Foreign Perspectives

Archive for September, 2009

Going by my revision plan I should have done sensation to perception first and indeed I have gone over those notes. However, the chapter from the book is an entirely different matter covering mainly the technicalities of the senses with heaps of new terminology rather than “proper” psychology. My thinking is that there’s basically no chance of me being able to answer a question based on that chapter at the moment although it does seem a nice introduction to the L3 course based around those themes; I’m going to leave it ’til then.

So what’s early cognitive development all about? Essentially it comes in three sections: understanding objects, interacting with people and understanding representations in descending order of importance going by the page count of each.

Understanding objects kicks off with Piaget’s object permanance (the toy hidden under the cloth) which they fail before around 9 months according to him. Bower tried testing using a train but this one falls down as young children can’t stop tracking a moving object. Finally, Baillargeon’s drawbridge and car experiments using the habituation method indicated that they could understand permanance from around 5 or 6 months of age and down to 3 1/2 in a replication. He went on to show that children before around 3 months thought that any size of object could hide any other size of object. Bringing up the rear were Hood and Willats with their light off experiment which also came out around 5 months for object permance.

On a separate tack, Piaget came up with the A-not-B (a variant of the toy hidden under the cloth). Harris felt that this was down to fragile memory but Butterworth came up with the same result even with a transparent cloth (sounds like a weird result, eh?). This suggests that the confusion could be down to a mismatch between updating their egocentric memory vs their allocentric memory. Diamond went on to try variations of the delay between hiding the toy and asking the child to retrieve it: as you would expect this delay could be lengthened as the child got older.

The second theme is around people and interacting with them. This one’s all about imitation which ranges from no imitation in the first month, some up to 4 months, direct imitation from 8-12 months and after that they can imitate  new and deferred behaviours. As ever, everyone else found that kids could do all this stuff much earlier than Piaget found with Meltzoff & Moore getting imitation down to 12-21 days of age (albeit with a small sample and no “nothing happened” option). Aside from those qualifications they went on to show that the ability to imitate improved with age as one would expect: 2 or 3 months old kids clearly could do more than those 6 weeks old.

Finally, in this chapter there’s a rundown of the understanding of models. DeLoache used a model room and found that children from around 3 years of age could correctly identify in the real room where stuff had been hid in the model room. Most common was the A-not-B error which suggested that the problem was an inhibitory one. However, that would suggest that they’d do better on the first trial but in practice some 77% failed first time around.

Overall, the problem of experimenting on really young children is that it’s not possible to ask them to explain their reasoning and that they may have difficulty in co-ordinating what they know with what they’d like to do.

Now, if I can manage to remember all that in the exam that would work out around the right wordcount for an answer I think. Anyway, ’tis on to temperament and development next. Oh, and the seen question…

As those who’ve done this course will know, there is a LOT of course needing to be revised. So much in fact that, unless you’ve nothing else to do, there’s no way to do it all to the required level.

However, there is the advantage that the usual rule for courses is that a given topic is only examined once (update: unless the course is ED209). Therefore anything covered on assignments can be dropped which takes out a surprising amount for this course since all the essay questions had two options.

Moreover, each question on the exam paper is confined to a single chapter.

Take those together and what remains are the following chapters:

Book 1: Psychological development and early childhood

1. ch3: Sensation to perception
2. ch4: Early cognitive development
3. ch5: Temperament and development
4. ch7:First relationships

Book 2: Children’s personal and social development

1. ch3: Children’s interactions:siblings and peers
2. ch5: Gender identity and the development of gender roles
3. ch6: National identities in children and young people
4. ch7: Young consumers

Book 3: Cognitive and language development in children

1. ch1: Early category representation and concepts
2. ch2: First words
3. ch4: The development of children’s understanding of grammar
4. ch5: Executive functions in childhood development and disorder
5. ch6: Understanding minds

Thanks to Martin, our tutor, for doing the hard work on the above. The ones in bold are those also selected by Tim who has a brilliant set of notes should you want to reduce the revision time even more. Personally, I’m using the Erica Cox notes which equate to something like a half dozen pages per chapter so around 70 pages to do all the above chapters.

To reduce revision time even more don’t forget that you only need to answer TWO questions from the above (plus the seen question!). Thus you only need to revise two of the books ie around 50 pages of the Erica Cox notes. Is it worth cutting it down that much? If it’s a choice of revising two books well or three not so well then I’d go for two; the third book is basically there as insurance against two questions that you really don’t like from one of the books.

Anyway, ’tis back to make a start on actually writing TMA7 (ie the seen question) tomorrow for me and, hopefully, the first run through of one revision chapter. Incidently, on that question, don’t forget that you’ve only got around 50 minutes to write out the answer so don’t be drafting more than around 7001000 words unless you write really fast.

It turns out that the very first piece of research is working out if there’s enough ink in the printer cartridge as there’s getting on for 70 pages of text between the three articles included in the references within the course text.

Those of an ecological mind will be thinking that I’d be better reading these online rather than printing them out and ordinarily I would do that if only because I usually can’t be bothered lugging around actual paper when I have them all on my baby computer. However, two of the articles are two up and it’s rather difficult to read such things with all the scrolling up and down business. Sadly, one of those is the longest article so it’s gonna need to be printed.

I suspect that I’ll be needing a new printer cartridge after if not during printing this lot.

Sniffling, coughing and sneezing have been working their way through all of us over the past week or so thanks to to James & John bringing these home from school.

Yesterday it was James’ turn to feel a bit off but now that he’s back to school ’tis the turn of John and me to feel dreadful.

Oh well, I guess another week or two and they’ll have worked their way through the range of minor colds and whatnot that their friends have…

I’ve just been to the final tutorial for the course so there aren’t any more excuses for putting off the work for the seen question for the course.

First off, was to choose the topic from amongst the five on offer. For me the choice was relatively simple. The legal one starts by saying that it’s a bit gruesome in parts which put me off that right away. The education one seems almost exclusively for teachers so that’s out. Health psychology just doesn’t appeal. The autism one seems to require that you’ve some experience of it outside the course. Which leaves the one on specific learning difficulties which I’d have chosen anyway as it seems interesting.

That done, I’ve read the chapter on it in the course book and gone through the study guide. Which means that it’s time for the real work…

What I’ll be doing tomorrow is reading over the three journal articles that are referred to on the course website (it’s in course resources, part 4). All being well, that’ll give me an idea of what approach to take when I’m starting on the literature search which I’ll be starting later in the week.

The aim for all of this work is to produce what’s essentially a TMA of around 1000 words. I say around 1000 words but I suspect that it’ll be somewhat shorter than that as I’ll need to write it out in a little under an hour. It’s very important to keep that time limit in mind as it would be all to easy to write far more in advance than could realistically be reproduced inside that one hour time limit. Going by my tutor, the majority of resits that he has are there because they didn’t allocate their time properly so don’t under-estimate the importance of this aspect!