Assignment: Developing Child Paper
General Psychology
For this second assignment, you will either a) need access to a child between the ages of ½ year and 12 years (don't just grab a random kid off of the street, make sure that you know the parents and that you explain to them exactly what your project entails), or b) make up a fictional child between the ages of ½ year and 12 years. In this paper, you will address the child's development with respect to several areas that we've covered in the developmental lectures. To start, you'll want to describe the child in terms of:
- Name, age, background information, and other general details,
- Identity development (both past and current issues related to Erikson's theory of identity development),
- Cognitive development (both past and current issues related to Piaget's theory of cognitive development),
- Attachment type (based on Ainsworth's theory of attachment),
- And physical/motor development (current skills/challenges based on information from the book and online sources-make sure to correctly cite these sources)
After describing the above details, you need to test the child (or pretend to test the child if you're using a fictional child) on a Piaget-related age appropriate struggle that they're currently going through (e.g. object permanence). You need to describe their performance on this test, using terms from Piaget's work to describe your findings and experimentation. You must also propose a few ways that you might be able to help the child master this challenge-or another cognitive challenge that they might be focused on-by building off of the theories and terminology of Lev Vygotsky.
In the end, you will earn points for providing the following information:
1. Your description of the child that you're "testing", with each section being between 1 to 3 paragraphs long
2. Your description of your "experiment" on the child, the child's performance, what this indicates about his/her cognitive development, and how you might be able to help this child better understand the cognitive concept more effectively
3. Proper grammar, creativity, and depth of coverage in the paper
4. Properly formatted in-text citations and reference list (use APA Format)