HISTORY OF STUDY OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Meaning & definition of human development
Human development is a study that examines how the whole child changes over time.
The study of human development focused first on children, then on adults and finally on the entire life span.
Life Span Development is about the rhythm and meaning of people’s lives, about turning mystery into understanding, and weaving a portrait of who each of us was, is and will be.(Santrock2011)

Child development is a study that examines how the whole child changes over time. It is concerned with the individuals physical, intellectual, emotional and social growth.

Human Development is an interdisciplinary study of the heredity and environmental factors involved in the process of individual growth from conception to death. The key statements contained in or implied in this definition are:

• Human Development is an individual process.
• Human Development examines heredity and environmental factors and the interactions among them.
• Human Development is the study of development and not merely change, over time.
• Human Development focuses on the continuity of the developmental process by studying the entire life cycle from conception to death.
• Human Development is an interdisciplinary study.

The history of the study of human development

• Artists seemed unable to see that children looked different from adults, with different proportions and different facial features.
• Early painters and sculptors portrayed children as shrunken adults.
• In the 13th century artists again showed children who actually looked like children.
• The first books of advice for parents had begun to appear during the 16th century and most of them were written by physicians .
• Till 17th century the concept of childhood was exalted in art as well as in life. The parents began to notice the “Sweet, Simple and Amusing “ nature of children. They began to dress them differently – in small sizes and confessed to joys they received from playing with their children.
• During 18th century a combination of scientific, religious, economic and social trends formed the perfect soil for the birth of the new study of child development.
  With Industrial revolution, family changed from an extended clan like group to the nuclear family.
  The tendency to provide more education for children as they  had to be kept busy and occupied in school for long periods of time.
  The new science of psychology, the study of human behavior, led people to feel they could understand better by learning what made some children turn out differently from others.
• By 19th century all these currents had come together and people of science were devising all manner of ways to study children.
  The 19th century also ushered in an interest in studying people in the life span till old age.
• After World war I (28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918), the study of elderly people gained momentum. Emphasis was primarily on learning about intelligence, reaction time, ability and achievement in old age.( Psychological aspects in old age).
• By the end of World war II in 1945 (1939-45) the study of child development and the study of ageing were well established.
  Until this time practically no one had begun to look at the entire human life span. Whatever happened to adults between adolescence and old age was being ignored. The early studies on child development were philosophical and mystical. The initial studies were based  on direct observation  initiated by the child biographers of the 19th century.

The life span development expanded as a subject for study.

• The Grant Study of Adult Development started in 1938.
• In the mid 1950’s Neugarten and her associates at the University of Chicago studied middle aged people.
• In 1960’s Levinson and his coworkers at Yale began to study men in early adulthood and the middle years.

Today psychologists recognize that human development is an ongoing process which continues throughout life.

References

1. George and Kaluger, Meriem Fair (1979). “Human Development : The span of life” , C.V Mosby Company, New York.
2. P. Devadas & N.Jaya, 1984, “ A text book on Child Development”, Macmillan India Ltd, Madrads.

Assignment

Collect different definitions of human development given by different authors.
Collect history of human development from different perspectives.

SCOPE AND IMPORTANCE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT FROM A LIFE SPAN PERSPECTIVE

Scope of Human development:

• Understand normal course developmental milestones.
• Study individual differences in human development.
• Understanding of foundations for adult behavior.
• Information to teachers for guiding and modifying child’s learning and behavior.
• Discovering characteristic behaviors at different ages.
• Opportunity for early detection, intervention and prevention of disabilities. 

Development occurs throughout life and is central to the life span perspective on human development. According to life span development expert Paul Baltes (1939-2006), the life span perspective views development as lifelong, multidimensional, multidirectional, plastic, multidisciplinary and contextual and as a process that  involves growth, maintenance, regulation and is constructed through biological, socio-cultural and individual factors working together.
Human Development is a pattern of movement or change that begins at conception and continues through the human life span.
The life span approach emphasizes developmental change throughout adulthood as well as childhood.(Park2010; Scheibe 2010).
Recent increases in human life expectancy contributed to the popularity of the life-span approach to development. The maximum life span of human beings is 122years. The maximum life span of humans has not changed since the beginning of recorded history but the life expectancy has changed.
Life expectancy is the average number of years a person born in a given country is expected to live if mortality rates at each age were to remain steady in the future. The life expectancy is shown separately for males and females, as well as a combined figure.

Worldwide, the average life expectancy at birth was 71.0 years (68 years and 6 months for males and 73 years and 6 months for females) over the period 2010–2013 according to United Nations World Population Prospects 2012 revision. According to the World Health Organization(WHO),  women on average live longer than men in all countries.
Statistics released by the Union ministry of health and family welfare show that life expectancy in India is 67.3 years for males and 69.6 years for females respectively according to Jan 29, 2014.

Characteristics of the life span perspective

• Human Development is Lifelong: In the life span perspective, early adulthood is not the end point of development; rather, no age period dominates development. An overall age profile of an individual involves not just chronological age, but also biological age, psychological age and social age. For eg: a 70 year old man (chronological age) might be in good physical health(biological age), be experiencing memory problems and not be coping well with the demands placed on him by his wife’s recent hospitalization(psychological age), and have a number of friends with whom he regularly plays golf(social age).
• Human Development is Multidimensional: Whatever your age, your body, your mind, your emotions and your relationships are changing and affecting each other. Development consists of biological, cognitive and socio emotional dimensions. The other components of cognitive dimension include, attention, memory, abstract thinking, speed of processing information and social intelligence.
• Human Development is Multidirectional: Through out life some dimensions or components of a dimension expand and others shrink. For eg. When one language (English) is acquired early in development, the capacity for acquiring second and third languages (Spanish & Chinese) decreases later in development, especially after early childhood(Levelt1989). During adolescence, as individuals establish romantic relationships, their time spent with friends may decrease.
• Human Development is Plastic: Plasticity means the capacity for change. Developmentalists explain how much plasticity people have in various dimensions at different points in their development. For eg., can the intellectual skills be improved at the age of 70’s & 80’s? Researchers have found that the cognitive skills of older adults can be improved through training and developing better strategies.(Boron2007; Hillman2008)
• Developmental Science is Multidisciplinary: Psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists and medical researchers all share an interest in unlocking the mysteries of development through the life span.
• Human Development is contextual: All development occurs within a context or setting. Contexts include families, schools, peer groups, churches, cities, neighborhoods, university laboratories, countries and so on. Each of these settings is influenced by historical, economic, social and cultural factors(Goodnow2010). The context like individuals change. Thus individuals are changing beings in a changing world. As a result of these changes, contexts exert 3 types of influences:
  • Normative age-graded influences: These are similar to individuals in a particular age group, the biological processes such as puberty and menopause also the sociocultural, environmental processes, such as beginning of formal education (at age 6); retirement (60 years)
  • Normative history graded influences: These are common to people of a particular generation because of historical circumstances like the economic, political and social disruptions For eg., the Sept 112201 terrorist attacks, etc.,
  • Nonnormative Life events: these are the unusual occurrences that have a major impact on the individual’s life. For eg., the death of a parent when a child is young, pregnancy in early adolescence, a fire accident, winning a lottery or getting an unexpected career opportunity.

• Human Development involves Growth, Maintenance and Regulation of loss: The mastery of life often involves conflicts and competition among three goals of human development: growth, maintenance and regulation of loss(Baltes2006). As individuals age into middle and late adulthood, the maintenance and regulation of loss in their capacities takes center stage away from growth.
• Human Development is a Co-Construction of Biology, Culture and the Individual factors: Development is a Co-Construction of biology, culture and the individual factors working together (Baltes& Rosler2006). For eg., The brain shapes culture, but it is also shaped by culture and experiences that individuals have or pursue. In terms of individual factors, we can go beyond according to our genetic inheritance and environment.

Reference

Kaluger. George & Kaluger, Meriem Fair (1979). Human Development : the span of life . C.V Mosby Company, New York

Assignment

Discuss characteristics of life span perspective with examples.

RELATIONSHIP OF THE DISCIPLINE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT WITH OTHER DISCIPLINES OF STUDY

Human development:
It is a scientific study of the changes in an individual’s biological, social, cognitive, emotional behavioral domains across the life span.

Relationship of Human Development with other Disciplines:
One of the definitions of human development is that it is the science of development and behavior of human beings. Behavior patterns in childhood pave the way to behavior patterns in adulthood. During the early period, scholars confined the study of human development only to the developmental pattern. Their followers integrated the information from varied other sources of allied sciences such as nutrition, health, education, social work. These entities which permit objective and quantitative measurements strengthen the subject of human development. Today one of the major tasks of human development is the integration of the findings of various fields into a harmonious unity of knowledge as shown in following figure-1.

1. Physical Sciences: Physiology, Pediatrics and Genetics
2. Social Sciences: Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology and Education

1. Physical Sciences:

a) Physiology: The discipline of physiology is concerned with growth and functioning of the body tissues and organs, which have an effect on development and behavior of the human being.

b) Medicine – Pediatrics: The physician is concerned with more than keeping records of heights and weights, diagnosing and treating the usual childhood diseases and prescribing medicine. The physician has to rely heavily on a thorough knowledge of human growth and development.

Psychiatry, another interrelated field is a specialized branch of medicine concerned with prevention of mental and emotional illness. The psychiatrist must be familiar with normal human development in all aspects: physical, mental, social and emotional. He must be able to discriminate between normal variations in individuals and signs of illness or pathological behavior which indicate serious disturbances and call for special treatment.

The discipline of medicine that deals with child health and medicine emphasizes the developmental history of understanding of the individual; information about prenatal factors and nutritional influences. Pediatrics is also concerned with norms and assessment of developmental status of the child.

c) Genetics: Studies the influence of hereditary factors on human development. The specialized field of genetics has shed light on the inheritance, characteristics of the succeeding generation from the preceding one.

2. Social Sciences:

a) Psychology: Psychology deals primarily with man’s behavior and his adjustment to his environment. It impinges on every area of human life. Developmental psychology is concerned with the chronological and progressive changes in man’s capacity to deal with his environment. It contributes to the understanding of the various aspects of human behavior and the techniques in measuring the individual differences. Other areas of psychology deal with those particular aspects in which one achieves a more or less satisfactory relationship with objects and people. Some areas deal with personality and its development. Some are concerned largely with the learning process, and some deal with interpersonal relationships and the nature of adjustments made by individuals in achieving and maintaining healthy social behavior. All these areas have significance to the study of human development specially in understanding the laws and principles that govern the unique development and behavioral pattern of each individual. Thus psychology helps to get an insight into the intricacies of our common heritage, the human nature. It also unfolds the amazing depth and the endless possibilities of human mind.

b) Anthropology: It contributes to the understanding of human beings by pointing out the cultural influence on the developing personalities. Anthropology which is the study of the human species in their cultures has two aspects; cultural and physical. Cultural anthropology seeks to throw light on man’s nature and social behavior in relation to his intentions. Physical anthropology is concerned with man as physical being. It deals with physical status and characteristics and his origin and evolution. Through careful measurements of the human body and its parts at different periods and stages of development, the field assesses the nature of the growth process.

c) Sociology: It refers to the total personality as a function of human relationships. Sociology is scientific knowledge about the behavior of human beings in relation to other human beings. It is concerned directly with man’s behavior in relation to the various human groups in which he holds membership, especially those with which he is closely identified, and which more or less participate directly in structuring his personality and behavior patterns. Sociologist helps to interpret the nature of the family and other social groups which play a vital role in the development of the child and how the nature of the society and the various institutions in society influence the thoughts, feelings and actions of the children and adults. Perception of the physical world is colored and determined in large measure by the character of the social institutions. Sociology explains the powerful role played by the different socializing agencies such as the home, school, and community in the personality development of the child. The basic nature of the child cannot be separated from the social environment, the milieu in which the human personality is moulded.

d) Education: It refers to the study of the child in the educational setting. The field of education has benefited greatly from the ever increasing knowledge of the characteristics of the growing child. Schools need to design and organize their programmes in keeping with levels of readiness of children. Seeking and gaining an understanding of the individual child in the school mutually by parents and teachers is important for his development. Educators and nutritionists have learned that the child and subject matter cannot be separated from each other in a class room. A good school programme is more than a series of courses; it is based on a sound knowledge of the nature of child growth in general and on a thorough understanding of each individual pupil in particular.

Contributions of the human development to other disciplines
Human development as a specialized field integrates the findings of the other disciplines to enrich the understanding of the growing individual. It organizes different findings into a coherent body of knowledge and makes it available to a variety of fields for application, such as medicine, nutrition, health, education and social work.

References
Cole M. Cole S. (1989).The Development of Children, New York: Scientific American Books.

Assignment
Collect information on different disciplines and relate how these disciplines contents are related with human development.

LATEST ISSUES IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

The following are the issues about the nature of development:

1. Nature and Nurture Issue: This issue involves the extent to which development is influenced by nature and nurture. Nature refers to the biological inheritance and nurture to its environmental experiences. The emerging view is that complex behaviours have some genetic loading that gives people a propensity(inclination) for a particular developmental trajectory(path). The basic growth tendencies are genetically programmed into humans. Psychologists emphasise  the importance of nurture or environmental experiences in development.  In reality we are the creatures and creators of our worlds. We are the products of our genes and environments.
2. Stability and Change Issue: Stability involves the degree to which early traits and characteristics persist through life. Change is how we develop into someone different from who we were at an earlier point in development. Developmentalists emphasise that stability is the result of heredity and possibly early experiences in life. In the life span perspective, plasticity or the potential for change exists throughout the life span. The roles of early and later experience are an aspect of the stability-change issue in the latest studies of human development. For eg. A shy child who hides behind the sofa when visitors arrive destined to become a wall flower at the college dances and might become a sociable, talkative individual.
3. Continuity and Discontinuity: This issue focuses on the degree to which development involves either gradual, cumulative change(continuity) or distinct stages(discontinuity).For eg. As the oak grows from seedling to giant oak, it becomes more of an oak. In terms of discontinuity, an insect grows from a caterpillar to a butterfly, it passes through a sequence of stages in which there is qualitative discontinuous change in development rather than a quantitative continuous change.
   Most lifespan developmentalists view strongly that development is influenced by each of these factors. Researchers are examining that many other contemporary issues are concerned with the life span perspective. They are the health and wellbeing, parenting and education, sociocultural contexts and social policy.
4. Health and well-being: Health professionals today recognize the power of life-styles and psychological states in health and well-being. Clinical psychologists help people improve the well-being.
5. Parenting and Education: Issues related to child care, parenting styles, child maltreatment, effects of divorce, intergenerational relationships, early childhood education, relationships between poverty and education, bilingual education, new educational efforts to improve life long learning, and many other issues related to parenting and education are of concern as the latest issues in human development.
6. Sociocultural Contexts: To analyse the sociocultural context, 4 concepts are especially useful: culture, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and gender.
   • Culture: Culture encompass (cover) the behavior patterns, beliefs and all other products of a particular group of people that are passed on from generation to generation. Culture results from the interaction of people over many years. A cultural group can be large or a small or an isolated one. Whatever the size the group’s culture influences the behavior of its members. Cross cultural studies compare aspects of two or more cultures. The comparison provides information about the degree to which development is similar or universal, across cultures, or is instead culture-specific.
   • Ethnicity: The word ethnic comes from the Greek word for “nation”. It is rooted in cultural heritage,  nationality, race, religion and language. Diversity exists within each ethnic group.
   • Socioeconomic status (SES): This refers to a person’s position within society based on occupational, educational and economic characteristics. Socioeconomic status imply/involve certain inequalities. Differences in the ability to control resources and to participate in society’s rewards produce unequal opportunities.
   • Gender: This refers to the characteristics of people as males and females. A special cross-cultural concern is the educational and psychological conditions of women around the world. (UNICEF,2010). Inadequate educational opportunities, violence and mental health issues are just some of the problems faced by many women.
     According to the analysis of UNICEF, 2004, a higher percentageof girls than boys around the world have never had any education. The countries with the fewest being educated are in Africa. In developing countries, 67% of women over the age of 25 have never been to school. At the beginning of the 21st century, 80 million more boys than girls were in primary and secondary educational settings around the world.

7. Social Policy: It is a government’s course of action designed to promote the welfare of its citizens. Values, economics and politics all shape a nation’s social policy. As policy makers are doing too little to protect the well-being of children and older adults, life span researchers are increasingly undertaking studies that their hope will lead to effective social policy.

A recent study also revealed that the more years children spent living in poverty, the more their physiological indices of stress were elevated (EvansKim,2007).

Reference

1. Santrock.J.W.(2011). Life span development. 13 ed. Mc.Graw Hill Education Pvt.Ltd. New Delhi.
2. Papalia, D.E. and Olds, SW. (2008). Human development. 11th ed. McGraw Hill. New York.

Assignment

Collect and present information on recent trends, issues and challenges in human development.

INTRODUCTION TO GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT IN HUMAN LIFESPAN

Growth and Development are generally used together to refer to various aspects of an individual’s overall performance.

Definition of growth and development
Growth is the progressive increase in the size of a child or parts of a child. Growth indicates increase in body dimensions. These changes can be measured in terms of height, weight, head circumference etc.,
Development is progressive acquisition of various skills (abilities) such as head support, speaking, learning, expressing the feelings and relating with other people. Growth and development go together but at different rates. Development refers to the different aspects of the child personality. According to Clarke, the developmental changes are systematic, progressive, permanent and occur over a period of time.
“Development means a progressive series of changes that occur in an orderly, predictable pattern as a result of maturation and experience” E.B. Hurlock.

Importance of assessing growth and development
The assessment of growth and development is very helpful in finding out the state of health and nutrition of a child. Continuous normal growth and development indicate a good state of health and nutrition of a child. Abnormal growth or growth failure is a symptom of disease. Hence, measurement of growth is an essential component of the physical examination.

How to measure growth
There are various measurements that are used to measure growth. These are:

• weight,
• height,
• head circumference,
• mid upper arm circumference (MUAC)
• chest circumference

To be useful, these measurements must be taken accurately using reliable equipment and correct measuring techniques.

1. Measuring weight: For measuring the weight, a beam balance or spring balance is used. Before weighing a child, check the weighing scale to ensure it is working properly. Then proceed as follows:

• Hung the scale securely with the dial of the scale at your eye level for correct reading. If you use the Salter scale, hang the weighing pants on the hook of the scale. Adjust the pointer of the scale to zero (“0”) by turning the knob on the top of the scale to account for the extra weight of the weighing pants;
• Ask the parent to remove any heavy clothes and shoes including the nappies and to dress the child in the weighing pants. .
• Once the child wears the weighing pants, ask her to lift the baby and fasten the loop of the pants to the hook of the weighing scale. Ask the mother to let go of the child but to continue standing nearby and talk to keep talking to the baby. The child’s feet should be off the ground.
• If the child is upset, ask the mother to calm him or her. When the child stops moving, note the weight quickly, reading to the nearest 10gm in infants and 100 gm in children.

2. Measuring the Head Circumference The head circumference is measured by encircling the head with an unstretchable tape measure, or a piece of string in the absence of a tape measure. This is passed over the most prominent part of the occipital posteriorly and just above the supraorbital ridges anteriorly to obtain the greatest distance around the head. The piece of string used in the absence of a tape measure is then measured with a ruler to obtain the head circumference.

3. Measuring the mid upper arm circumference (MUAC) The mid upper arm circumference is measured using a tape or string in the absence of a tape. The tape or string is placed around the left upper arm, midway between the elbow and the shoulder bone. Care is taken not to pull the tape or string too tightly. The measurement is read. The string used in the absence of a tape measures is then measured with a ruler to obtain the mid upper arm circumference.

