Child Development: Chapter 1

• Learning about child development is valuable for many reasons: it can help us become better parents, inform our views about social issues that affect children, and improve our understanding of human nature.
• Great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and Rousseau raised basic questions about child development. They proposed interesting hypothesis about them, but they lacked the scientific methods to answer the questions.
• The field of child development is an attempt to answer a set of fundamental questions: How do nature and nurture together shape development, How do children shape their own development, In what ways is development continuous and in what ways is it discontinuous, How does change occur, How does the sociocultural context influence development, How do children become so different from one another, How can research promote children's well-being?

• Even infants and young children actively contribute to their own development through their patterns of attention, use of language, and choices of activities.
• Many developments can appear either continuous or discontinuous, depending on how often and how closely we we look at them.
• The mechanisms that produce developmental changes involve a complex interplay among experiences, genes, and brain structures and activities.
• Clinical interview: a procedure in which questions are adjusted in accord with the answers the interviewee provides.
• Amygdala: An area of the brain that is involved in emotional reactions.
• Meta-analysis: A method for combining the results from independent studies to reach conclusions based on all of them.
• Nature: Our biological endowment; the genes we receive from our parents.
• Nurture: The environments, both physical and social, that influence our development.
• Genome: Each person’s complete set of hereditary information.
• Epigenetics: The study of stable changes in gene expression that are mediated by the environment.
• Methylation: A biochemical process that influences behavior by suppressing gene activity and expression.
• Continuous Development: The idea that changes with age occur gradually, in small increments, like that of a pine tree growing taller and taller.
• Discontinuous Development: The idea that changes with age include occasional large shifts, like the transition from caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly.
• Stage theories: Approaches proposing that development involves a series of large, discontinuous, age-related phases.
• Cognitive Development: The development of thinking and reasoning.
• Neurotransmitters: Chemicals involved in communication among brain cells.
• Sociocultural Context: The physical, social, cultural, economic, and historical circumstances that make up any child’s environment.
• Socioeconomic Status (SES): A measure of social class based on income and education.
• Cumulative Risk: The accumulation of disadvantages over years of development.
• Scientific Method: An approach to testing beliefs that involves choosing a question, formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and drawing a conclusion.
• Hypothesis: Testable predictions of the presence or absence of phenomena or relations.
• Reliability: The degree to which independent measurements of a given behavior are consistent.
• Interrater Reliability: The amount of agreement in the observations of different raters who witness the same behavior.
• Test-retest Reliability: The degree of similarity of a participant’s performance on two or more occasions.
• Validity: The degree to which a test measures what it is intended to measure.
• Internal Validity: The degree to which effects observed within experiments can be attributed to the factor that the researcher is testing.
• External Validity: The degree to which results can be generalized beyond the particulars of the research.
• Structured Interview: A research procedure in which all participants are asked to answer the same questions.
• Questionnaire: A method that allows researchers to gather information from a large number of participants simultaneously by presenting them a uniform set of printed questions.
• Clinical Interview: A procedure in which questions are adjusted in accord with the answers the interviewee provides.
• Naturalistic Observation: Examination of ongoing behavior in an environment not controlled by the researcher.
• Structured Observation: A method that involves presenting an identical situation to each participant and recording the participant’s behavior.
• Variables: Attributes that vary across individuals and situations, such as age, sex, and popularity.
• Correlation Designs: Studies intended to indicate how two variables are related to each other.
• Correlation: The association between two variables.
• Direction-of-Causation Problem: The concept that a correlation between two variables does not indicate which, if either, variable is the cause of the other.
• Third-variable Problem: The concept that a correlation between two variables may stem from both being influenced by some third variable.