to find them informative, interesting, and useful towards deepening your understanding and application of the class material, and hopefully, fun to do! – as you learn more about child psychology.
In this video clip you will see three children engaged in Piagetian conservation tasks. The first two children are performing conservation of volume tasks and the third child is performing a conservation of number task with coins and then a conservation of mass task with graham crackers. Recall that all conservation tasks test a child’s cognitive ability to understand that even if an object or liquid goes through a physical transformation, some of the properties will remain ‘conserved’ or unchanged. For example, a ball of clay will still have the same ‘amount’ of clay whether you shape it into a snake, a ball, or a pancake.
In this assessment, analyze the scene and for each child:
Briefly describe the child you’ll be assessing (e.g., the boy in the light blue shirt)
Identify the Piagetian stage of cognitive development the child has reached, or is demonstrating in the tasks (i.e., sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, or formal operations).
Explain (very specifically) how you came to this determination. Important information to include in your assessment would be:
What behaviors did the child engage in (what did they do) that led you to that choice of cognitive stage?
What specifically did the child say that led you to that choice?
What things did they say/do, or not say or do, that allowed you to determine they were excluded from a different stage?
Be as specific and detailed as possible with your descriptions.
Your assessment should follow these standard formatting requirements:
double spaced
1 inch margins
12 point font
approximately 3 pages
VIDEO: MUST BE WATCHED TO COMPLETE ASSISGNMENT (please copy and paste link for short video)
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