4. Measuring the Length/Height The length is measured using a horizontal measuring board also called Infantometer. The child is laid on his back with the head against the fixed head board. A helper holds the child’s head so that the body is straight. With one hand of the health worker, the child’s knees are pressed down to straighten the child’s legs fully while, with the other hand, the sliding foot board is placed to touch the child’s heels firmly. With the foot board in place, the child’s length is read on the meter scale.
To measure the height of a child who can stand a Height rod can be used.
To measure the height, a bare foot child stands with the feet together. The heels, the buttocks  lightly touch the measuring device.. The sliding head piece is lowered to rest firmly on the head. The height is read and recorded.

5. Measuring chest circumference
The infant lies on back. With an automated tape device, measure the circumference of the chest at the level of the nipples during normal breathing. An assistant is required to assure that the infant is in the correct position.
From birth to about 1 year, the head circumference is greater than the chest circumference. After 1 year, Chest circumference is greater than the Head circumference.

6. Tooth eruption: It is when the first tooth reupts.

Weight Growth Pattern
An average term newborn weighs 3.5 kg (range 2.5 kg- 4.6 kg). Within the first 3-4 days, a term newborn loses 5-10 % of the birth weight. This weight loss is usually regained in 2 weeks by term babies and longer by premature babies. An average term baby doubles the birth weight in 4-6 months, triples it by one year and quadruples it by two years of age.

Head Circumference Growth Pattern.
The head circumference measurements are used for estimating the growth of the brain. At birth, the head circumference of a term baby averages 34 cm (see Table.2). The head circumference grows most rapidly in the first year: 2 cm monthly in the first 3 months, 3 cm during the next 3 months, and 3 cm in the last 6 months. This means that the average head circumference is 44 cm at 6 months and 47 cm at 12 months of age. Thus, the head circumference grows by 12 Cm during the first year.

Table.2 Average and range of head circumference and the average length/height of children

Mid Upper Arm Circumference Growth Pattern:
The measurements of mid upper arm circumference (MUAC) are used for determining whether the child is well nourished or malnourished.

The mid upper arm circumference increases fairly rapidly to about 16 cm by the age of one year. In the period 1 to 5 years, the mid upper arm circumference increases by only 1 cm. So, irrespective of age, the mid upper arm circumference of well nourished children ranges 16 -17 cm in the period 1-5 years. Conversely, if the mid upper arm circumference of a child of 1 to 5 years of age is less than 16 cm, that child has malnutrition and corrective intervention should be carried out.

Length/ Height Growth Pattern
An average term baby is 50 cm long. The length increases by 50% in the first year. In the second year, the average height growth is about 12 cm. The birth length doubles by 4 years of age. After the second year of age, the annual height growth averages 5-6 cm until the beginning of the adolescent growth spurt. Height growth stops at about the age of 18 years in girls and at the age of about 20 years in boys.

Growth Chart

Growth Monitoring Growth monitoring is the process of maintaining regular close observation of a child’s growth. It starts with measurements of weight daily, weekly, monthly, bimonthly etc.
To determine an individual child’s growth pattern, weight measurements from birth are plotted on the growth chart of the child health card. The plotting produces a line or graph. This line constitutes that individual child’s growth pattern or curve.
A constantly upward curve parallel to the printed lines shows GOOD growth.
By looking at the direction of the child’s growth curve, the health worker and the mother can see at a glance whether the child is gaining weight appropriately or not.
A horizontal (flat) growth curve means the child is not growing and is a sign of disease, especially malnutrition. A child who is malnourished cannot grow properly, cannot resist diseases, and is in danger of getting killer diseases. Mother should be encouraged to give the child food containing enough calories, protein, vitamins and minerals.
A curve deviating a VERY DANGEROUS situation. The child is losing weight. The child needs extra care immediately. The baby may be suffering from malnutrition, tuberculosis, AIDS or other medical conditions. The mother is advised to take the baby to hospital for investigations and treatment.
Any infant who does not gain weight for one month or a child who does not gain weight for two months should receive urgent attention. Such an infant or child is becoming malnourished.

Importance of Growth Monitoring:
Health workers and parents should monitor the growth of children for the following reasons

• For early detection of abnormal growth and development
• To facilitate the early treatment or correction of any conditions that may be causing abnormal growth and development.
• To provide an opportunity for giving health education and advice for the prevention of malnutrition.

DEVELOPMENT
At the beginning of this unit, we defined development as the progressive acquisition of various skills (abilities) such as head support, speaking, learning, expressing the feelings and relating with other people. We also said that each child follows a unique path in growth and development that is laid down from the beginning of life by what he has inherited from both parents. If a child is genetically determined to be clever, then development will be more rapid. Unfortunately, many things may change the genetically determined path of growth and development. These things include, for example, infections, lack of care, psychological trauma, bad education, and malnutrition, to mention just a few.
It is very important to know the age ranges when most children acquire certain skills. The various skills the baby and a young child learn are called milestones. In monitoring development, we notice at what age the child achieves various milestones, such as smiling at the mother, sitting without support, grasping objects with his/her hands, standing, walking and talking. You should record at what age the child has achieved the various milestones.
Still, it is important to remember that every child develops at his/her own rate or pace. Some walk early, others late. The average age ranges at which children reach various milestones is given in Table.3.

 Table.3: Normal Developmental Milestones

The factors that promote development include good nutrition, emotional support, play and language training. We shall discuss each of them in detail, starting with good nutrition.

• Good nutrition: Good nutrition is essential for normal growth and development. Unlike most other organs in the body, the brain is not fully developed at birth. Good nutrition in the first 6 months of life is extremely important. Malnutrition in this period may inhibit the growth of the brain. As a result of impaired brain growth, the child may suffer for the rest of life if the child does not get enough good food. A malnourished child is often tired, apathetic and not interested in learning new things that will promote normal development.
• Emotional Support:The first 5 years of life are critical for the foundation of the skills which are developed in the following periods of the child’s life. A newborn starts with no knowledge and learns a great deal during his/her first year of life. It is very important to realize that a child is a growing and developing human being right from birth. He ought to be treated very carefully, with love and respect, so that he can develop normally. He needs full emotional support. There are eight basic needs for a healthy emotional development of a child.

These are:

1. Love;
2. Security;
3. Acceptance an an individual;
4. Self-Respect (Self-Esteem);
5. Achievement;
6. Recognition;
7. Independence;
8. Authority

Let us briefly look at each in detail.

Love A child needs to feel loved continuously. A child who does not feel loved will not develop properly, and will not learn as quickly as other children. Instead, he becomes sad and lonely and no longer interested in what goes on around him.
Security A child needs to feel safe. He can only feel safe if his parents show that they love him and take good care of him. He must know that his parents will look after him and help him, that they will feed him when he is hungry, play with him, and keep him happy and comfortable. The love and security a child gets from the mother and family helps him to develop a sense of trust in people, initially the family members and later people outside the family.
Acceptance as an individual: A child enjoys being accepted as an individual. A child needs to know that his mother and family love him for what he is. They should not compare him with other children and tell him that he is slow to do this or that, or that he is not as good as some other child. They should show him that they respect him as an individual with his own likes and dislikes, and that they realize he is unique, as all children are unique.
Self respect (self-esteem). Children need to feel that they are of great value, they are able to do things by themselves, they can achieve success, and that their success will be recognized. Anything suggesting that a child is inferior is very disturbing to the child.
Achievements The child feels the need to achieve. The parents should not do anything that the children can do for themselves.
Recognition A child enjoys recognition by his or her parents. A child needs to know that his parents are happy and pleased when he has learned to do something new. Parents should help a child to do things and encourage him to make achievements. They should also teach the child because they love him and show that they are proud of him. This helps the young child to feel secure and to learn more easily.
Independence A child needs to learn how to make decisions. As the child grows he needs to be allowed to decide more and more things for himself and learn how to be independent. The parents must not unnecessarily limit the child’s independence and exploration by overprotection and over anxiety.
Authority A child needs his parents’ authority mixed with affection. The parents train the child to learn to obey the rules of the home, the neighbourhood, the school and the society. The rules indicate what the child may do and what he may not do. What a child may do is approved and encouraged with rewards. What the child may not do is clearly and firmly disproved and discouraged. The discouragement is achieved by permitting consequences of undesired behaviour. The child thus learns to accept the restrictions that are there in life.

• PlayPlay is an essential factor for the development of a child. Play is an irreplaceable source of information, stimulation for the brain, stimulation for the muscles and a lot of fun. All these are necessary for physical, mental and social development. All normal children like to play. If a young child does not play, he may be ill. Encourage playing, even if it may be noisy sometimes.

Expensive toys are not necessary for play. Young children will improvise toys from common objects such as paper (but not plastic bags), sticks and stones. The parents should make sure the child does not injure him/ herself with any of the toys. For example, parents should ensure that a toy is not too small, as a child can easily choke on small objects. To help a child play and learn properly, he needs to have:

• Plenty of room so that he can move about and discover things for him/ herself.
• He should be encouraged to do things he wants or enjoys.
• Several different kinds of toys so he can practice different skills. Blocks of wood can be used for stacking, a ball for throwing, containers of water or sand for filling and pouring.
• Encouragement and interest from the adults. It is fun to play together.

There are different kinds of play, and each type helps a child to develop properly.

Physical play: This exercises the body’s large muscles and keeps the child healthy and strong. Physical plays include: running, jumping, climbing, and swimming.
Manipulative play: This is a kind of play in which the child uses the hands and the eyes. It teaches such things as the size, consistency, texture, shape and colour of objects. Things for manipulative play include: sand, earth, clay and water. Children enjoy playing with all these things.
Creative play: Painting, paper cutting, sewing, using crayons, threading beads and shells, clay modelling, and building with bricks or blocks of wood are all activities that help children to use their hands and eyes together to make things which were not there before.
Imitative play helps the child to acquire the skills of being a person. Through imitating the sound, the child acquires speech. Imitating everything, the child acquires many skills: dressing, feeding, washing etc.
Imaginative play: The child can dress up and pretend to be an adult whom he knows, or pretend to be a driver driving a car. . Children can even pretend that they are animals. This sort of play is important because it allows young children can get rid of a lot of feelings of anger, anxiety and fear.

• Language TrainingAnother factor that promotes development is language training. Children should be offered opportunities to meet, use, and play with words in conversation and in reading books. Using an adult language, the adults should talk and sing with small children and infants, encourage them to talk about what they are thinking, not laugh when children are talking, read to the children, tell stories, and listen as attentively to the children as they listen to the other adults. Try to understand how they are thinking and be happy that they want to involve you in their world.

You now know what growth and development are and the factors that promote them. In the following section we shall discuss the importance of antenatal care, perinatal care and postnatal care and the effects of not having these services.

Difference between growth & development

References

Cole M. Cole S. (1989).The Development of Children, New York: Scientific American Books

http://wikieducator.org/Lesson_5:_Growth_and_Development

Assignment

1. Prepare a check list to assess the growth and development of infants, toddlers and preschoolers.
2. Prepare a list of available tools to measure growth and development of infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

PRINCIPLES OF GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT

There are certain principles governing the process of growth and development. These principles are common for all the children.

1. Growth axis or growth gradients
Growth axis and growth gradients are the directions of the physical and physiological changes in the human body. Developmental changes also follow the same sequence. The three directions of growth are:

• Cephalocaudal
  Physical growth occurs downward from top to the bottom of body. For instance, during prenatal period the brain and nervous system develop first, followed by developmental changes in lower part of the body. After birth, in post natal years, the infant gains control first over total head movements as well as movements of eyes and mouth. Then it gains control over trunk movements and finally leg movements.
• Proximodistal
  The control of movements matures from central (proximal)  areas of body to outer or peripheral areas (distal). For instance, infant gains control over its body, then its arm movements, hand movements and finally its finger movements. Likewise they gain control over leg, foot finally toe movements.
• Differentiation (mass to specific)
  It refers to a direction of growth from mass to specific process or activities so that the principle of differentiation proceeds from the simple to complex growth. For instance, in the physical domain, babies learn to move their arms (Gross movements), prior to being able to oppose their thumb and index finger while grasping a rattle (specific movement). Young children learn to walk before they can skip or hop.

2. Growth and development are orderly and sequential
Human growth and development is an orderly process. The sequence of growth and development is clear for physically based functions, i.e. locomotion, grasping, whereas for cognitive or socially based functions such as thinking and reasoning, morality, play behaviour the sequence of development is not clear.

3. Individual variations in growth and development
Individuals follow the same pattern of sequential changes in growth and development. There is however considerable variation among individuals in the rate of growth and development. For instance, children vary markedly in height, weight and other dimensions of physical growth.

4. There are critical periods and sensitive periods in individual growth and development
Critical period is a period of time when a given event will have its greatest impact; the only point in time when particular environmental factor can have an effect on the developing organism.

Critical period in prenatal development is the first 2 months and peaks around four weeks after conception. For instance, if pregnant women are exposed to drugs, X-rays, certain diseases, such as German measles during the first 3 months of pregnancy, it would result in structural deformity of embryo since organs are formed at this time.

5. Development occurs at different rates for different parts of the body
Different parts of body show somewhat different growth patterns in relation to the age of the child. The body growth includes skeletal growth and growth of internal organs and external organs. The organs show rapid growth during prenatal period, infancy and early childhood and adolescence than during school age. For instance, the lymphatic system consisting of thymus, lymph nodes and intestinal lymphoid mass reaches an adult level by 7 years. The neural system i.e. head, brain, spinal cord is almost fully developed by 6 years. The reproductive organs grow very slowly until adolescent period at which point they undergo rapid growth.

6. Development proceeds in different stages – each stage has certain unique characteristics
The total human life span is divided into various stages as each stage has its unique behavior patterns. In each stage certain traits or behavioral characteristics stand out more prominently than others. For instance, neonatal stage, infancy, early childhood stages are distinctive from one another.

7. Growth and development are related and continuous
The process is both quantitative and qualitative. A child’s digestive tract is an illustrative example of this principle. Growth in size permits a large intake of food in a single feeding. Changes in structure permits the digestion of more complex foods and increases the efficiency of converting more complex foods into simple forms which the body can use.

8. Growth and development are correlated and integrated
Growth and development do not occur in isolation. Both are interrelated with each other. While the child’s body grows, he masters the physical skills. Similarly, as brain grows, child’s mental development also undergoes quantitative changes i.e. thinking and understanding.

9. Points of accelerated and decelerated growth
There are periods of accelerated and decelerated growth. During infancy and early childhood period and adolescence, growth is rapid but not in school age, adulthood and old age.

Individual differences: Each human chromosome contains 1250 genes. Twenty three pairs of chromosomes interact with each other during conception. They combine in nearly eight million combinations which bring out the individual differences among children belonging to one family. Every person is biologically and genetically different from others due to genetic endowment. Environmental experiences add to these differences.

References

1. George and Kaluger, Meriem Fair (1979). “Human Development : The span of life” ,C.V Mosby Company, New York.
2. P. Devadas & N.Jaya, 1984, “A text book on Child Development”, Macmillan India Ltd, Madrads.

Assignment

Write down examples for each principle of growth and development by keeping in view of milestones.

DETERMINANTS (FACTORS) AFFECTING GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

Physical growth depends upon heredity and environmental factors such as sunlight, fresh air, food, climatic conditions, and freedom from infections. There are many factors that affect growth and development and they can be summarized in the following manner.

Factors influencing Growth and Development
Factors influencing Growth and development are:

• Physiological factors: Genetic, neurological, glandular, maturation, adaptative capability.

a. Genetic factors:
There are two types of cells

The somatic cells develop into internal organs; brain, bodily parts and different internal organs.

The germ cells are the reproductive cells which transmit traits, predispositions, a wide range of characteristics, vulnerabilities and response patterns.

b. Neurological factors:
The nervous system is one of the most important and influential systems of the human body that contributes to growth and development. The quality of the nervous system determines the response patterns of the individual to all environmental inputs. The two hemispheres of the brain have different functions: the left hemisphere specializes in verbal activities such as speech, writing and other forms of expressive communication. The right hemisphere deals with non verbal tasks such as mechanical work, artistic and spatial abilities. Development of one more than the other hemisphere brings about different sets of abilities and skills in individuals.

c. Glandular system:
Endocrine glands secrete hormones; chemical substances which affect growth, development and health of an individual. Hormones regulate rate and pattern of development, functioning of all internal organs and the brain.

• Deficiency of thyroid activity during the growing years stunts physical and mental development.
• A too active thymus gland will retard the normal development and keep the child physically and mentally childish for too long a period.
• Deficiency in the secretions of parathyroid gland results in defective bone growth and hyper excitability of muscles, because the calcium level in the blood is regulated by parathyroid glands.
• Deficiency in the activity of sex glands delays the onset of puberty, while hyper activity brings about precocious sexual development. Extreme cases of gonadic hyperactivity may lead to early sexual maturity even between 3rd and 4th year of age.

d. Physiological maturation:
Maturation is the unfolding of innate organic pattern in an ordered sequence through growth of the organs. That is, maturation involves readiness in the individual to learn a task or a skill. Many capacities emerge only when the child is ready. For instance, good muscle coordination requires the maturation that comes around two and a half  to three years of age. Therefore, maturation goes hand – in – hand with growth and development.

• Environmental: Social factors include socialization, family, peers, education, socioeconomic conditions, culture. Physical factors include – geographical, community, artifacts, possessions.

a. Socialization: It is a process through which a child is shaped into socially acceptable individual to fit into the culture. Becoming socialized means that the individual behaves in ways that are acceptable in his culture. Child gets socialized by the agents in his community. This process is fundamental to social development since it develops social attitudes, behaviours, social roles and skills common to the culture.

b. Family: Family is the first and the most important socializing agent in the life of an individual. The family passes on its attitudes, values, goals, prejudices and perspectives to the child, which in turn shapes the child’s behaviour. Parents are key agents in the social development of the child. For instance, a highly controlling family environment where parents dominate the child tends to develop either submissiveness or rebellion in the child, whereas a democratic family environment builds confidence and self reliance in the child.

c. Peer group: Peer group consists of individuals of approximately the same age and social class. Peer group assumes increasing importance in the life of a child; from being momentary play mates in childhood to influential partners in adolescence. Peer group reinforce behaviours, attitudes and develops varied social skills, emotional responsiveness, moral standards and behaviours in individuals.

d. Society: Society provides certain rules by which to live. Societies affect individuals in various ways across life span. Communities in which individuals live provide framework for socio-economic life. After the family, the school is the most influential social agency in the life of a child. Most of the development in childhood years happens in these two social agencies.

e. Physical factors: Physical factors such as rural – urban living conditions, climatic conditions have great influence on development. Depending up on physical living conditions, individuals’ development occurs. For instance, cognitive development varies according to the opportunities for play and learning material in their physical environment.

f. Nutrition: Proper nutrition is essential for healthy development of children in terms of physical and mental qualities. The nutritional status of children reflects the nutritional status of the community.
Children who had suffered once from severe protein calorie malnutrition in early childhood years may suffer from permanent stunting in physical growth and mental abilities.

g. Physical defects: Physical defects place limitations on the child’s ability to deal with the environment. The most common physical defects among children are visual and auditory impairments, orthopedic disabilities, speech defects, harelip, cleft palate, central nervous system disorders and heart diseases. Some of these are congenital while some are the results
of an illness or accident.
The developmental progression of these children is usually below to that of normal children. For instance, blind children are slower in walking, feeding and dressing themselves than other children with normal vision.

• Psychodynamic factors: Include – self – structure, self concept, self ideal, self identity, behaviour patterns, personality traits, values, attitudes and adjustable mechanism.
• Personal factors: Include intelligence, sex, health and position in the family.

a. Intelligence: Intelligence is a component of development, but is also a critical factor that affects development. Children with high intelligence tend to progress well in other components of development too. Whereas children intellectually retarded, show poor overall development. Developmental research indicates that children with high intelligence achieve developmental milestones earlier than children with average and low intelligence levels.

b. Sex: Sex plays an important role in child’s physical and mental development. At birth boys are slightly stronger and larger than girls. But girls grow rapidly and mature sooner than the boys and at the same time they are larger than boys. This is apparent at the puberty age, from 9-12 years. Girls also attain their maximum size earlier than boys.

c. Health: Frequent health setbacks are detrimental to development. Child’s development is adversely affected by the loss of physical stamina, indigestion, poor assimilation of nutrients etc.

d. Position in the family: The position of the child within the family influences his development more through environmental than through natural factors. The 2nd, 3rd, 4th child in the family generally develop more quickly than the first born, not because of any pronounced intellectual differences but because of the fact that the younger children learn from imitating their older brothers and sisters. On the other hand, the youngest child of the family, especially if distinctly younger than the other children, is apt to be slower in his development because he is more pampered and overprotected.

Reference
Kaluger. George & Kaluger, Meriem Fair (1979). Human Development: the span of life . C.V Mosby Company, New York

Assignment
Collect and present information on how hormones affect the growth and development. Collect in detailed information on how psycho dynamic factors will affect the growth and development.

ROLE OF HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT ON GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT

Human development is a complicated process. Neither heredity nor environment shapes the entire course of development. Heredity and environment are complimentary to each other in the developmental process.

Heredity

• Heredity is defined as ‘the sum total of potentialities inherited at birth”.
• Heredity must be given an environment to function, whereas environmental factors can contribute only to genetic potentialities of a living and growing organism.
• Heredity sets the limits to success in attaining these potentials depending on the environmental influences or facilities.

Role of Heredity on Physical, intellectual and Personality development

• Physical Development: Heredity has a greater effect on physical and motor development, such as size, strength, appearance and metabolism. But on the other hand certain prenatal conditions such as maternal nutrition, infections of mothers, x– rays, emotional trauma during pregnancy have significant effect on physical development of the foetus. Nutrition in early childhood period directly influences the body growth and physical activity. Children who suffer from protein deficiency are stunted and are retarded in development.
• Intellectual Development: Heredity sets limits beyond which environment cannot enhance or retard intelligence. Heredity determines specific capacity in some areas of intellectual functioning. But on the other hand a highly intelligent person may not be able to make use of his inherent capacities (eg. memory, reasoning, creativity) due to environmental restrictions.
• Personality Development: Certain traits like activity levels, sociability and temperament are found to be genetically determined. Such personality traits which are determined by inherited potential are more resistant to change.

Environment
Environment refers to all conditions to which an individual is subjected to in the course of development starting from fetal development to old age. It comprises of prenatal conditions such as mother’s age, nutritional intake, health status, medical care, drugs and post natal conditions such as child rearing practices, cultural expectations, experiences, facilities and opportunities. Based on its nature, environment is divided into prenatal and postnatal environment.
Prenatal  environment: It is also called as internal or intrauterine environment where the child grows.
Age of mother: Ideal age for healthy child birth falls between 25-30 years of age of the mother. However, other factors being ideal, women can deliver healthy babies even up to 40 years. But the tendency for later age pregnancies being unsuitable for healthy growth of fetus is also true. It is found that a woman after 35 years could produce irregular/ abnormal eggs which result in Down’s syndrome, leading to mental retardation in the child
Maternal Nutrition: The developing fetus derives food from the blood stream of the mother through placenta and umbilical cord. Any nutritional deficiency in the mother’s food intake would result in nutritional deficiency in the fetus and its growth suffers. Low birth weight, premature and still births can result from such a condition.
Maternal diseases: When a mother is exposed to German measles or syphilis, it would result in mental retardation and physical abnormalities in the baby.
Emotional stress: Emotional stress in the mother influences the fetus through glandular changes which could result in complicated deliveries and miscarriages.
Radiation: Frequent exposure to X–rays during pregnancy may result in developmental disorders such as microcephaly, stunted growth and cleft palate.
Drugs: Some drugs that the mother may consume have severe negative effects on the foetus. Especially drugs like amphetamine may lead to negative effects on brain development.
Rh Incompatibility: Difference with blood composition of fetus and mother leads to the biochemical incompatibility. The Rh negative mother produces antigens which enter into fetal blood stream. Antibodies are formed in the fetus through placenta. RBC of foetus is destroyed and it prevents the supply of oxygen to fetus resulting in erythroblastoses (destruction of RBC).
First born children are not affected by this blood incompatibility since the antigens are not yet developed by the mother’s blood. The next pregnancy could become problematic for the fetus.
Postnatal environment: It is called external environment. Based on quality of environment, it is further divided into enriched and impoverished.
Enriched environment: It provides stimulation to the child and enhances inherited potentialities. An enriched environment provides child with opportunities for exploration and to realize its own strengths and inborn capacities. It is rich in verbal, social and physical stimulation. It provides variety and quality in the stimulation offered. It involves high level of adult interaction with the child to channelize its inbuilt potentials. An optimal/ enriched environment is one which is carefully constructed according to the needs and abilities of the child.
Impoverished environment: It is a kind of environment where even basic needs of the child are not fulfilled. It does not provide scope and opportunity for child’s growth and development, child’s inner potentials and does not cater to the child’s optimal development.
On the contrary, it hampers the child’s potentials and capacities for development.

Structural levels of environment
Bronfenbrenner (1979) used the word ecology to refer to the interactions of the person and his or her social and physical setting. The ecology of human development involves the scientific study of progressive, mutual accommodation between an active growing human being and the settings in which the developing person lives. The interaction between the developing person and the environment is viewed as a reciprocal relationship.
The ecological environment includes immediate settings (home, school, work) and interaction between immediate settings and larger settings. The ecological environment is composed of four structural levels.
The Micro system: This system involves the interaction between the developing child in an immediate setting or context. For instance, interactions between child & mother, father, teacher and  peers.
The Meso system: This system involves the relationships among the various settings or contexts in which the developing child finds himself/herself. Ex: school and family, family and peer group.
The Exo system: This system includes the primary social structures that influence the developing child, though the child does not directly participate in this system. Ex: formal/informal institutions such as governmental structures,  neighbourhood,  communities and work places.
The Macro system: It consists of the broad general values, beliefs, ideologies, rules and regulations of the society, which influence the ways specific institutions organize and function. Eg: cultural values, legislations, governing bodies and institutions.
All these layers of environment influence the growth and development of the child in different and important ways.

References

1. Craig, G.J. (1976). Human Development. New Jersey:  Prentice Hall INC.
   
2. Fabes, R., & Martin, C. L. (2006). Discovering Child Development (pp. 74-76). New York: Pearson Education.
3. Papalia, D.E., & Old, S.W. (1978). Human Development. London: Mc. Graw Hill Inc.
4. Video:Amniocentisis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9itd1Ot-kg

Assignment

• Present information on in which way heredity and environment affect the growth and development
• Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of heredity and environment on growth and development

GENETIC CONCEPTS AND ABNORMALITIES ASSOCIATED WITH HUMAN LIFE

Human life begins as a single cell weighing about one twenty-millionth of an ounce!. This tiny piece of matter housed our entire genetic code – the growth from a single cell to a person made of trillions of cells, each containing a replica of the original code. That code is carried by GENES.

The nucleus of each human cell contains CHROMOSOMES, which are thread like structures made up of deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA. DNA is a complex molecule with a double helix shape, like a spiral staircase, and contains genetic information.

GENES, the units of hereditary information, are short segments of DNA. Each gene has its own location, its own designated place on a particular chromosome.  Genes are the basic units of heredity that are carried on the chromosomes. The Human Genome Project efforts to map the human genome – a genome is the genetic material of an organism. It consists of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The genome includes both the genes, (the coding regions), the noncoding DNA^[1] and the genomes of the mitochondria and chloroplasts. Numerous studies have shown that external events outside the original cell and the person, as well as events inside the cell, can excite or inhibit gene expression(Gottlieb, Lickliter,2006).

Every human cell carries a genetically programmed blueprint for development.

The blueprint is coded by Genes, which reside on thin structures called chromosomes. In humans each cell contains 46 chromosomes that work together in pairs which has approximately 30,000 genes. One chromosome of the pair is inherited from the mother and the other from the father.

Through the three processes genes manage to get passed from generation to generation, namely MITOSIS, MEIOSIS and FERTILIZATION.

Mitosis:
All cells in the body, except the sperms and egg, have 46 chromosomes arranged in 23 pairs.   These cells reproduce by a process called MITOSIS. Mitosis is a process in which a single body cell divides into two exactly equal parts.  Two new cells are formed, each containing exactly the same 23 pairs of chromosomes.

Meiosis:
This is a different type of cell division. It forms eggs and sperm ( sex germ cells or the gametes). During meiosis, a cell of the testes (in men) or ovaries (in women) duplicates its chromosomes but then divides twice, thus forming four cells, each of which has only half of the genetic material of the parent cell(Klug and others,2010). By the end of meiosis, each egg or sperm has 23 unpaired chromosomes.

Fertilization:
During this process an egg and a sperm fuse to create a single cell, called a ZYGOTE. In the zygote, the 23 unpaired chromosomes from the egg and the 23 unpaired chromosomes from  the sperm combine to form one set of 23 paired chromosomes – one chromosome of each pair from the mother’s egg and the other from the father’s sperm .  Thus each parent contributes half of the offspring’s genetic material.

Each chromosome in the pair contains varying forms of the same genes, at the same location on the chromosomes. A difference lies in the 23rd pair. In females this pair consists of two chromosomes called X chromosomes; in males, the 23rd pair consists of an X and a Y chromosomes. The presence of a Y chromosome is what makes an individual MALE.

The chromosomes in the zygote are not exact copies of those in the mother’s ovaries and the father’s testes. During formation of the sperms and the egg in meiosis, the members of each pair of chromosomes are separated, but which chromosome in the pair goes to the gamete is a matter of chance. In addition, before the pairs separate, pieces of the two chromosomes in each pair are exchanged, creating a new combination of genes on each chromosome (Mader,2011).

Identical twins (monozygotic twins):
It develops from a single zygote that splits into two genetically identical replicas, each of which becomes a person.

Identical (monozygotic) twins are always of the same sex because they form from a single zygote that contains either male (XY) or female (XX) sex chromosomes.

Fraternal twins (dizygotic twins):
It develops from separate eggs and separate sperm, making them genetically no more similar than ordinary siblings.

Therefore, boy/girl twins are always fraternal or (dizygotic); they can only form from two separate eggs that are fertilized by two separate sperm.

Sources of variability:  A source of variability comes from DNA. Even when the genes are identical, people vary.

Genotype: Is all of a person’s genetic material makes up his or her GENOTYPE.

Phenotype: consists of observable characteristics. Phenotype include physical characteristics (such as height,weight, hair colour) and psychological characteristics (such as personality and intelligence).

Genetic principles:
A number of genetic principles like Dominant-Recessive genes, Sex linked genes, Genetic imprinting and Polygenic Inheritance determine the characteristics.

Dominant-Recessive genes principle: One gene of a pair always exerts its effects; it is dominant, overriding the potential influence of the other gene, called the recessive gene. A  recessive gene exerts its influence only if the two genes of a pair are both recessive.  If a recessive gene for a trait is inherited from both the parents, the trait will be shown. If it is inherited from only one parent, it will not be shown and will never know that the gene is carried. Eg. Brown  hair, farsightedness, dimples rule over blond hair, nearsightednesss and freckles in the world of dominant-recessive genes.

Can 2 brown haired parents have a blond haired child? Yes. Suppose each parent has a dominant gene for brown hair and a recessive gene for blond hair. Since dominant genes override recessive genes, the parents have brown hair, but both are carriers of blondness and pass on their  recessive genes for blond hair. With no dominant gene to override them, the recessive genes can make the child’s hair blond.

Sex linked genes: Most mutated genes are recessive. When a mutated gene is carried on the X chromosome, the result is called X-linked inheritance. Most individuals who have X-linked diseases are males as they have no backup copy to counter the harmful gene and therefore may carry an X-linked disease. Hemophilia and fragile-X syndrome are examples of X- linked inheritance diseases.

Chromosomal and gene-linked abnormalities or inherited abnormalities or developmental disorders:
Inherited abnormalities or developmental disorders appear due to variations in chromosomes or metabolic conditions. Some of the developmental disorders are:

Down’s syndrome: It is one of the types of mental retardation which occurs due to abnormal pairing of chromosomes. An extra chromosome is found on the 21st pair. It is characterized by distinctive physical appearance. The child with this syndrome has almond shaped eyes, flattened skull, round face, extra fold of skin over the eyelids, a protruding tongue, small chin, small ears, short broad neck, short limbs, flat nasal bridge, sparse hair and very low intelligence quotient.

Down’s syndrome appears approximately once in every 700 live births.

Turner syndrome: It is due to the sex chromosome abnormalities. The Turner’s syndrome is the result of lack of sex chromosome in females making the person XO instead of XX, or part of one X chromosome is deleted. The person is characterized by below normal intelligence, short stature and deformity of neck, forearm and failure to develop secondary sexual characteristics.
Turner syndrome occurs in approximately 1 of every 2,500 live female births.

XYY Syndrome: It is a chromosomal disorder where boy has an extra Y chromosome. They are tall, have severe acne during adolescence, are poorly coordinated, may exhibit impulsive behaviors are violent and have lower intelligence. This is caused due to problems in cell division during sperm production. Presence of extra Y chromosome produces aggressive and anti social behaviors.

Trisomy –X syndrome: It is a chromosomal disorder (47, XXX), in which girls are born with an extra X chromosome. They reach menopause earlier than the normal females. They have slightly lower intellectual levels, are often quiet and passive. They may have delayed development of speech and motor skills than normal females with XX chromosomes.

Klinefelter syndrome: It is a genetic disorder in which males have an extra X chromosome (XXY) instead of  XY. It is characterized by small genitals,undeveloped testes, lack of sperms, usually have enlarged breasts and become tall. Sometimes the individual exhibits antisocial behavior.
Klinefelter syndrome occurs approximately once in every 600 male live births.

Fragile X syndrome: It is a genetic disorder resulting from an abnormality in the X chromosome, which becomes constricted and often breaks. It is characterized by mental retardation, learning disability, or a short attention span. This disorder occurs more frequently in males than females.

Phenylketonuria (PKU):  It is a metabolic disorder where the individual cannot properly metabolize phenylalanine, an amino acid. This condition results due to absence of hepatic enzyme- phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH) that metabolizes the amino acid, phenyl-alanine to tyrosine. When phenylalanine accumulates, it is converted into phenylpyruvate, which is injurious to nervous system. The defect which is transmitted by autosomal recessive gene results in progressive mental retardation in majority of untreated individuals.
It can occur once in every 10,000 -20,000 live births.

Polydactyle: It is a condition where individual has an extra finger or toe. It can be in any of three places of the hand:

• on the small finger side—most common (ulnar)
• on the thumb side, also called thumb duplication—less common (radial)
• in the middle of the hand—least common (central)

Polydactyly is one of the most common congenital hand defects, affecting about one out of every 500 to 1,000 babies.

Other diseases that result from genetic abnormalities include-

Cystic fibrosis– Glandular dysfunction that interferes with mucus production, breathing and digestion are hampered.

Diabetes– Body does not produce enough insulin ,which causes abnormal metabolism of sugar.

Hemophilia- Delayed blood clotting causes internal and external bleeding.

Huntington’s disease– Central nervous system deteriorates, producing problems in muscle coordination and mental deterioration.

Spina bifida– neural tube disorder that causes brain and spineabnormalities.

Tay-Sachs disease.- Deceleration of mental and physical development caused by an accumulation of lipids in the nervous system.

References

1. P.C.Blewitt.P.(2003).The life span Human Development for helping professionals. Merrill Prentice Hall,Ohio.
2. R, Martin,C.L.(2003). Exploring Child Development.2nd ed. Allyn and Bacon,Newyork.
3. Santrock, J. (2011). Life span development. 13th McGraw Hill Education India Pvt.Ltd..
4. L.B.(1985). Human Development. 2nd ed.Macmillan Publishing Company,Newyork.

Assignment
Prepare and present a list of genetic abnormalities and collect the pictures, characteristics and symptoms

STAGES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Meaning and importance of stage

• A stage is a period during which certain changes occur that are unique to that period.
• Every stage is built upon the foundation of previous stages.
• Each stage is designated according to child’s abilities and activities during the period.
• Irrespective of the cultural and social background, human growth follows a general developmental pattern at different stages in which certain prominent changes / behavioral patterns are observed. 

Description of each developmental stage: The developmental stages are generally overlapping and the ages indicated are approximate estimates during which a particular stage is experienced by the individual.  

Stages of human life span:

1. Prenatal Period: It is from conception to birth spanning a period of 9 months or 36/38 weeks. It is further divided into 3 stages.

a. Period of ovum (Conception to 2 weeks): A human being’s life starts from the moment of the fertilization, which occurs in the middle of the menstrual cycle of a woman, when a male sperm meets the female egg cell (ovum) and a new cell is formed called zygote. Within 24-60 hours the zygote splits and cell production progresses rapidly.

b. Period of embryo (2 – 8 weeks): The cell mass is called as embryo. Between this period and 40 weeks, primitive forms of body organs appear and continue to develop.

c. Period of foetus (8 Weeks – birth): All major structures are formed and mature.

• In the tenth week, head is erect; intestines, kidneys and spinal cord are formed.
• By twelfth week, sex distinction is possible, Nose Bridge appears, and blood begins to form in bone marrow and the eye takes final shape.
• By the end of fourth month, the fetus looks like a human being, hair begins to appear, kidneys attain final shape, sex organs develop, bone joints appear, the two halves of the brain are clearly visible, reflexes like sucking and swallowing appear.
• By five months, nerve cells develop, fat on the body starts developing.
  By the end of six months, the body becomes proportionate, lungs begin to make surfactant, a chemical that prevent lungs from collapsing.
• By the end of seventh month, lungs are capable of breathing, fat forms smoothening the skin, eyes can open and respond to light.
• By the end of 8th month, skin is smooth, hands and legs have chubby appearance and many folds appear in the brain.
• In the ninth month the fetus adds fifty percent of its weight and many reflexes appear.

2. Infancy (birth –2 yrs.): It involves 2 stages

a. Neonatal stage (birth – 30 days): Adjustment to post natal life takes place during this period. This is a transitional stage from foetal to postnatal functioning. During this short period of time, remarkable changes and adaptation occur in the new born. The neonate makes tremendous adjustments to new way of life which requires the performance of bodily functions like breathing, digestion of food, maintaining body temperature and excretion of waste products.

b. Infancy (1 month to 2 years): Rapid physical growth occurs and a sense of trust develops during this period. A neonate is called infant when his physiological process becomes operative and fairly well adjusted. He undergoes rapid physical growth; however growth during this period is less striking than that of prenatal period.

In the later part of the second year, the child is able to move about on his own. This particular stage is referred to as toddlerhood / babyhood.

3. Toddlerhood (2 – 3 years)

• This period is characterized by elaboration of locomotion, language development and fantasy play.
• Child is very active and curious and actively explores the environment.
• This age is also known as ‘Terrible Twos’.

4. Period of early childhood (4 to 6 years)

• This period is characterized by rapid physical and physiological development and development of self concept. During these years, remarkable changes occur.
• Uniqueness of individual emerges in complex ways. Child acquires the ability to communicate verbally with others. Child has a greater physical movement and can explore the world around him. Intellectual abilities improve and the child can perform complicated tasks.
• This is a foundation period for the personality development of the child. Important developmental tasks of this period are gender identification, early moral development and peer play.

5. Period of Middle Childhood/ School Age (6-12 Years)

• During this period physical growth continues but at a slower pace.
• Child’s intellectual development is rapid and very complex as he moves from sheltered intimate world of his home to the larger environment of the school and community.
• Child begins to acquire basic skills of formal learning and develops certain social abilities as his/her relationships with others outside the family, expands.
• This period is characterized by friendships, concrete operational cognitive functioning, skill learning and self evaluation.

6. Adolescence (12 – 24 yrs.): This period is divided into early and late adolescence.

a. Early adolescence (12 – 18 yrs)

• It is a period of rapid physical growth and increased emotional stress. The onset of pubertal changes in early adolescence makes it the most dramatic of all stages.
• This period is marked by physical maturation of the sex organs and development of secondary sexual characteristics. The average age of menarche is 13 years for girls and 14 years for boys.
• Intellectual development is marked by the increase in ability for abstract Self identity develops during this period. Emotional stress is great as individual tries to accept his/her new self and new role in society.
• Cultural practices, constraints and expectations exert great influence at this stage.
• Important milestones during this period are physical maturation, formal operational intelligence, emotional development, membership in peer group, sexual relationships and self identity development.

b. Late adolescence (18-24 yrs):

• This stage is characterized by tapering of physical growth.
• But mental and social development continue in many complex ways in response to the demands of society and new roles and responsibilities that the individual is required to assume as he approaches adulthood.

Important tasks of the period include autonomy from parents, gender identity, internalized morality, completion of education and making career choice.

7. Adulthood (24 – 75 yrs.)

a. Period of Early Adulthood (24–34 yrs):

• In adulthood, physical changes accompanying adolescence are fairly complete for a majority of individuals.
• However, physiological and psychological adjustments continue throughout the stage but are more crucial around 24 years as the individual chooses career life and establishes his/her family and becomes a productive and useful member of the society fulfilling his/her economic and social needs as well as that of the world around.
• His personality and achievements are determined to a considerable extent by kinds of experience during early formative years.
• Important tasks of this stage are exploring intimate relationships, child bearing, work life style.

b. Middle Adulthood: (34–60yrs):

• Middle 30’s to middle 60’s ends with completion of child rearing and parenting roles. It is customarily subdivided into early (30-50 years) and middle age (50-60 years).
• During advanced middle age, physical and physiological changes that first began during the early 40s become more apparent.
• Individual’s interests change and they desire to maintain a stable standard of living and assist teenage children become responsible and happy adults.
• Managing a career, nurturing intimate relationships, managing the household and expanding caring relationships are important tasks of the stage.

c. Later adulthood / Senescence (60-75yrs):

• Decline in physical and physiological functions is the major change that occurs during this period.
• These aging years demand a higher degree of socio-emotional adjustment. There is decline in physical strength, social status and physiological functions.
• The individual is deprived of the emotional support of daily occupation and conflict rising out of the feeling of not being needed by one’s family.
• Old age can prove a most difficult time for some persons where as others are psychologically content and intellectually alert even beyond 70’s.
• Important tasks of the stage are accepting one’s life, promoting intellectual vigour and redirecting energy to new roles.

References

1. P.C.Blewitt.P.(2003).The life span Human Development for helping professionals. Merrill Prentice Hall,Ohio.
2. R, Martin,C.L.(2003). Exploring Child Development.2nd ed. Allyn and Bacon,Newyork.
3. Santrock, J. (2011). Life span development. 13th McGraw Hill Education India Pvt.Ltd..

Assignment
Collect and present visual clips of foetus, how it will grow weekly and monthly in mothers womb.

DEVELOPMENTAL TASKS DURING LIFE SPAN

Introduction
Robert J. Havighurst introduced the concept of developmental tasks. He believed that human development is a process in which people attempt to learn the tasks required of them by the society to which they are adapting.
Developmental task is a task which arises at a certain time in the life of an individual, successful achievement of which leads to happiness and also success with later tasks, while failure leads to unhappiness and difficulty with later tasks (Havighurst, 1972).

• At each stage of development, one faces a new set of developmental tasks consisting of a set of skills and competencies that contribute to increased mastery over one’s environment.
• These tasks reflect areas of accomplishment in physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development as well as development of the self-concept.
• The tasks change with age because each society has age-graded expectations for behaviour. The individual, who learns these tasks, receives satisfaction and reward and does not suffer unhappiness and social disapproval.
• Most people learn developmental tasks at the time and in the sequence appropriate to their society. If a particular task is not learned during the sensitive period, learning it may be much more difficult later on.

Sensitive Period: It is the period of time when the person is most ready to acquire a new ability.

Purpose of developmental tasks

• Developmental tasks are guidelines that enable individual to know what society expects of him at a given stage of life.
• It motivates individual to do what the social group expects him to do at a certain age.
• It gives an insight to individual on what is expected of him in the following stages of development

Havighurst’s developmental tasks during the life span

Prenatal stage:

• Pregnant women must receive good prenatal health care
• scheduled medical check-up
• Food intake (nutrition)
• life-style,hygiene food supplements, medicine/drug/smoking/alcohol
• Support from spouse is highly needed

 Infancy and early childhood

• Learning to take solid foods
• Learning to walk
• Learning to talk
• Learning to control the elimination of body wastes
• Learning sex differences and sexual modesty
• Getting ready to read
• Learning to distinguish right and wrong and beginning to develop a conscience

Late childhood

• Learning physical skills necessary for ordinary games
• Building a wholesome attitude toward oneself as growing organism
• Learning to get along with age-mates
• Beginning to develop appropriate masculine or feminine social roles
• Developing fundamental skills in reading, writing, and calculating
• Developing concepts necessary for everyday living
• Developing a conscience, a sense of morality, and a scale of values
• Developing attitudes toward social groups and institution
• Achieving personal independence

Adolescence

• Achieving new and more mature relations with age mates of both sexes
• Achieving a masculine or feminine social role
• Accepting one’s physique and using one’s body effectively
• Desiring, accepting, and achieving socially responsible behavior
• Achieving emotional independence from parents and other adults
• Preparing for an economic career
• Preparing for marriage and family life
• Acquiring a set of values and an ethical system as a guide to behavior – developing an ideology

Early adulthood

• Getting started in an occupation
• Selecting a mate
• Learning to live with a marriage partner
• Starting a family
• Rearing children
• Managing a home
• Taking on civic responsibility
• Finding a congenial social group

Middle age

• Achieving adult civic and social responsibility
• Assisting teenage children to become responsible and happy adults
• Developing adult leisure-time activities
• Relating oneself to one’s spouse as a person
• Accepting and adjusting to the physiological changes of middle age
• Reaching and maintaining satisfactory performance in one’s occupational career
• Adjusting to aging parents

Old age

• Adjusting to decreasing physical strength and health
• Adjusting to retirement and reduced income
• Adjusting to death of spouse
• Establishing an explicit affiliation with members of one’s age group
• Establishing satisfactory physical living arrangements
• Adapting to social roles in a flexible way

References

1. Newman, & Newman. (2003). Development through life: A psycho social approach (pp. 132-134).  United States of America: Wardsworth.
2. http://www.readorrefer.in/article/Havighurst-s-developmental-tasks-during-the-life-span-Babyhood-and-early-childhood_1992/

Assignment

DOMAINS/AREAS/ASPECTS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS

Children develop intellectually, physically and socially step by step in a progressive manner. Skills are learned gradually as children grow through the stages of development.
When looking at child development, several domains or developmental areas are considered: motor/physical, cognitive/intellectual, social/emotional, communication/language, moral self-help and aesthetic developments.

Motor/Physical Domain
The motor/physical domain involves both gross motor and fine motor skills as well as physical growth. Since muscle and bone tissue grows very rapidly during the first two years, infant growth is very rapid and increases in strength, coordination, and stamina occur. Typical infant growth and development proceed from the head downward and from the center of the body outward. The same developmental sequence occurs for muscle control with infants gaining control over muscles that support their head and neck first, then the trunk, and eventually developing muscle control needed for reaching. Muscle control needed for walking is the last to develop. During infancy, motor abilities evolve in a specific sequential order. However, it is important to note that the rate of motor development differs among children (e.g., standing, walking).

Handedness:
The performance or individual preference for use of a hand is known as Handedness.

Ambidexterity is the state of being equally adapted in the use of both the left and the right hand, and also in using them at the same time.
In the early weeks the human organism is “AMBIDEXTROUS” i.e., it does not show any preference in the use of either hand. An unequal use of two hands is evident around the mean age of 6 years. The use is both preferential and in greater strength. Even during 1st year, there is no indication of hand preference and they use either hand as a matter of convenience, i.e. if an object is nearer the left hand the baby would use the left hand to acquire or grasp it, if closer to right, he will use the right hand. This shifting pattern likewise also occurs in the 2nd year but less frequently than in the previous years.

Thus in the first year, the infant is neither dominated by left or right hand though certain pattern of preference of either hand can be observed in the 2nd year. By the 3rd year the child indicates a distinct preference of one hand, that is, the child becomes “UNIDEXTROUS”. A preference of the right hand as compared to the left occurs in most children, except a few. Considerable aspects of finer motor co ordinations like writing skills and other manipulatory skills which are extremely important to the later development and adjustments of the child are determined by it.

Cognitive/Intellectual Domain
The cognitive domain refers to the process of learning and understanding or the intellect or the mental abilities.It is the ability of the child to think and find a solution to the problems. It is connected with the function of the brain. Cognition involves receiving, processing, and organizing information that has been perceived through the senses and using the information appropriately. If you ask a small child to give his/her rattle to you, in all probability you will have no reaction because the child has not understood you. The understanding or cognition develops with age.

0 to 3 months: The cognitive development of the newborn is extremely limited. The child satisfies hunger by sucking instinctively. The child cries and the mother feeds the baby. Slowly the child starts co-relating crying with being fed. The child can also be seen moving lips when hungry.

4 to 6 months: Cognition takes time to develop. Whatever is held by the infant is taken to the mouth and the sucking starts. In due course the child learns that the ‘rattle’ or the ‘ball’ that he/she holds cannot give milk to satisfy the hunger.

7 months to 1 year: Children out of curiosity might touch the hot iron. Gradually they shun anything and everything looking like iron. They associate the burning feeling with iron and think it best to keep away from it. Hence it is very apparent that cognition is modifying child’s behavior.

1 year to 5 years: Upto the age of 1 to 1½ years if you remove the baby’s toy from his/her sight, it stops existing for the baby.

Older children understand that the toy cannot vanish and it still exists. They start searching for it. They are often able to take out the toy from the hiding place. The ability of not forgetting the existing of the toy is called ‘object permanence’.

Do you remember that children attribute human values to non-living objects?

The child comes crying to the mother that he/she has been hit by the table. If the tricycle is damaged he/she may force the mother to tie a bandage around its handle. These two examples show that the child’s cognition is developing. He/she cannot identify hurt with pain and bandage with relief. Slowly and gradually the children are able to mentally conserve their experiences and use them to solve problems. Cognition develops further with the increasing use of sensory organs. When the child enters kindergarten, the child has a comprehensive idea of counting, alphabets, size relationship big or small and the names of geometric shapes.

Social/Emotional Domain

Social development refers to the ability of a child to behave in a manner acceptable to the society in which he/she lives.
Social development leads to socialization. Socialization is a process whereby the child learns to eat, speak and play. It also means behaving well in a group.

From 4-6 months the infants begin to become social. They notice the individuals around them. They respond by gurgling, cooing and babbling. They start recognizing their parents, siblings, strangers.

7-9months- The bond between the infant and the mother or the mother figure are stronger. They can differentiate between love and scolding.

10-18months- Infants feel secure with family members and avoid strangers. They even become possessive of things belonging to mother/ their toys.

1½ – 5years- The feelings of possession are strong. The child wants the mother’s undivided attention.

Emotions are the feelings everyone is born with. Emotional development means the ability to control emotions and express them in ways acceptable to society.

Crying and smiling are the two early emotions.

4-6 months- infants start showing anger when wet, lonely and unattended.
7 -9 months – Develops a bond between mother and child gives rise to another emotion – affection. This emotion is expressed by hugging and cuddling.
10-18 months – They get scared and acquire another emotion – fear.
1½ – 5years – Become jealous of siblings when mother attends to their needs.
The emotional behavior varies among children. For eg. A child may hide behind his/her mother for fear of strangers while other may start growling.

The emotions are short lived. For eg. The child may hit the sibling because of jealousy one minute and hug and kiss the next minute to show love. As children grow they learn to control their emotions.

The various agents helping the socialization process of the child are parents, siblings, peers, and household helpers.

The social/emotional domain encompasses feelings and emotions, behaviors, attachments and relationships with others, independence, self-esteem, and temperament. Infants like to be held and cuddled when awake and begin to establish a bond or emotional attachment with parents and caregivers which evolve into a sense of trust and security.

Communication/Language Domain
“Language development means the ability to communicate through the use of meaningful words and sentences.”

The communication/language domain refers to perceiving, understanding and producing communication/language. Communication abilities will vary on age ranging from crying and fussing to eventually communicating with spoken sounds and words.

0 to 3 months: The only sound that the infant can produce is of ‘crying’. By crying they communicate to their mother that they are angry or wet. By the time they are 3 months old, they respond by ‘cooing’ and learn to produce the ‘ooo’ ‘caoo’ sounds. They make gurgling sounds when they are well-fed and happy.

4 to 6 months: The infants of this age-group start producing flat ‘a-a’ sounds. Gradually starts producing various sounds like pa, ma, ta, ba, na and so on.

6 to 9 months: The infant  now produces double flat sounds like baba, mama, tata, nana, papa etc. Such sounds produced by the baby are often referred to as ‘babbling’. Initially the sounds produced may not mean anything. Gradually becomes adept at speaking words that have meaning. A baby learns to associate meaning with an object, and then the word becomes a symbol or label for the object.
For example, the child says ‘ball’ and means ‘give me the ball’ or ‘I do not want the ball’. The parents learn to decode the meaning from the gestures and mono-syllables spoken by the child.

10 to 12 months:  The infant now start speaking in simple sentences. A child who says ‘babi-ball’ or ‘babi-doll’ actually means ‘baby’s ball’ or baby’s doll’. They also try to master what is called telegraphic speech. Instead of saying papa has gone to office, they say papa office. The language develops with repeated usage. The child reproduces sound by imitating. So it is desirable that the parents do not use the baby language while talking to their infants and toddlers. If the parents speak clearly, the children will also learn the correct use of words.

1 to 2 years: They now are promoted to 3 to 4 word sentences. They can now say ‘I want doll’ and ‘I want big doll’ and even ‘I want red doll’. An 18 to 20 month old child can speak about 50 words.

3 to 5 years: The children have a habit of using the newly learnt word/words repeatedly. They copy sounds and behave like parrots. They just don’t tire of reciting nursery rhymes learnt at home or playschools. They are ever-ready to show off their language skills. Children learn to speak more than one language quite easily. The child speaks one language at home and the other to communicate with playmates outside the house. Very often, the later is, due to the need to communicate with children who do not speak his/her language. They can have a vocabulary of above 1700 words. Uses adult speech sounds, mastered basic grammar, relates a story.

Moral Domain
Moral behavior means conformity with the moral code of the social group. The word moral comes from a Latin word MORES meaning manners and customs.

There are 4 components to the concept of Moral Development:

1. Conformity to social standards, learning and the laws, customs and the rules of the group.
2. The role of the Conscience. The conscience is a conditioned anxiety response, a mechanism for ensuring internal control.
3. The role of emotions, especially shame and guilt.
4. The role of social interactions – contact with others.

Self-Help/Adaptive Domain
The self-help or adaptive domain involves adapting to the environment and ability to do things for oneself. Some skills associated with this domain include feeding, dressing, toileting, and drinking independently.

Aesthetic Domain
It is a sense of appreciation among the children for beautiful things and forms. This aesthetic development causes moral development with the children afterwards. This empasises  and develops the attitude of loving natural objects like flowers, fruits, leaves, and appreciate their colours, shapes, arrangement etc. They take care of these things along with their belongings like books, pens, toys dress etc. They like the orderliness of things like trees in a line, arrangement of desks and chairs, standing in a queue etc. They preserve different things and objects carefully without causing destruction .

Holistic Development: Holistic development refers to how all aspects of child development are interrelated and affect the Human being as a Whole

References

1. http://www.floridahealth.gov/AlternateSites/CMS-kids/providers/early_steps/training/itds/module1/lesson1_3.html
2. Laxmi Devi. (1998). Child development  An introduction. Anmol Publications Pvt. Ltd.

Assignment

1. List out the recent areas of human development.
2. Collect and present milestones with pictures under each area of development

THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT – INTRODUCTION

Definition: A theory is an interrelated, coherent set of ideas that helps to explain phenomena and make predictions.
A theory is an idea or set of ideas that is intended to explain facts or events. (Webster’s dictionary).
A fact is a statement , based on observation, with which many people would agree.
A theory is a fact-based framework for describing a phenomenon. In psychology, theories are used to provide a model for understanding human thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
The major purpose of reviewing theories of human development is to demonstrate how such theories are used to formulate answers to basic questions of human development.

Function: A theory has three general functions or purposes-

1. A guide that scientists can use in collecting the kinds of information they need to describe an aspect of development. For eg. A theory of language acquisition might allow a researcher to describe the process of babbling and then the use of one word sentences.
2. Serves to help scientists in integrating a set of facts into general categories.
3. Helps scientists to present material and information in an organized and coherent way.

Criteria: To evaluate the utility of a theory, the criteria helps to understand the usefulness of a theory.
Murray Sidman (1960) identifies 6 criteria- inclusiveness, consistency, accuracy, relevance, fruitfulness and simplicity.

1. INCLUSIVENESS: It is the number and the type of phenomena included in a theory.
2. CONSISTENCY: It is how well the theory can explain new things without changing the basic assumptions.
3. ACCURACY: It is how the theory predicts the future outcomes and explains the past ones.
4. RELEVANCE: It is how closely the theory is related to the information collected and how it reflect the facts.
5. FRUITFULNESS: It is how well the theory generate new ideas and directions for inquiry.
6. SIMPLICITY: It is how simple and how easy is the theory to understand. 

Theories are the back bone of  developmental research and are very much connected to the real world.

Categorization of Theories of Human Development:

References

1. James O. & Whittakar, 1970., Introduction to Psychology, W.B. Sanders Company, London p-p 459-494
2. R. Bugulski, 1960., An Introduction to Principles of Psychology, The Bobbs-Manin Company Inc, New York

Assignment

List out different theories for each area of human development

CLASSICAL CONDITIONING THEORY

Learning by conditioning of reflex was suggested by a Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov. According to him, conditioned reflex is a reflex produced by a stimulus that originally was incapable of causing this reaction but that has been substituted for the originally adequate stimulus by a process of long association. Classical conditioning takes a respondent behaviour and brings it under the control of a previously neutral stimulus.

Classical Conditioning Experiments
Conditioning: It represents learning at a very low level. Conditioning is nothing but “the establishment of connection between a stimulus and a response which have no natural connection between them”. It is learning at a very simple level, learning which we acquire mostly unconsciously.
Experiment:Pavlov demonstrated that a dog salivates when food is put into its mouth. This reflex of salivation is physiological and natural. But the dog can be made to salivate to any other neutral stimulus, say the sound of a bell, if the natural stimulus (food) is presented to the dog with the neutral stimulus(sound of bell). This salivation to the sound of bell is unnatural and learned. Pavlov gave different names to the various types of stimuli and responses. The natural stimulus for salivation ie. food was called by him as unconditioned stimulus (US). The natural response to it ie. salivation while eating was called unconditioned Response(UR). The experimental stimulus which was neutral before experiment, but to which response is conditioned during experiment is called conditioned stimulus (CS). Here it is the sound of the bell. The learned response (salivation) to the otherwise neutral stimulus (sound of the bell) is called conditioned response (CR).

In a typical experiment, Pavlov paired food and bell a few times. It was found that after a few pairing, the dog salivates even when only bell is sounded and food is not presented. This salivation is nothing but a conditioned (learned) response to an otherwise neutral stimulus ie. Bell. Thus we can define classical conditioning as “a process in which a neutral stimulus by pairing with a natural stimulus, acquires all the characteristics of neutral stimulus”.

Conditioning is also helpful in the learning of language. Role of picture to teach students numbers and words is of vital importance. If a child is taught the word ‘cow’ with a picture of the cow shown to him, he at later time may recognize a cow and pronounce the word pointing his hand towards the animals. Here relation between the word and the animal was established with the picture. In this way we learn from our day to day experiences by conditioning. It is conditioning which enables us to learn habits, culture, customs, social traits and language etc.

Instrumental or Operant Conditioning Theory
B.F.Skinner advocated this theory. He stated that human beings and society are controlled by a haphazard assortments of rewards and punishments. The fundamental mechanism of control is reinforcement. We learn to do that thing that either reward or permit us to avoid pain. In short reinforcement determines our behaviour.

Skinner’s Experiment
A hungry rat is put into a box called “Skinner Box” devised by Skinner himself. The box contains a simple lever-like device which when pressed by the rat releases a pellet of food or sugar water. The hungry rat when put into the box begins to explore the box and happens to press the lever casually. This happens 2 or 3 times before it notices that pressing of lever releases food. Later the rat learns to press the lever whenever it feels hungry. It is called the reinforcer or reward. The strength of learning is measured by the number of lever pressing by the rat per unit of time. It is otherwise called the rate of response.

Experiment to test Escape Conditioning:
An electric grid is placed on the floor of the Skinner Box. The grid delivers a shock to the paws of a rat placed inside and it is terminated only when the rat presses a bar. It is observed that when the rat is shocked for the first time, it shows a number of behaviours like jumping, crouching, scratching etc. On certain occasions it accidentally touches the bar and terminates the shock. Gradually his response of touching the bar gets strengthened because of the reward (escape from pain of shock) and occurs more and more. At the end, it learns to press the bar to terminate the shock. This kind of learning or conditioning is called escape conditioning.

Avoidance Conditioning:
Avoidance of pain or punishment before it is inflicted is also a type of reward or reinforce of behaviour. In avoidance of conditioning a signal precedes the onset of the shock. Thus in a Skinner Box, a tone can be sounded before the onset of the shock. During the initial trials, the rat will learn to press the bar, when he is shocked and soon after he will learn also to press the bar in response to the tone so that he will avoid shock. This is called avoidance learning or avoidance conditioning. Ina nut-shell the response is learnt by the subject to take care of that situation.

In Skinner’s view, rewards and punishments shape development. For Skinnner the key aspect of development is behaviour, not thoughts and feelings. For eg. shy people learned to be shy as a result of experiences they had while growing up. It follows that modifications in an environment can help a shy person become more socially oriented.

References

1. Santrock, J. (2011). Life span development. 13th ed. McGraw Hill Education India Pvt.Ltd..
2. Salkind,N.J. (2004). An introduction to Theories of Human Development. Sage Publications, New Delhi.
3. Dash B.N.(2008). A text book of Educational Psychology. Dominant publishers and distributors, New Delhi.

Assignment
Prepare and present a list of experiments with visual aids using classical conditioning and operant conditioning

MATURATIONAL THEORY – ARNOLD GESELL, G.STANLEY HALL

The Maturational Theory of child development was developed by a psychologist and a pediatrician named Arnold Gesell. Gesell’s theory is known as a maturational-developmental theory. He believed that a child’s growth and development is influenced by both their environment and heredity, but he largely investigated the children’s physiological development. He called this process maturation.  The intrinsic factors include genetics, temperament, personality, learning styles, as well as physical and mental growth.  Simultaneously, development is also influenced by factors such as environment, family background, parenting styles, cultural influences, health conditions, and early experiences with peers and adults.
Gesell recorded the changes he observed in the growth and development of children from infancy through adulthood. The Maturational Theory takes the stance that environment has no affect on a child’s development. In fact, if a child suffers from any developmental problem, it is believed that the problem lies within the individual child and not as the result of the child’s environment and circumstances.

The Concept of Maturation
Gesell observed that maturational development always unfolds in fixed sequences: an embryo’s heart is always the first organ to develop, then the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord), followed by the peripheral organs. After birth, babies first gain control over their lips and tongues, then their eye movements, followed by control over their neck, shoulders, arms, hands, fingers, legs, and feet. There is a genetic cephalocaudal (head-to-foot) trend in both prenatal and postnatal development.
As a baby grows, they learn to sit up, stand, walk, and run; these capacities develop in a specific order with the growth of the nervous system, even though the rate of development may vary from child to child. Gesell believed that individual differences in growth rates are a result of the internal genetic mechanisms.
Maturational theory states that while the child’s social and cultural environments also play a role in their development, these socializing forces are most effective when they are harmonious with the inner maturational timetable. He opposed efforts to teach children things ahead of their developmental schedule, asserting that once the nervous system had matured adequately, a child would begin mastering tasks such as sitting up, walking, and talking from their own inner urges.

The Study of Patterns
Gesell studied infant behavior and how early motor behavior develops. He determined that growth is best measured not quantitatively but in patterns. A pattern can be anything that has a definite shape or form  such as an eye blink. Gesell looked for patterns in the process by which actions become organized; for example, the steps in the development of eye-hand co-ordination.

Reciprocal Interweaving
Gesell created the term “reciprocal interweaving” to describe the developmental process in which two opposite tendencies gradually reach an effective balance. For example, when a child is developing a preference for “handedness”, he or she uses first one hand and then the other, and eventually ends up with a preferred pattern of hand use.
Gesell also applied the concept of reciprocal interweaving to the development of the personality. Gesell asserted that, like motor behaviors, personality also develops as a back and forth pull between two opposite poles. He gave the example of a child going through a cycle of introverted and extroverted tendencies, beginning at age three, until the two tendencies become integrated and balanced. Gesell believed that developmental progress requires temporarily loss of equilibrium, but followed by reintegration at higher levels of organization.

Functional Asymmetry
Gesell found asymmetric development to be common in children. In motor behaviors, this can be seen in an infant’s tonic neck reflex, where babies prefer to lie with their heads turned to one side and extend their arm to which the head is turned and flex the other arm behind the head. It is a reflex where the infant directs vision towards the hand or fist in extension.

Self-Regulation
Gesell believed that even newborns could regulate their own development, and demonstrated that babies were able to determine their own schedules for eating and sleeping.
Gesell also observed self-regulatory mechanisms in personality and overall integration and equilibrium. He interpreted development as a process where behavior advances in a spiral pattern, alternating between equilibrium and disequilibrium as children enter new phases. While tensions arise, these self-regulatory mechanisms ensure that the organism never goes too far in one direction.

Individuality
Gesell gave the impression that all children behave in exactly the same way at each age. However, his position was that the developmental sequences are common to all children, but they vary in their individual rates of growth. He suggested that these growth rates are possibly related to differences in temperament and personality. For example, he speculated that a child who grows slowly might be cautious, even-tempered, and patient, where as a child who develops more quickly might be more outgoing, happy, and quick to react. Gesell believed that a child’s environment should be adjusted to his or her temperament and growth style.

Philosophy of Child rearing:
Gesell believed in a child-centered approach to raising children. He urged parents to recognize the inborn schedule that babies are born with, pointing out that it is the product of over three million years of biological evolution.  He observed that babies appeared to know what they needed and what they were ready to do and learn. He directed parents to look to the children themselves for cues on how to help the child develop as an individual, and to set aside their own expectations of what the baby “ought” to be doing, particularly in the first year.
Gesell developed a series of development schedules summarizing the sequences of development in children. He believed that parents familiar with these sequences will become more patient and understanding during times of disequilibrium and instability knowing that they will eventually disappear.

Gesell’s Theory
Gesell concluded that children go through predictable stages of growth. Some of the key points associated with his theory include:

• Although all children cycle through the same stages or sequences of growth, they don’t enter the stages at the same time. Each child has its own unique pace.
• Pacing is influenced by internal factors, such as physical and mental development, genetics, personality and temperament.
• Pacing is also influenced by external factors, like parenting style, environment, peers, culture and health.
• Children’s development changes due to a feeling of equilibrium, or calm plateau’s of learning, and disequilibrium, an unsettled time of rapid growth and learning.

Cycles of equilibrium and disequilibrium

Gesell’s Spiral
Using the idea that children cycle through periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium, Gesell created a spiral-like pattern to describe how children develop. The cycles describe six stages occurring at half-year intervals, which last longer as a child grows. For example, younger children move through a cycle far more rapidly than older children. Just think of how much a toddler learns about language compared to a young teen.

Gesell identified six stages of growth:
1. Smooth, consolidated (Equilibrium)
2. Breaking up(Disequilibrium)
3. Sorting out- rounded- balanced(Equilibrium)
4. Inwardizing(Disequilibrium)
5. Expansion – Vigorous (Equilibrium)
6. Fitting together(Disequilibrium)

G.Stanley Hall
Granville Stanley Hall (February 1, 1844 and died on April 24, 1924 ) was the first American to receive a Ph.D. in the field of psychology, the founder of the American Journal of Psychology.  Hall believed that between the ages of 14 and 24, we undergo a period of ‘storm and stress’, where we experience intense feelings of ambition and rebellion that will lead to a lot of suffering as we head towards maturation. He emphasized, however, that reaching maturation was not the end, and it’s important to note that even after we mature, we continue to develop.
Hall’s theory of adolescence focused largely on that of males. He argued that young boys’ energies needed to be controlled and properly channeled by society. He advocated, for instance, for more sports to be included in young males’ education, as opposed to excessive academic study. He also said that their education should be focused on fostering emotions of patriotism and service.
Hall held obedience and discipline in high esteem, but claimed that, for adolescents, the most effective way to foster these traits was through the supervised channeling of physical energy. His theories thus gave rise to organizations like the Boy Scouts.
Although Hall said comparatively little about adolescent women, he felt that their education should also be tailored to their cultural gender role, preparing them for the roles of wife and mother.

Hall suggested that:

• Adolescence is an important stage of human development that occurs between the ages of 14-24. (The UN definition of youth is 12-24, similar to Hall’s view.)
• Adolescence is often a period of ‘storm and stress’. Young people are moody, have conflicts with others and often become painfully self-conscious.
• Young people may swing between extremes. They want to be surrounded by friends, then want to be alone. They may want to be good but make bad choices.
• There are important biological and physical changes that occur during adolescence.
• Adolescence is a time when young people may commit crimes and engage in ‘delinquent’ behaviours.
• Young people are risk takers often seeking out new things and excitement.
• During adolescence, young people change from children into rational adults.

References

1. Elizabeth Hurlock, 1974., Personality development, McGraw Hill Inc, New York
2. Norman L. Munn, L.Dodge, Fernord Peter S. Fernold, 1972., Introduction to Psychology, Oxford& IBH publishing Company, New Delhi.
3. http://study.com/academy/lesson/arnold-gesell-biography-theory-of-child-development.html
4. https://blog.udemy.com/child-development-theories/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesell%E2%80%99s_Maturational_Theory

Assignment
Prepare and present a list of examples for concepts of maturation given by Arnold Gesell

NEED THEORY – MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEED THEORY

Maslow proposed a theory of human motivation based on a hierarchy of needs. He used the terms “physiological”, “safety”, “belongingness” and “love”, “esteem”, “self-actualization”, and “self-transcendence” to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid with the largest, most fundamental levels of needs at the bottom and the need for self-actualization and self-transcendence at the top.

The most fundamental and basic four layers of the pyramid contain what Maslow called “deficiency needs” or “d-needs”: esteem, friendship and love, security, and physical needs. If these “deficiency needs” are not met – with the exception of the most fundamental (physiological) need – there may not be a physical indication, but the individual will feel anxious and tense. Maslow’s theory suggests that the most basic level of needs must be met before the individual will strongly desire (or focus motivation upon) the secondary or higher level needs. Maslow also coined the term “metamotivation” to describe the motivation of people who go beyond the scope of the basic needs and strive for constant betterment.
The human mind and brain are complex and have parallel processes running at the same time, thus many different motivations from various levels of Maslow’s hierarchy can occur at the same time. Maslow spoke clearly about these levels and their satisfaction in terms such as “relative”, “general”, and “primarily”. Instead of stating that the individual focuses on a certain need at any given time, Maslow stated that a certain need “dominates” the human organism. Thus Maslow acknowledged the likelihood that the different levels of motivation could occur at any time in the human mind, but he focused on identifying the basic types of motivation and the order in which they should be met.

Physiological needs
Physiological needs are the physical requirements for human survival. If these requirements are not met, the human body cannot function properly and will ultimately fail. Physiological needs are thought to be the most important; they should be met first.
Air, water, and food are metabolic requirements for survival in all animals, including humans. Clothing and shelter provide necessary protection from the elements.The intensity of the human sexual instinct, sexual competition may also shapeup.

Safety needs
Once a person’s physiological needs are relatively satisfied, their safety needs take precedence and dominate behavior. In the absence of physical safety – due to war, natural disaster, family violence, childhood abuse, etc. – people may (re-)experience post-traumatic stress disorder .  In the absence of economic safety – due to economic crisis and lack of work opportunities – these safety needs manifest themselves. This level is more likely to be found in children as they generally have a greater need to feel safe.

Safety and Security needs include:

• Personal security
• Financial security
• Health and well-being
• Safety net against accidents/illness and their adverse impacts

Love and belonging
After physiological and safety needs are fulfilled, the third level of human needs is interpersonal and involves feelings of belongingness. This need is especially strong in childhood, deficiencies within this level of Maslow’s hierarchy – due to hospitalism, neglect, shunning, ostracism, etc. – can adversely affect the individual’s ability to form and maintain emotionally significant relationships in general, such as:

• Friendship
• Intimacy
• Family

According to Maslow, humans need to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance among their social groups, regardless whether these groups are large or small. For example, some large social groups may include clubs, co-workers, religious groups, professional organizations, sports teams, and gangs. Some examples of small social connections include family members, intimate partners, mentors, colleagues, and confidants. Humans need to love and be loved – both sexually and non-sexually – by others. Many people become susceptible to loneliness, social anxiety, and clinical depression in the absence of this love or belonging element. This need for belonging may overcome the physiological and security needs, depending on the strength of the peer pressure.

Esteem
All humans have a need to feel respected; this includes the need to have self-esteem and self-respect. Esteem presents the typical human desire to be accepted and valued by others. People often engage in a profession or hobby to gain recognition. These activities give the person a sense of contribution or value. Low self-esteem or an inferiority complex may result from imbalances during this level in the hierarchy. People with low self-esteem often need respect from others; they may feel the need to seek fame or glory. However, fame or glory will not help the person to build their self-esteem until they accept who they are internally. Psychological imbalances such as depression can hinder the person from obtaining a higher level of self-esteem or self-respect.

Most people have a need for stable self-respect and self-esteem. Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs: a “lower” version and a “higher” version. The “lower” version of esteem is the need for respect from others. This may include a need for status, recognition, fame, prestige, and attention. The “higher” version manifests itself as the need for self-respect. For example, the person may have a need for strength, competence, mastery, self-confidence, independence, and freedom. This “higher” version takes precedence over the “lower” version because it relies on an inner competence established through experience. Deprivation of these needs may lead to an inferiority complex, weakness, and helplessness.
Maslow states that while he originally thought the needs of humans had strict guidelines, the “hierarchies are interrelated rather than sharply separated”. This means that esteem and the subsequent levels are not strictly separated; instead, the levels are closely related.

Self-actualization
“What a man can be, he must be”. This quotation forms the basis of the perceived need for self-actualization. This level of need refers to what a person’s full potential is and the realization of that potential. Maslow describes this level as the desire to accomplish everything that one can, to become the most that one can be. Individuals may perceive or focus on this need very specifically. For example, one individual may have the strong desire to become an ideal parent. In another, the desire may be expressed athletically. For others, it may be expressed in paintings, pictures, or inventions.  As previously mentioned, Maslow believed that to understand this level of need, the person must not only achieve the previous needs, but master them.

Self-transcendence (Go beyond Limit or Surpass something)
In his later years, Maslow explored a further dimension of needs, while criticizing his own vision on self-actualization. The self only finds its actualization in giving itself to some higher goal outside oneself, in altruism and spirituality.

References

1. Hamchek, D.E. 1987., Encounters with the self, 3rd edition, Holt Rinehart &Winston Inc, New York.
2. Boring E.G. Long Field H.S. Weld H.P., 1963, Foundations of Psychology, Asia Publishing House, New Delhi.
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow’s_hierarchy_of_needs

Assignment
Give detailed list of examples for each of the need given in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

ECOLOGICAL THEORY – BRONFENBRENNER

Ecological theory emphasizes the environmental factors . The ecological theory with important implications for understanding life span development was created by Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917-2005).

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory emphasises that the deelopment reflects the influence of several environmental systems. The theory identifies 5 environmental systems: Microsystem, Mesosystem, Exosystem, Macrosystem and Chronosystem.

MICROSYSTEM:
It is the setting in which the individual lives. The microsystem is the system closest to the person and the one in which they have direct contact, and directly impact the child’s development. They include –  family, school, peers, religious institutions, neighborhood. Relationships in a microsystem are bi-directional. In other words, your reactions to the people in your microsystem will affect how they treat you in return. This is the most influential level of the ecological systems theory.

MESOSYSTEM:
The next level of ecological systems theory is the mesosystem. The mesosystem consists of the interactions or connections between the different parts of a person’s microsystem. These interactions have an indirect impact on the individual. For example, the relation of family experiences to school experiences; school experiences to religious experiences and family experiences to peer experiences. Children whose parents have rejected them may have difficulty developing positive relations with teachers. If parents take an active role in the school, such as attending parent/teacher conferences and volunteering in the classroom. This has a positive impact on the development because the different elements of his microsystem are working together. The development could be affected in a negative way if the different elements of the microsystem were working against one another.

EXOSYSTEM:
The exosystem refers to a setting that does not involve the person as an active participant, but still affects them. An example would be a child being affected by a parent receiving a promotion at work or losing their job or the type of work. Another example – exosystem would be father’s workplace. Alex’s father is in the Navy. This often takes him away from the family, and Alex sometimes does not see his father for months at a time. This situation impacts Alex, and he becomes anxious when his father leaves. Alex’s anxiety has an effect on his development in other areas, even though he has no interaction with his father’s work .

MACROSYSTEM:
The fourth level of ecological systems theory is the microsystem. The microsystem encompasses the cultural environment in which the person lives and all other systems that affect them. Examples could include the economy, cultural values, and political systems. The macro system can have either a positive or a negative effect on a person’s development. Another example, Alex is a military child. Because of this, he has already moved three times and lived in two different countries by the age of five. Alex is also influenced by the values of the military community that he belongs to.

CHRONOSYSTEM:
The patterning of environmental events and transitions over the life course, as well as socio-historical circumstances. For example, divorces are one transition. Researchers have found that the negative effects of divorce on children often peak in the first year after the divorce. By two years after the divorce, family interaction is less chaotic and more stable. An example of socio-historical circumstances is the increase in opportunities for women to pursue a career

Bronfenbrenner added biological influences to his theory describing it as a bioecological theory.

References

1. Santrock, J. (2011). Life span development. 13thed. McGraw Hill Education India Pvt.Ltd..

Assignment
Give one example for each of the systems components and how will show their effect on growth and development of the child

ETHOLOGICAL THEORY – LORENZ

Ethology stresses that behaviour is strongly influenced by biology, is tied to evolution, and is characterized by critical or sensitive periods.
These are specific time frames during which, according to ethologists, the presence or absence of certain experiences has a long lasting influence on individuals.

Konrad Lorenz helped bring ethology to prominence. He studied the behaviour of greylag geese, which will follow their mother as soon as they hatch. Lorenz separated the eggs laid by the goose into 2 groups. One group he returned to the goose to be hatched by her. The other group was hatched in an incubator. The goslings in the first group performed as predicted. They follow their mother as soon as they hatched. However, those in the second group, which saw Lorenz when they first hatched, followed him everywhere, as though he were their mother. Lorenz marked the goslings and then placed both groups under the box. Mother goose and ‘mother’ Lorenz stoodaside as the box lifted. Each group of goslings went directly to its ‘mother’. Lorenz called this process imprinting, the rapid, innate learning that involves attachment to the first moving object seen.
According to Lorenz view, imprinting needs to take place at a certain, very early time in the life of the animal, or else it will not take place. This point in time is called a critical period. A related concept is that of a sensitive period, and an example of this is the time during infancy, when attachment (according to Bowlby) should occur in order to promote optimal development of social relationships.

Evolutionary theory
According to evolutionary theory, individuals live long enough to reproduce and pass on their characteristics. Evolution favored longevity.

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution – Natural Selection
Charles Darwin simply brought something new to the old philosophy — a plausible mechanism called “natural selection.” Natural selection acts to preserve and accumulate minor advantageous genetic mutations. Suppose a member of a species developed a functional advantage (it grew wings and learned to fly). Its offspring would inherit that advantage and pass it on to their offspring. The inferior (disadvantaged) members of the same species would gradually die out, leaving only the superior (advantaged) members of the species. Natural selection is the preservation of a functional advantage that enables a species to compete better in the wild. Natural selection is the naturalistic equivalent to domestic breeding. Over the centuries, human breeders have produced dramatic changes in domestic animal populations by selecting individuals to breed. Breeders eliminate undesirable traits gradually over time. Similarly, natural selection eliminates inferior species gradually over time.

Evolutionary Theory appears to have seven distinct and interrelated phases, set by Science in the following order:
Cosmic Evolution. The development of space, time, matter and energy from nothing.
Stellar Evolution. The development of complex stars from the chaotic first elements.
Chemical Evolution. The development of all chemical elements from an original two.
Planetary Evolution. The development of planetary systems from swirling elements.
Organic Evolution. The development of organic life from inorganic matter (a rock).
Macro-Evolution. The development of one kind of life from a totally different kind of life.
Micro-Evolution. The development of variations within the same kind of life.

References

1. Santrock, J. (2011). Life span development. 13th ed. McGraw Hill Education India Pvt.Ltd..
2. http://www.darwins-theory-of-evolution.com/
3. http://www.allaboutthejourney.org/theory-of-evolution.htm

Assignment
Prepare a detailed notes with examples on Ethological Theory by Lorenz

COGNITIVE THEORY – JEAN PIAGET

Jean Piaget(1896 – 1980) is a famous Swiss developmental psychologist. He states that children actively construct their understanding of the world and go through 4 stages of cognitive development. According to him 2 processes underlie the cognitive construction of the world – Organization and Adaptation. We organize our experiences, for eg. we separate important ideas from less important ideas. And we connect one idea to another. In addition to organizing we adjust to the new environmental demands.

Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development are:

1. The sensorimotor stage – Birth to 2 years
2. The pre operational stage – 2 – 7 years
3. The concrete operational stage – 7 -11 years
4. The formal operational stage – 11 – 15 years

1. The sensorimotor stage – Birth to 2 years
In this stage the infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences.

Object Permanence:
According to Piaget, developing object permanence is one of the most important accomplishments at the sensorimotor stage of development. Object permanence is a child’s understanding that objects continue to exist even though they cannot be seen or heard.
Imagine a game of peek-a-boo, for example.
A very young infant will believe that the other person or object has actually vanished and will act shocked or startled when the object reappears. Older infants who understand object permanence will realize that the person or object continues to exist even when unseen.

Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage:
The sensorimotor stage can be divided into six separate sub-stages that are characterized by the development of a new skill.

Reflexes (0-1 month):
During this sub stage, the child understands the environment purely through inborn reflexes such as sucking and looking.

Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months):
This substage involves coordinating sensation and new schemas. For example, a child may suck his or her thumb by accident and then later intentionally repeat the action. These actions are repeated because the infant finds them pleasurable.

Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months):
During this substage, the child becomes more focused on the world and begins to intentionally repeat an action in order to trigger a response in the environment. For example, a child will purposefully pick up a toy in order to put it in his or her mouth.

Coordination of Reactions (8-12 months):
During this sub stage, the child starts to show clearly intentional actions. The child may also combine schemas in order to achieve a desired effect. Children begin exploring the environment around them and will often imitate the observed behavior of others. The understanding of objects also begins during this time and children begin to recognize certain objects as having specific qualities. For example, a child might realize that a rattle will make a sound when shaken.

Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months):
Children begin a period of trial-and-error experimentation during the fifth substage. For example, a child may try out different sounds or actions as a way of getting attention from a caregiver.

Early Representational Thought (18-24 months):
Children begin to develop symbols to represent events or objects in the world in the final sensorimotor substage. During this time, children begin to move towards understanding the world through mental operations rather than purely through actions.

2. The pre operational stage – 2 – 7 years
This is the 2nd stage and it lasts from 2 – 7 years of age. This period is characterized by the development of language. Children begin to go beyond simply connecting sensory information with physical action and represent the world with words, images and drawings. According to Piaget, preschool children still lack the ability to perform what he calls operations. Which are internalized mental actions that allow children to do mentally what they previously could only do physically. For eg. If you imagine putting two sticks together to see whether they would be as long as another stick, without actually moving the sticks, you are performing a concrete operation. 

3. The Concrete Operational Stage – 7 – 11 years
This is the 3rd Piagetian stage. In this stage children can perform operations that involve objects and they can reason logically when the reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples. For instance, concrete operational thinkers cannot imagine the steps necessary to complete an algebraic equation, which is tooabstract for thinking at this stage of development.

4. The Formal Operational Stage – 11-15 years
This appears between the ages of 11 and 15 and continues through adulthood. In this 4th stage, the individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in abstract and more logical terms. In solving problems, they become more systematic, developing hypotheses about why something is happening the way it is and then testing these hypotheses.

References

1. Santrock, John W. (2008). A topical approach to life-span development (4 ed.). New York City: McGraw-Hill.
2. Santrock.J.W.(2011). Life span development. 13 ed. Mc.Graw Hill Education Pvt.Ltd. New Delhi

Assignment
Prepare a list of examples along with visuals for all the sub stages of Piaget’s cognitive theory

SOCIAL THEORIES – JOHN BOWLBY’S ATTACHMENT THEORY

Attachment is a close emotional bond between 2 people.
Attachment theory is a psychological model that attempts to describe the dynamics of long-term interpersonal relationships between humans. It addresses how human beings respond within.
John Bowlby stresses the importance of attachment in the first year of life and the responsiveness of the care giver. Both infants and their caregivers are biologically predisposed to form attachments. He argues that the new born is biologically equipped to elicit attachment behaviour. The baby cries, clings, coos, and smiles. Later the infant crawls, walks and follows the mother. The immediate result is to keep the primary caregiver nearby, the long-term effect is to increase the infant’s chances of survival.
Attachment does not emerge suddenly but rather develops in a series of phases, moving from a baby’s general preference for human beings to a partnerships with primary caregivers. Following are 4 such phases based on Bowlby’s conceptualization of attachment.

• Phase 1: From birth to 2 months. Infants instinctively direct their attachment to human figures. Strangers, siblings and parents are equally likely to elicit smiling or crying from the infant.
• Phase 2: From 2 to 7 months. Attachment becomes focused on one figure, usually the primary caregiver, as the baby gradually learns to distinguish familiar from unfamiliar people.
• Phase 3: From 7 to 24 months. Specific attachments develop. With increased locomotor skills, babies actively seek contact with regular caregivers such as mother or father.
• Phase 4: From 24 months onwards. Children become aware of others feelings, goals and plans and begin to take these into account in forming their own actions.

Bowlby argued that the infants develop an internal working model of attachment , a simple mental model of the caregiver, Their relationship and the self as deserving of nurturant care. The infant’s internal working model of attachment with the caregiver influences the infant’s and later the child’s subsequent responses to other people. The internal model of attachment also has played a pivotal role in the discovery of links between attachment and subsequent emotional understanding, conscience development and self concept.

Main points of Bowlby’s theory:

1. A child has an innate (inborn) need to attach to one main attachment figure(ie. monotropy).
2. A child should receive the continuous care of this single most important figure dfor approximately the first 2 years of life.
3. The long term consequences of maternal deprivation might include the following- delinquency, reduced intelligence, increased aggression, depression, affectionless psychopathy.
4. Short term separation from an attachment figure leads to distress( the PDD model. The 3 progressive stages for distress are- Protest, Despair and Detatchment.
5. The child’s attachment relationship with their primary caregiver leads to the development of an internal working model.

This internal working model is a cognitive framework comprising mental representations for understanding the world, self and others.

It is this mental representation that guides future social and emotional behaviour as the child’s internal working model guides their responsiveness to others in general.

Social Theory – Vygotsky’s socio cultural theory

Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934)  a Russian psychologist emphasized the influence of social interaction on development. Sociocultural theory focuses not only how adults and peers influence individual learning, but also on how cultural beliefs and attitudes impact on how instruction and learning take place.
According to Vygotsky, children are born with basic biological constraints on their minds. Each culture, however, provides what he referred to as ‘tools of intellectual adaptation.’ These tools allow children to use their basic mental abilities in a way that is adaptive to the culture in which they live.
For example, while one culture might emphasize memory strategies such as note-taking, other cultures might utilize tools like reminders or rote memorization.
Vygotsky believed everything is learned on two levels. First, through interaction with others, and then integrated into the individual’s mental structure. Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (inter psychological) and then inside the child (intra psychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.
A second aspect of Vygotsky’s theory is the idea that the potential for cognitive development is limited to a “zone of proximal development” (ZPD). It is a concept introduced by Vygotsky. The zone of proximal development is often abbreviated as ZPD. It is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help. Vygotsky stated that a child follows an adult’s example and gradually develops the ability to do certain tasks without help.

A teacher or more experienced peer is able to provide the learner with “scaffolding” to support the student’s evolving understanding of knowledge domains or development of complex skills. Collaborative learning, discourse, modelling, and scaffolding are strategies for supporting the intellectual knowledge and skills of learners and facilitating intentional learning.
The concept of the ZPD is widely used to study children’s mental development as it relates to education. The ZPD concept is seen as a scaffolding, a structure of “support points” for performing an action. This refers to the help or guidance received from an adult or more competent peer. Scaffolding is a process through which a teacher or a more competent peer helps the student in his or her ZPD as necessary and tapers off this aid as it becomes unnecessary, much as a scaffold is removed from a building after construction is completed. “Scaffolding is the way the adult guides the child’s learning via focused questions and positive interactions permitting  the child to work within the ZPD.
An example of scaffolding is learning to drive. Parents and driving instructors guide driving students along the way by showing them the mechanics of how the car operates, the correct hand positions on the steering wheel, the technique of scanning the roadway, etc. As the student progresses, less and less instruction is needed, until they are ready to drive on their own.
Teachers should assign tasks that students cannot do on their own, but which they can do with assistance; they should provide just enough assistance so that students learn to complete the tasks independently and then provide an environment that enables students to do harder tasks than would otherwise be possible.

References

1. Norman L. Munn, L.Dodge, Fernord Peter S. Fernold, 1972., Introduction to Psychology, Oxford& IBH publishing Company, New Delhi.
2. Boring E.G. Long Field H.S. Weld H.P., 1963, Foundations of Psychology, Asia Publishing House, New Delhi.
3. Gardner, Howard (1983; 1993) Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences, New York: Basic Books

Assignment

1. Collect and present the information on stages of attachment theory.
2. Define Zone of Proximal Development with examples

SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY BY BANDURA

Albert Bandura is an American leading architect. Bandura’s social learning theory is based on his idea that individuals are greatly influenced by other people.  The broad way of learning is accomplished by means of Observation, Imitation and Modeling. Consider how children often mimic the behaviours of superheroes from movies and television.
The  key tenets or views of social learning theory are as follows:

1. Learning is not purely behavioral; rather, it is a cognitiveprocess that takes place in a social context.
2. Learning can occur by observing a behavior and by observing the consequences of the behavior (vicarious reinforcement – learning by watching the consequences to others of their behaviour).
3. Learning involves observation, extraction of information from those observations, and making decisions about the performance of the behavior (observational learning or modeling). Thus, learning can occur without an observable change in behavior.
4. Reinforcement plays a role in learning but is not entirely responsible for learning.
5. The learner is not a passive recipient of information. Cognition, environment, and behavior all mutually influence each other (reciprocal determinism).

Social learning theory draws heavily on the concept of modeling, or learning by observing a behavior. Bandura outlined three types of modeling stimuli:

• Live model
  in which an actual person is demonstrating the desired behavior

Verbal instruction
in which an individual describes the desired behavior in detail and instructs the participant in how to engage in the behavior

Symbolic
in which modeling occurs by means of the media, including movies, television, Internet, literature, and radio. Stimuli can be either real or fictional characters.

The Elements of Observational Learning are:

• Attention
  In order to learn, observers must pay attention to the modeled behavior. Attention is impacted by characteristics of the observer (e.g., perceptual abilities, cognitive abilities, arousal, past performance) and characteristics of the behavior or event (e.g., relevance, novelty, affective valence, and functional value).
• Retention
  In order to reproduce an observed behavior, observers must be able to remember features of the behavior. Again, this process is influenced by observer characteristics (cognitive capabilities, cognitive rehearsal) and event characteristics (complexity).
• Reproduction
  To reproduce a behavior, the observer must organize responses in accordance with the model. Observer characteristics affecting reproduction include physical and cognitive capabilities and previous performance.
• Reinforcement and Motivation
  The decision to reproduce (or refrain from reproducing) an observed behavior is dependent on the motivations and expectations or incentives of the observer, including anticipated consequences and internal standards.

References

1. Fabes.R and Martin.C.R. 2003. Exploring Child Development. 2nd ed. Allyn and Bacon.USA.
2. Schiamberg.L.B. 1985. Human Development. 2nd Mc Millan Publishing Company,New York.
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_learning_theory

Assignment
Present the key concepts of social learning theory with examples

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY – SIGMUND FREUD

Sigmund Freud (6May 1856-23Sep 1939) is considered to be the founder of the psychodynamic approach to psychology. He believed that mind is responsible for both conscious and unconscious decisions based on drives and forces. Freud also believed that people could be cured by making conscious their unconscious thoughts and motivations, thus gaining “insight”. Freud believed that personality is made up of 3 major systems – the Id, the Ego and the Superego.

The Id: It is the original system of personality. Id consists of everything psychological that is inherited and that is present at birth, including the instincts. Id functions in such a manner as to discharge the tension immediately and return the organism to a comfortably constant and low energy level. This principle of tension reduction by which the id operates is called the pleasure principle.

The Ego: Ego is responsible for creating balance between pleasure and pain. The ego is the person’s self composed of unconscious desires. Ego is said to obey the reality principle and to operate by means of the secondary process. The reality principle suspends the pleasure principle temporarily, but the pleasure principle is eventually served when the needed object is found and the tension is thereby reduced. Ego is the organized portion of the id. It has no existence apart from the id, and it never becomes a completely independent of the id. Its principal role is to mediate between the instinctual requirements of the organism and the conditions of the surrounding environment.

The Superego: Superego is the moral arm of personality. It represents the ideal rather than the real and strives for perfection rather than pleasure. Its main concern is to decide whether something is right or wrong. Superego develops in response to the rewards and punishments meted out by the parents. There are 2 subsystems of the superego – conscience and ego-ideal. Whatever the parent say is improper and punish the child for doing it tends to become incorporated as the conscience, whatever parent approve of and reward the child for doing tends to become incorporated into its ego-ideal. The mechanism by which this incorporation takes place is called introjections (identification/introspection). Superego is inclined to oppose both the id and the ego and make the world over its own image.
These 3 are merely names for various psychological processes that obey different system principles. The personality normally functions as a whole rather than 3 separate segments. In a very general way, the id may be 5hought of as the biological component of personality, the ego as the psychological component and the superego as the social component.

Psychosexual theory of Freud
Freud’s theory of psychosexual development is represented among 5 stages. According to Freud each stage occurs within a specific time frame of one’s life. If one becomes fixated in any of the focus.

Oral Stage: (Birth to 18 months)
It is a child seeking pleasure through mouth ie, sucking. Oral stimulation is crucial during this stage; if the infants needs are not met during this time frame he or she will be fixated in the oral stage. Fixation in this stage can lead to adult habits such as thumb-sucking, overeating, nail-biting. Personality traits can also develop during adulthood that are linked to oral fixation.

Anal Stage: (18 months to 3 years)
During this stage the infants pleasure seeking centers are located in the bowels and bladder. Parents stress toilet training and bowel control during this time. Fixation in the anal stage can lead to anal retention or anal expulsion. Anal retentive characteristics include being overly neat, precise and orderly when being anal expulsive involves being disorganized, messy and distructiveness, tempertantrums.

Phallic Stage: (3-6years)
This is the third stage of psychosexual development.  It begins at 3 years and ends when the child reaches 6 years. This stage focuses on the genitals as pleasure seeking areas of the body. Boys in this stage experience the Oedipus complex while girls experience the Electra complex. In both cases the child develops incestuous feelings for the parent of the opposite sex. Or a sexual catharsis for the parent of the opposite sex and a hostile catharsis for the parent of the same sex. Fixation in the phallic stage has different personality traits depending on one’s gender. Males may take great pride in their masculinity and their sexuality while women may become flirtatious(enticing or playful) and promiscuous(immoral). In both instances, these personality traits are  sign of low self esteem and self worth.

Latency Stage (6 to 11 years)
The fourth stage is the latency stage which begins at the age of 6 and continues until the age of 11. During this stage there is no pleasure seeking region of the body; instead all sexual feelings are repressed(withdrawn). Thus, children are able top develop social skills, and find comfort through peer and family interaction.

Genital Stage (11 to 18 years)
The final stage of psychosexual development is the genital stage. This stage commences at the age of 11, lasts through puberty, and ends when one reaches adulthood at the age of 18. The onset of puberty reflects a strong interest from one person to another of the opposite sex. If one does not experience fixation(fascination/ interest) in any of the psychosexual stages, once he or she has reached the genital stage he or she will grow into a well balanced human being.

References

1. B.R. Bugulski, 1960., An Introduction to Principles of Psychology, The Bobbs-Manin Company Inc, New York

Assignment

1. Define what are the psychosexual stages of Fraud and present them with examples

PSYCHO SOCIAL THEORY – ERIK ERIKSON

According to Erikson’s theory, personality development goes through a series of 8 stages. Associated with each stage is a psych-social crisis that the individual either successfully resolves or fails to resolve. The first 4 stages occur during infancy and childhood, the 5th stage during adolescence and the last 3 stages during adult years up to old age. Erikson theory describes the impact of social experience across the whole life span.
In each stage of the, the person confronts and hopefully masters new challenges. Each stage builds upon the successful completion of earlier stages. If the challenges of stages are not successfully completed it may be expected to reappear as a problem in the future.

The 8 stages in his theory are:

1. Trust vs Mistrust (oral sensory, Birth to 2 years)
2. Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt(muscular-anal, 2- 4years)
3. Initiative vs Guilt(locomotor-genital, preschool, 4 – 5 years)
4. Competence: Industry vs Inferiority(Latency,5 – 12 years)
5. Fidelity: Identity vs Role confusion(adolescence, 13 – 19 years)
6. Love: Intimacy vs Isolation(young adulthood, 20 – 24, or 20 – 39 years)
7. Care: Generativity vs Stagnation(middle adulthood, 25 – 64, or 40 – 64 years)
8. Wisdom: Ego integrity vs Despair(late adulthood, 65 to death)

1. Trust vs Mistrust (oral sensory, Birth to 2 years)
The first stage of Erikson’s theory centres around the infant’s basic needs being met by the parents and this interaction leading to trust or mistrust. Trust as defined by Erikson is “an essential truthfulness of others as well as a fundamental sense of one’s own trustworthiness. The infant depends on parents especially the mother for sustenance and comfort. A child’s first trust is always with the parent or the caregiver. If the parents expose the child to warmth, regularity, affection the infant’s view of the world will be trust. If parents fail to provide a secure environment and to meet the child’s basic needs; a sense of mistrust result. Development of mistrust can lead to feelings of frustration, suspicion, withdrawal and a lack of confidence.

2. Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt(muscular-anal, 2- 4years)
During this age the child gains control over eliminative functions and motor abilities, they begin to explore their surroundings. The parent’s patience and encouragement helps foster autonomy in the child. Children at this age like to explore the world around them and they are constantly learning about their environment.
At this age the children develop their first interests. For eg. A child who enjoys music may like to play with radio/i-pod, musical instruments. Highly restrictive parents, however, are more likely to instil in the child a sense of doubt and reluctance to attempt new challenges. As they gain increased muscular coordination and mobility, toddlers become capable of satisfying some of their own needs. They begin to feed themselves, wash and dress themselves and use the washroom.
If the care givers encourage self sufficient behaviour, toddlers develop a sense of autonomy – a sense of being able to handle many problems on their own. But if care givers demand too much, ridicule early attempts at self-sufficiency, children may instead develop shame and doubt about their ability to handle problems.

3. Initiative vs Guilt (locomotor-genital, preschool, 4 – 5 years)
Initiative adds to autonomy the quality of undertaking, planning and attacking a task for the sake of just being active and on the move. The child is learning to master the world around them, learning basic skills and principles of physics. Eg. Things fall down ,not up; Round things roll; learn to count, tie, speak with ease. At this stage the child wants to begin and complete their own actions for a purpose. Gilt is a confusing new emotion. They may feel guilty when this initiative does not produce desired results. Preschoolers face the challenge of initiative vs guilt. During this stage the child learns to take initiative and prepare for goal achievement, risk taking behaviours and roles. Eg. Crossing the road etc. By so doing the child may also develop negative behaviours. These are a result, developing a sense of frustration for not being able to achieve a goal as planned and may engage in aggressive behaviours such as throwing objects, hitting or yelling etc.
If parents, teachers encourage and support children’s efforts and help them make realistic choices, children develop initiative-independence in planning and undertaking activities. Instead if adults discourage the pursuit of independence activities and dismiss them as silly and bothersome, children develop guilt about their needs and desires.

4. Competence : Industry vs Inferiority( Latency, 5-12 years)
Children at this age are becoming more aware of themselves as individuals. They work hard at “being responsible, being good and doing it right”. At this stage, children are eager to learn and accomplish more complex skills; reading, writing, etc. Children might express their independence by talking back and being disobedient and rebellious.

Erikson viewed the elementary school, years as critical for the development of self confidence. If children are encouraged to make and do things and are praised for their accomplishments, they begin to demonstrate industry by being diligent(hard work), persevering at tasks until completed, and putting work before pleasure. If instead children are ridiculed or punished for their efforts or if they find they are incapable of meeting their teachers’ and parents’ expectations, they develop the feeling of inferiority about their capabilities. At this age children start recognizing their special talents and discover their interests. They may begin to choose to do more activities to pursue that interest, such as joining a band if they are interested in music, a sport if they know they have athletic ability. If not allowed to discover their own talents in their own time, tbey will develop a sense of lack of motivation, low self-esteem and lethargy. They may become “couch potatoes” if they are not allowed to develop interests.

5. Fidelity: Identity vs. Role confusion (adolescence, 13-19 years)
Erikson proposed that most adolescents achieve a sense of identity regarding who they are and where their lives are headed. Erikson coined the term “Identity Crisis” as the identity in youth is different. This turning point in human development seems to be the reconciliation between “the person one has come to be” and “the person society expects one to be”. This emerging sense of self will be established by forging past experiences with anticipations of the future. Of all the 8 stages, this 5^th stage corresponds to the “Crossroads”.
What is unique about this stage of Identity is that it is special sort of synthesis of earlier stages and a special sort of anticipation of later ones.
The problem of adolescence is one of role confusion – a reluctance to commit which may haunt a person into his mature years. There may be conflicts with adults over educational choices, career choices etc. According to Erikson, when an adolescent has balanced both perspectives of “What Have I got?” and “What am I going to do withit?” he or she has established their identity.

6. Love: Intimacy vs. Isolation(Young adulthood, 20-24 or 20-39 years)
At the start of this age identity vs. Role confusion is coming to an end. Young adults are still eager to blend their identities with friends. Erikson believes we are sometimes isolated due to intimacy. We are afraid of rejection such as being turned down or our partners may break up with us.
Once people have established their identities they are easy to make long term commitments to others. They become capable of forming intimate, reciprocal relationships (eg. Through c;ose friendships or marriage) and willingly make the sacrifices and compromises that such relationships require. If people cannot form these intimate relationships a sense of isolation may result; arousing feelings of darkness and anguish.

7. Care: Generativity vs. Stagnation ( Middle adulthood, 25-64 or 40-64 years)
Generativity is the concern of guiding the next generation. Socially-valued work and disciplines are expressions of generativity. The adult stage of generativity has broad application to family, relationships, work and society. In contrast, a person who is self centered and unable to help society move forward develops a feeling of stagnation – dissatisfaction with the relative lack of productivity.

8. Wisdom: Ego Integrity vs. Despair (Late adulthood, 65-death)
As age increases and one becomes senior citizens they tend to slow down on productivity and explore life as a retired person. It is during this time that they contemplate accomplishments and are able to develop integrity as leading a successful life. If they see life as unproductive, or feel that they did not accomplish their life goals, they become dissatisfied with life and develop despair, often leading to depression and hopelessness.
The final developmental task is retrospection: people look back on their lives and accomplishments. They develop feelings of contentment and integrity if they believe that they have led a happy, productive life. They may instead develop a sense of despair if they look back on a life of disappointments and unachieved goals. According to Erikson, Ego integrity is viewed as the key to harmonious personality development. Ego quality that emerges from a positive resolution is wisdom. Despair is the result of teh negative resolution or lack of resolution of the final life crisis. This negative resolution manifests itself as a fear of death, a sense that is too short and depression.

 References

1. Hamchek D.E. 1987., Encounters with the self, 3^rd edition, Holt Rinehart &Winston Inc, New York.

Assignment

1. Explain each stage of Erik Erikson and wWrite live examples for each stage

SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS IN RESEARCH WITH HUMAN SUBJECTS

1. Informed consent:
Individuals should be informed about the research and provide their voluntary consent before the actual study. All participants must know what their research participation will involve and what risks might develop. Even after informed consent is given, participants must retain the right to withdraw from the study at any time for any reason.

2. Confidentiality:
Researchers are responsible for keeping all of the data they gather on individuals completely confidential and when possible, completely anonymous.

3. Debriefying:
After the study has been completed, participants should be informed of its purpose and the methods that were used. In most cases, the experimenter also can inform participants in a general manner beforehand about the purpose of the research without leading participants to behave in a way they think that the experimenter is expecting.

4. Deception: (Misleading)

Telling the participants beforehand what the research study is about substantially alters the participant’sbehaviour and invalidates the researchers data. In all cases of deception, however, the psychologist must ensure that the deception will not harm the participants and that the participants will be debriefed

5. Respect for enrolled subjects:
Research participants or the subjects should have their privacy protected, the opportunity to withdraw, and their well-being monitored. The concept of trust is the cornerstone of research. The dignity and welfare of individuals who participate in research should be a central concern of everyone involved in the research project.

6. Additional care with vulnerable subjects:
Additional care must be taken with these special classes of research subjects who are potentially more vulnerable to risks than the rest of the community:

• Children
• Prisoners
• Pregnant Women
• Mentally Disabled Persons
• Economically Disadvantage Persons
• Educationally Disadvantaged Persons etc.

 7. Minimizing Bias:
The goal of reducing or minimizing bias isn’t to make everyone the same but to make sure that questions are thoughtfully posed and delivered in a way that allows respondents to reveal their true feelings without distortions.

There should not be gender bias or cultural bias or ethnic bias.

To minimize culture bias, researchers must move toward cultural relativism by showing unconditional positive regard and being cognizant of their own cultural assumptions.

Bias in research can be minimized if the researcher knows what to look for and how to manage it.

References

1. Santrock.J.W.(2011). Life span development. 13 ed. Mc.Graw Hill Education Pvt.Ltd. New Delhi.
2. http://www.quirks.com/articles/9-types-of-research-bias-and-how-to-avoid-them

Assignment

1. Collect and present information on why we need to consider human subjects are special during research

ETHICAL ISSUES IN HUMAN RESEARCH

Research in human development can potentially make enormous contributions to advancing human welfare and accomplishing humanitarian goals. Some of the basic ethical issues are:
1. Right to privacy: Information collected from children for research should never be used to their disadvantage. Identification of individual persons is essential to the research as in longitudinal studies where the same person will be studied over a period of time, elaborate precautions are essential to safeguard confidentiality.

2. Right to the truth: Some experiments depend on deception (fraud, dishonest) of subjects. Children are told that they are testing out a new game, when they are actually being tested on their reactions to success or failure. Is it legitimate to deceive subjects about the real purpose of an experiment? If such deception is practiced, how can people’s right to the truth and to their own integrity be protected? Does telling the subjects the truth after the experiment undo the lie?

3. Right to informed consent: Usually the consent of children to be part of scientific experiments is not considered. We have to rely on parents’ for their child’s well being or on school personnel’s judgment in cases where students are permitted to participate in research programmes. Investigators do not have to justify their procedures to the children. How much do adults have to know about an experiment before the consent they give can be considered “informed”? When the true purpose of an experiment is withheld from a subject, can the consent he or she gives be considered informed?

4. Right to self-esteem: Many researchers try to discover at what point people become capable of certain skills or certain types of reasoning. They study children who are known to be too young to achieve the ability under the study. Other investigators want to find out the limits of a child’s abilities and so they continue to pose problems until she or he is unable to answer. Built into the design of all such studies is the certainty of failure. How do these feelings of failure affect individual children?

5. Fetal research: With the legalization of abortion, research on fetuses has explained enormously, along with a host of perplexing (confusing) ethical questions, including the elemental decision about the basic nature of the fetus. If it is a part of mother’s body, she can give permission for it to be used for research purposes. If it is a dying person, the much more stringent restrictions must apply to any research involving aborted fetuses.

Some fetal experiments involve injecting a drug into a pregnant woman who has already decided to have an abortion, to determine the drug’s effect on the fetus. Other experiments measure fetal patterns of swallowing, breathing, eliminating and sleeping – measures that may indicate fetal maturity and viability.

We are now moving into a time in which critical choices are going to have to be faced and made. We share a strong presumption that experiments on dying person are wrong. And that human life is not to be treated casually.

6. Social concerns: The vast amount of research that has been carried out among children of minority groups and among socially disadvantaged children involves a different kind of danger. If we consistently find that children from certain subcultures do not achieve intellectually as well as other children – and if this research is published – what is the ultimate result?
Developmentalists do not want to harm the subjects who help them learn. Yet severe restrictions would put a half to many current studies and would limit our understanding of people.
It is up to everyone in the field of human development to accept the responsibility to t6ry to do good and at the very least to do no harm.

References

1. Papalia, D.E. and Olds, SW. (1978). Human development.  McGraw Hill. Kogakusha,Ltd.

Assignment

1. Explain why ethical issues are important in conducting human research

TRENDS AND CHALLENGES IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

1. From Global to Discrete Response Systems:
One common trend in human development is the transition from global system to discrete systems. A global response is a generalised one, such as the cry of a new born infant, that can have many different meanings. A discrete response is a highly specific behavior that can be distinguished from other behaviours in terms of its usefulness. An infant’s crying, which begins as global behavior soon becomes differentiated into sounds that have specific meanings, such as hunger, discomfort, or pain. Other example, Young child first propel themselves by using gross pushing movements, these eventually become more refined into crawling, then walking ….. Thus development progresses from general or global systems to specific or discrete systems of responding.

2. Increase in Complexity:
As development progresses, the individual becomes more complex. Biologically, the one cell that was present at conception divides and subdivides to form more than a million separate yet interdependent units. There is increase in psychological complexity as well The number of emotions increases, and the strategies the individual has available for solving problems become more sophisticated.

3. Increase in Integration and Differentiation:
Biological and psychological systems become increasingly differentiated (separate) from each other as well as increasingly integrated( entwined) with each other as development progresses. For an individual to survive, his or her behaviours, can’t function alone; rather, they must become part of a coherent, organized system. When behavior becomes differentiated, they are more articulated or distinct from one another. When behaviours become integrated, they become enmeshed with or incorporated into one another, often forming something that is qualitatively different from what was there before.

For eg. Young children use basic sensory information, such as seeing or touching, to explore their environments. As children develop, they begin to organize these basic strategies into a more efficient and adaptable system that combines both seeing and touching.

4. Decrease in Egocentrism:
Ego centrism is an individual’s preoccupation with his or her own perspective, it is characteristic of development at all levels. During early years of development, a child tends to believe that his or her own perspective on the world is the only one possible. People tend to become less self centered when they begin socializing with others. Or even because of biological changes ie. when the body needs to direct less effort toward self-growth, the individual is able to devote greater energy to reaching out and exploring the world.

5. Development of Social Autonomy:
The expression of autonomy, a critical part of developmental change, can take many different forms. Social autonomy is the growing human being’s increasing independence and ability to provide for his or her own needs. Initially the infant is dependent on others for basic care. In contrast the older child is much more self sufficient, and the young adult even more.  Most children show varying degree of independence from their primary caretakers. As individuals become increasingly autonomous, one of the most important is they begin to accept the standards of society and they interpret these standards from their own viewpoints rather than from their parents view point.

Other issues which can be considered are:

• Maturation: It is a biological process in which developmental changes are controlled by internal or endogenous factors. Eg. The results from maturation are- walking, or secondary sex changes at puberty. These characteristics never take place because of specific practice or exercise and they are not learned.
• Learning: It is a function of direct or indirect experience. The term refers to developmental changes that result from exercise or practice and the outcomes of learning are highly individualized and specific. Eg. Learning driving a car and a second language.

References

1. Salkind,N.J. (2004). An introduction to Theories of Human Development. Sage Publications, New Delhi.

Assignment

1. Collect information on what are the latest trends and challenges in Human development and find out the recent research areas.

ORIGINS OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

Science: It is the process through which we organize bits of information.
It is also a process through which ideas are generated and new directions are followed.
Science is very much like the blue print that a builder uses to understand how the many different parts of a structure fit together to form something that is more than the sum of the individual parts.
The scientific method is important in any field that includes among its goals the organization of knowledge and the generation of new ideas.

Model of Scientific Inquiry:
Science can be seen as a four-step process:

1. Asking a question
2. Identifying the factors or elements of that question that need to be examined
3. Identifying the factors or elements of that question that need to be examined Accepting or rejecting the premise on which the original question was based

 1. Asking a question: It involves recognizing that something of interest or potential value needs further investigation. Everyday experiences and events are the sources of most first questions which is the first step of scientific inquiry. From what the untrained mind sees as confusion and disarray, the trained mind selects important events These experiences or events can include art, music, literature or even the events in the lives of individuals. For eg. The development of small pox vaccine was prompted by Edward Jenner’s personal observation that the only people who did not seem to be vulnerable (exposed) to the disease were the women who tended cows. In turn, this observation led to Robert Koch’s development of germ theory, a basic and important principle of immunology.

[Cow pox is a disease caused by Cow pox virus. The transferral of the disease was first observed in dairymaids who touched the udders of infected cows and consequently developed the signature pustules on their hands. Cowpox is similar to, but much milder than, the highly contagious and often deadly smallpox disease. Once vaccinated, a patient develops antibodies that make him/her immune to cowpox, but they also develop immunity to the smallpox virus.]
Another example is the observation that the child’s cognitive development occurs in a series of different and distinct stages. Many developmental psychologists have made this observation informally and then studied the stages they identified systematically.

2.Identifying the factors or elements of that question that need to be examined:
The second step of scientific inquiry is identifying what factors are important and how they will be examined. One of the ways a researcher identifies important factors is by conducting a search of the previous literature, including reports and the work of the other researchers. For eg. The differences in the ways parents raise their children.  A psychologist might begin such an examination by identifying the factors that could be involved in these differences, such as the number of children in the family, sex of the child, ordinal position, socioeconomic status, educational status of the parents. The investigator is asking pointed questions about the importance of certain factors and the nature of the relationships between those factors.

At this point the researcher must make decisions regarding how the questions will be answered. This part of process involves the design and completion of the research. For eg. If one is interested in the effects of environmental stimulation on intellectual development, one could design an experiment to compare the intellectual development of children who were reared in an enriched environment( beginning school at early age) with that of children who have not experienced an enriched environment( perhaps having spent time in an institution) .

This is the step in the model where the researcher must operationally identify important factors (or variables), state the possible relationships among them, and determine what method should be used in the actual research.

3. Testing the question: This step is the most hands- on part of the scientific process. In this step , the researcher actually collects the data necessary to answer the question. For eg. A developmental psychologist at this point might conduct a survey of the problem-solving skills of children with learning disabilities. Once the essential information is gathered ( by interview, scores etc) the researcher applies some tool( such as a statistical test ) to determine an outcome, and then compares the outcome with what he or she has proposed in the original question to see if the two are consistent.  For eg. A teacher may be interested in knowing whether students learn to read with more comprehension when he uses programmed instruction than they do when he uses a more traditional teaching method.

4. Accepting or Rejecting the Premise on which the original question was based: Depending on the outcomes of step 3, the original question will be reconsidered, and if necessary more specific questions will be asked.

Thus scientific research is an always ongoing process. Scientists are continually redesigning their experiments to accommodate new information, new technologies and new findings.

References

1. Salkind,N.J. (2004). An introduction to Theories of Human Development. Sage Publications, New Delhi.

Assignment

1. Present how to conduct scientific inquiry with examples specific to human developmental research

RESEARCH METHODS AND DESIGNS IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Research: Research is an art of scientific investigation.

• It is a scientific and systematic search for pertinent information on a specific topic.
• Research comprises defining and redefining problems, formulating hypothesis or suggested solutions: collecting, organizing and evaluating data ; reasoning and reaching conclusions; and carefully testing the conclusions to determine whether they fit the formulating hypothesis.

Scientific Method: It is an orderly process entailing a number of steps, recognition and definition of problem, formulation of hypothesis, collection of data, analysis of data and statement of conclusion regarding confirmation or disconfirmation of hypothesis.

I. Research Methods:

There are three main types

• Descriptive research
• Correlational research
• Experimental research

1. Descriptive Research: Descriptive research methods are pretty much as they sound — they describe  They do not make accurate predictions, and they do not determine cause and effect. In social science and business research the term ex post facto research is used  for descriptive research studies.
2. The correlational research: A correlation is an index or an estimate on how two factors or measures vary together. It is expressed in terms of the direction and size of the relationship.
   Ex : food and weight are positively correlated with each other. Sickness and weight are negatively correlated with each other.
3. The experimental Research: The experimental research involves introducing some types of change into the child’s environment and then measuring the effects of this change on the child’s subsequent behaviour. Experiments vary in terms of

• the degree of control that is exercised over important variables
• location or setting in which the experiment is conducted.
• The laboratory experiment :In this the investigator carries out the experiment on children in controlled laboratory setting.
• The field experiment: In this the researcher introduces a change in a naturalistic setting and observes the targeted behaviour.
• The natural experiment: The investigator capitalizes upon a change in the child’s world that occurs naturally and is not due to the investigator’s intervention.

Research Design: Research design is the plan, structure and sharing of investigation concerned so as to obtain answers to research questions and to control variance.

Research plan– It is a detail description of a proposed study design to investigate a given problem.

II. Designs for studying development: There are 4 important research designs used to study development. They are

1. Cross sectional design: Studying a cross section of subjects simultaneously. These studies compare people of different areas, social backgrounds, from different community settings. These are quite common in research on child development. For eg. The weights of children of particular age groups at one time.
2. The longitudinal design: In this study design, the subject is assessed repeatedly in order to determine the stability of the patterns of development and behaviour of a particular individual, over different time internals. The same participants are studied at different times.
   Uses
   a) It is useful in tracking the course of development of a particular group of individuals.
   b) It helps trace intra-individual patterns overtime i.e. how the individual can change over a period of time.
3. Cohort Sequential Design: A cohort sequential design combines the cross sectional and the longitudinal approaches into one method of study. Groups of participants are called cohorts, studied for certain number of years. It is a powerful developmental research design.
   Uses
   It produces immediate cross-sectional data, longitudinal data and a comparison of children who are in the same age for a period of six years.
4. Retrospective design: The participants are asked to report their own experiences from an earlier time in their own lives. Many earlier studies of child rearing used parents’ recollections of their parenting techniques to evaluate their pattern of child care.

References

1. Nageswara Rao.G.(2012). Research Methodology and Quantitative Methods, BS Publications, Hyderabad.
2. C.R. 2010. Research Methodology Methods and Techniques ( 2nd revised edition), New Age International Publishers, New Delhi

Assignment

1. List out the various types of research methods with examples in human development research

METHODS OF DATA COLLECTION

Method of gathering data about children: Methods of gathering data are

1. Self report measures

1. Parental report
2. Children’s report

2. Other reporting techniques/methods of data collection include

1. Observation
2. Interview schedules
3. Questionnaire
4. Case study
5. Survey method
6. Checklists
7. Rating scales
8. Score card
9. Attitude scales and inventories
10. Biographies
11. Social measures
12. Psychological tests
13. Video conference methods
14. Telephone method

1. Self-report measures: These are two types:

1. Parental reports: Parents are asked to provide a verbal report of some aspects of their own behavior and understanding of their child, such as their child rearing practices, their observations on their child’s development etc.
2. Children’s report: Another strategy is to use children’s reports of their own behaviour or their parent’s behaviour. Children are more difficult to interview than adults. Children are less attentive, are slower to respond and have more difficulty in understanding the questions than adults.

Merits of self-reports

• Information that is otherwise unobtainable can be obtained through self-reports Reports on feelings, attitudes.
• Information provided through self-reports gives a long term or global view of the person rather than the limited view of one time observation.

Demerits of self-reports

• Parents and children tend to forget and give inaccurate information.
• Parents/children tend to give socially acceptable responses.
• Parents may genuinely mistake between their behavior and attitude.
• Perceptions of parents and children may differ.

In order to overcome differences in perceptions usually both parents as well as children are interviewed. Parents are asked to keep a diary of events to check accuracy of their statements.

2. Methods of data collection:

a) Observation: Observations serve to overcome some of the problems posed by reporting. Direct observations of parents, children and teachers can take place in structured and unstructured situations. Observational aids range from simple, written observation guidelines to recorded behaviors to sophisticated equipment such as electronic devices and software to analyze reflexes, reactions and other kinds of brain mapping.

Different kinds of observation are

• Time sampling: Selecting units of time in a day for observation Eg. 8.00 am, 11 am.
• Event sampling: Selecting specific events to observe Eg. While playing, while eating.
• Diary description: Entering observations in a diary from time to time.
• Narratives: Continuous observed narratives maintained in write up.

Merits:

1. Very direct method for collecting data or information – best for the study of human behavior.
2. Data collected is very accurate in nature and also very reliable.
3. Improves precision of the research results.
4. Helps in understanding the verbal response more efficiently.
5. Observations can be made continuously and also for a larger duration of time period.

Demerits:

1. Children behave differently in structured settings.
2. Parents tend to behave in socially acceptable ways.
3. Observations make children self conscious.
   These problems can be overcome by frequent visits so that the observer blends into the situation. Change in recording techniques such as videos, recorders. Using multiple measures of recording the behavior.

b) Interview schedule: An interview schedule is usually a set of questions which are asked and filled by an interviewer in a face to face situation with another person. It is different from a questionnaire in which the schedule is administered personally to a respondent or a group of respondents, while questionnaire is usually mailed.

Merits:

• It provides opportunity to establish rapport, to explain the purpose and to make the meaning of items clear.
• Provides more complete and usable information, since probing for information is possible.

Demerits:

• Much effort is needed by the researcher to contact personally all the respondents required either individually or in a group.
• More expenditure of time and money since all respondents must be personally located and interviewed.

c) Questionnaire: Questionnaire refers to a device for securing answers to questions by using a form, which the respondent fills himself. The questionnaire can be mailed to the respondents also.

Merits:

• Low cost
• Free from bias as the answers are in respondents own words
• Respondents can have adequate time to think and answer
• Respondents who are not easily approachable can also be reached conveniently

Demerits:

• Can be used only by literates
• Respondents may not feel responsible in returning the filled questionnaires
• Incomplete questionnaires may be received
• Questionnaires may be filled by a person other than the respondent
• Detailed information cannot be collected as respondents may not be interested or due to lack of time or both

d) Case study: Case study or the clinical method, as it is sometimes called (Edward, 1969), involves intensive investigation of a particular case. It aims at studying everything about that case rather than something about everything. Case study takes into account all the pertinent factors of the case or situation.

Merits:

• Facilitates intensive study
• Can obtain a real and enlightened record of personal experiences
• Information collected under case study help a lot to the researcher in the task of constructing appropriate tools.
• Real record of personal experiences can be obtained
• Facilitates drawing of inferences and helps in maintaining the continuity of the research process
• Case data are quite useful for diagnosis, therapy and other practical case problems.

Demerits:

• Case situations are seldom comparable
• Real information is often not collected
• Time consuming and expensive
• Subjectivity and logical concepts may be missing
• Case study method can be used only in a limited sphere, sampling is not possible

e) Survey Method: Surveys are conducted in case of descriptive research studies. Survey method usually has larger samples. Surveys are concerned with describing, recording, analyzing and interpreting conditions that either exist or existed. Surveys can be administered through a variety of ways – online, questionnaire/paper, face to face, mail, telephone.

Merits:

• Easy to develop
• More information can be gathered
• Less expensive
• Easier to find statistically significant results, multiple variables can also be effectively analysed using surveys.

Demerits:

• Not ideal method for controversial issues
• Inflexibility can be a demerit
• Respondents may not feel encouraged to provide accurate, honest answers

Other methods of data collection are:

• Checklists :Checklists are lists of sequential behaviors’ arranged in a system
  of categories. The observer can use the checklists to determine if the child exhibits the behaviors or skills listed. The checklists are used when many behaviors are to be observed. It can be used quickly and easily.
• Rating scales: The rating scale is a useful device in assessing quality, especially when quality is difficult to measure objectively. Rating is a term applied to the expression of opinion judgment regarding some situation, object or character. In this method descriptions of different degrees of quality are arranged along a line from high to low or otherwise and this line forms the scale.
• Score card: The score card is an elaborate form of the rating scale in which items are evaluated usually in numerical terms. Sometimes the score card and rating scale are used interchangeably
• Attitude scales and inventories: An attitude denotes the inner feeling or belief of a person towards a particular phenomenon. An opinion is what a person says about his attitude towards the phenomenon. For collecting the opinions an enquiry form called opinionnaire or attitude scale is used. Attitude scale helps to collect data in the form of expressed opinions of individuals or groups to obtain the measure of their attitudes or beliefs regarding some phenomenon.
• Biography: Biography is a systematic method and has the advantage of providing continuous and more or less integrated observations of child development. Biographies are written usually by an interested parent or relative. A child can be encouraged to write an autobiographical statement that includes information relating to his likes and dislikes, interests, ambitions, friends and relatives.
• Social measures : For describing and measuring social relationships, values or attitudes there are several tools like social distance scales, Guess-two-technique and sociometries are used.

Social distance scales: Developed by Bogardus (1950) the social distance scale attempts to measure the degree to which an individual or group is accepted or rejected by others.

Guess-two-technique: It consists of descriptions of a series of roles played by individuals in a group. The subjects are to name the individuals who fit the descriptions. Peer judgments, poor or good about individual roles are revealed through process of guessing.
‘This person is always happy ‘
‘This person is always active’
‘This person always finds fault with others’

Stoichiometry: Designed by Moreno and Jennings (1952) stoichiometry is a measure of social distance. Stoichiometry consists of designation a meaningful choice situation. For example ‘with whom would you like to work/play/visit?’ and asking the child to name the person or persons, in the order of their preference designating the child they would most like to play with.

• Psychological tests: Psychological tests are instruments designed to describe and measure a sample in relation to certain aspects of human behaviour or inner qualities.
  Examples of psychological tests are:
  1. Achievement tests,
  2. Intelligence tests
  3. Aptitude tests,
  4. Interest inventories
  5. Personality measures.

References 

1. Nageswara Rao.G.(2012). Research Methodology and Quantitative Methods, BS Publications, Hyderabad.
2. C.R. 2010. Research Methodology Methods and Techniques (2nd revised edition), New Age International Publishers, New Delhi.

Assignment

1. Write examples for each of the data collection method

STANDARDIZED TESTS – MERITS AND DEMERITS 

Standardized tests may be used for a wide variety of educational purposes. For example, they may be used to determine a young child’s readiness for kindergarten, identify students who need special education services or specialized academic support, place students in different academic programs or course levels, or award diplomas and other educational certificates. The following are a few most common forms of standardized test:

1. Achievement tests:
These are designed to measure the knowledge and skills students learned in school or to determine the academic progress they have made over a period of time. The tests may also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of schools and teachers, or identify the appropriate academic placement for a student – i.e., what courses or programs may be deemed most suitable, or what forms of academic support they may need. Achievement tests are “backward-looking” in that they measure how well students have learned what they were expected to learn.

Merits:

• Provides a snapshot of student performance
• Serves as a tool to determine needed educational resources
• Provides a convenient method to measure progress

Demerits:

• Negative pressures put on schools
• Potential error in measuring skills and an issue of fairness when testing diverse students

2. Aptitude tests:
These tests attempt to predict a student’s ability to succeed in an intellectual or physical endeavor by, for example, evaluating mathematical ability, language proficiency, abstract reasoning, motor coordination, or musical talent. Aptitude tests are “forward-looking” in that they typically attempt to forecast or predict how well students will do in a future educational or career setting. Aptitude tests are often a source of debate, since many question their predictive accuracy and value.

Merits:

• Good for comparison- comparing excellence and performance in each area.
• More effective in testing the capability of students as compared to other standard tests

Demerits:

• Time consuming
• Aptitude tests may have negative effect
• Not suitable for below average students

3. Psychological tests:
These tests including IQ tests, are used to measure a person’s cognitive abilities and mental, emotional, developmental, and social characteristics. Trained professionals, such as school psychologists, typically administer the tests, which may require students to perform a series of tasks or solve a set of problems. Psychological tests are often used to identify students with learning disabilities or other special needs that would qualify them for specialized services. Psychological tests are instruments designed to describe and measure a sample in relation to certain aspects of human behaviour or inner qualities.

Merits:

• These tests are educative- helps respondent to learn
• Through testing, a lot of information is gathered in a relatively short period of time.
• Test can act like problem solving by making the respondent think in a new way.

Demerits:

• There can be varying interpretations
• Decisions made in a testing situation are not always the same actions people would take when faced with the situation in reality.
• Psychological tests only remain relevant for a time, need to be updated
• Cultural bias- language etc.

4. Interest tests/Inventories:
These are psychological tests to assess a person’s interests and preferences. These tests are used primarily for career counseling. Interest tests include items about daily activities from among which applicants select their preferences. The rationale is that if a person exhibits the same pattern of interests and preferences as people who are successful in a given occupation, then the chances are high that the person taking the test will find satisfaction in that occupation. A widely used interest test is the Strong Interest Inventory, which is used in career assessment, career counseling, and educational guidance.

5. Personality tests:
Psychological measures of personality are often described as either objective tests or projective tests.

Objective tests (Rating scale or self-report measure)
Objective tests have a restricted response format, such as allowing for true or false answers or rating using an ordinal scale. Prominent examples of objective personality tests include the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,  Child Behavior Checklist and the Beck Depression Inventory, the 16PF,Occupational Personality Questionnaire, all of which are based on the Big Five taxonomy.

Projective tests (Free response measures)
Projective tests allow for a freer type of response. Example of this would be the Rorschach test, in which a person states what each of ten ink blots might be.

Another common projective test is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

Merits:

• Personality tests usually detect interpersonal characteristics
• Helps to provide new motivations
• Can build confidence

Demerits:

• One test may not be accurate in testing
• Some are time consuming
• Expensive

References

1. http://www.careerride.com/view.aspx?id=26670
2. http://edglossary.org/standardized-test/

Assignment

DEFINITIONS

Variable- a variable is something that varies or the characteristic which varies is called variable. It is a symbol to which numerals or values are assigned. For eg. sex, income, height, weight, level of education etc.

• Dependent variable: When changes in one variable depend upon the changes in other variable or variables, it is known as a dependent or endogenous variable.
• Independent variable: variables which cause the changes in the dependent variable are known as the independent or explanatory or exogenous variables.
  An independent variable is the presumed cause for the dependent variable. Independent variable is the antecedent, the dependent is the consequent. Eg. Intelligence and school achievement – intelligence is independent variable and achievement is the dependent variable.
• Quantitative variable: variable which can be measured with a standard scale is called Quantitative variable. Eg. area under water bodies, age, income etc.
• Qualitative variable: Variable which cannot be measured with a standard scale is called qualitative variable. Eg. Red flower, intelligent person, short person, progressive person etc.
• Random variable: Variable which assume any value between any two fixed limits is known occurs by chance or without any prediction is called random variable. Eg. Temperature, sunshine, adult height at maturity etc. these cannot be predicted in advance and therefore they are called as random variables.
• Discrete variable: Variable which can take only fixed number of values is called discrete variable. Eg. Number of parks, number of factories, number of chairs etc.
• Continuous variable: A variable which can assume any value between any two fixed limits is known as continuous variable. Eg. area under crops, area under parks, daily cement production of a factory etc.

Hypothesis: A hypothesis is a researcher’s prediction of the research findings.  A good hypothesis is stated clearly and concisely, expresses the relationship between two variables and defines those variables in measurable terms.

• Null hypothesis: A null hypothesis states that there is no significant relationship/ difference among/ between the variables. This hypothesis is used by statistical tests to test with statistical tests to test with statistical procedures and arrive at conclusions such as      either the null hypothesis is accepted or rejected.
• Alternate hypothesis: When null hypothesis is rejected then alternate hypothesis is accepted. 

Sampling:

Definition of Population: Population is that group to which the researcher would like to generalize the research findings. Defining the population is an important first step in sample selection. Population is of 2 types:

• Target population: Population to which the researcher would ideally like to generalize the findings of the study.
• Accessible Population: Population from which the researcher can realistically select the sample. That is the available population.

Definition of Sample: Sampling is a process of selecting a number of participants for a study in such a way that they represent the larger group from which they were selected. A sample is made up of the individual’s items or events selected from a larger group referred to as population.

Types of Sampling Methods:

Drawing a sample from population based on probability theory is called Probability sampling method. Some of the methods used in research are- simple random sampling, stratified random sampling, cluster sampling, systematic sampling.
If the Sample is selected without using probability theory it is known as Non probability sampling method. Some of these methods are purposive sampling, convenience sampling, judgment or quota sampling etc.

Probability sampling method

• Simple Random Sampling: It is a process of selecting a sample in such a way that all individuals in the defined population have an equal and independent chance of being selected for the sample. The selection of the sample is completely out of the researcher’s control. Random sampling is the best single way to obtain a representative sample.
• Stratified Sampling: In this method the population is divided into different strata or groups based on a particular character then sample are drawn from each group to represent the entire population.
• Cluster Sampling: In this method the population is divided into sub groups called clusters. A sample of clusters is selected at random and the units selected will be the selected sample. For eg. If the district is considered as population, mandals and talukas are considered as clusters.
• Systematic Sampling: It is a process in which individuals are selected from a list taking every k^th K is determined by the researcher based on the size of the list, say nk divided by the sample size say n required. For eg. if the population size is 30 and the sample size is 6 the k=5 ie. every 5th person will be selected in the sample. Difference between this method and others is that all members in a population do not have equal chance to be part of the sample.

Non-probability sampling method:

• Purposive Sampling: Also known as judgment sampling. It is a process of selecting a sample that is believed to be representative of a given population. The researcher selects and deliberately identifies criteria for selecting a sample.
• Convenience Sampling: Referred to as accidental sampling or haphazard sampling. It is a process of selecting the sample based on the researcher’s convenience with respect to conducting the study. For eg. if the investigator wants to investigate the problem whether drinking water contains fluoride he can select road side villages having this problem so that he can have transport and other facilities.
• Quota Sampling: The size of the sample ie. the exact number or the quota is fixed before hand irrespective of the size of the population. For eg. in order to study the problems in industry, the number of factories to be selected is fixed for the categories – big, medium, small and cottage industries. Similarly in order to study the nature of town planning, fixed number of categories of cities such as very old, old, recent, very recent will be This method can be adopted in exit polls in election and can widely be used in large scale surveys. 

Apart from the probability and non probability sampling there is another sampling method called the Qualitative Sampling. It is a process of selecting a small number of individuals for a study in such a way that the individuals chosen will be able to help the researcher understand the phenomenon under investigation. The purpose of qualitative research is choose sample of individuals who are good informants. The types of Qualitative sampling  are:

• Intensity Sampling: Selecting participants who permit study of different levels of the research topic. Eg. experienced and fresh teachers.
• Homogeneous Sampling: Selecting participants who are very similar in experience, perspective. This process produces a very narrow, homogenous sample and makes data collection and analysis simple.
• Criterion Sampling: Selecting all cases that meet some set of criteria or have some characteristic. Eg. Students who have not cleared all examinations in the first attempt.
• Snowball Sampling: Selecting a few people who fit a researchers needs, then using those participants to identify additional participants,  until the researcher has sufficient number.

Operational Definitions:  It is assigning meaning to a construct or a variable by specifying the activities or operation necessary to measure it.

• Concept: A concept expresses an abstraction formed by generalization from particulars. Eg.Weight, Birds, Flowers, Currency, etc.
• Construct: A construct is a concept but has an added meaning of having been deliberately and consciously invented or adopted for a special scientific purpose. Eg. intelligence. It is a concept defined by psychologists, by observation of both intelligent as well as non intelligent behaviours as well as a construct, ie. it can be related to other constructs and concepts; Eg. school achievement is relate to intelligence, Intelligence can be observed and measured using a test which helps place individuals on different levels on this concept, that way it becomes a

It is important that the measuring instrument possess characteristics that will bring in value to the research findings and confidence in interpreting the findings and generalizing them to the population. The two main characteristics are Validity and Reliability.

Validity: It is the most important characteristic of a measuring instrument.
Validity is defined as the degree to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure, and consequently permits the interpretation of scores.
Validity is important for all forms of research and all types of tests and measures. A test is valid for a particular purpose but not generally valid. Validity is specific for the interpretation to be made and the group which is being tested.

Types of validity:
There are of 4 types – Content validity, criterion related validity, construct validity and consequential validity.

Reliability: It is the degree to which a test consistently measures whatever it is measuring. The more reliable a test is, the more confidence one can have that the scores obtained from the test are essentially the same scores that would be obtained if the test were readministered to the same group.

Reliability is expressed numerically as reliability coefficient which is obtained using correlation. A high correlation value indicates high reliability.
A valid test is always reliable; a reliable test need not necessarily be valid.

Types of Reliability:
There are 5 types of reliability – test-retest reliability, equivalence, equivalence and stability, internal consistency reliability, scorer/rater reliability.

References

1. Nageswara Rao.G.(2012). Research Methodology and Quantitative Methods, BS Publications, Hyderabad.
2. C.R. 2010. Research Methodology Methods and Techniques (2nd revised edition), New Age International Publishers, New Delhi.

Assignment

1. Identify a research proposal and mark dependent variables, independent variables, sampling method, research design and hypothesis