The Developing Child Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

The Developing Child - Essay Example Particularly, child is attributed to have phisycal, psychological and cognitive development. Those will be descussed in current paper. Both child developmentalists and life-span researchers recognize that development is more than increases in frequency, size, complexity, or functional efficacy. For example, in some areas of psychometric intelligence, such as crystallized intelligence, development proceeds in an incremental fashion over the life span into late adulthood; in others, such as fluid intelligence, it declines beginning in early adulthood. Similar phenomena exist in social development. Relationships with opposite-sex peers may show a discontinuous pattern with declines in the elementary school years and increases in adolescence and young adulthood. Ontogeny therefore is a reflection of aspects of both growth and decline. Development thus may be viewed as a gain-loss relationship. Both child development and life-span development have models involving such ideas. In research on adulthood and old age, Bronfenbrenner (2003) has suggested that a basic process underlying this dynamic interplay between gains and losses over the course of development is selective optimization with compensation. As constraints in development or limitations in plasticity occur with age, individuals become more specialized and selective in adapting to situations and in solving problems. They develop substitutive skills to compensate for declining abilities. In confronting new tasks; the elderly draw selectively upon past experiences, existing knowledge and skills, and personal and social resources. The particular form of selective optimization or compensatory skills or strategies adopted will depend on the individual's past life conditions. Gains and losses may also exist in childhood development. For example, even in Piaget's theory there is evidence for loss (in perceptual accuracy) as children more toward a higher cognitive stage ( Bronfenbrenner, 2003). A more concerted effort by both child and life-span researchers to focus on gains and losses and multidirectionality in development could lead to enhanced and increasingly fruitful developmental models.Both contemporary child psychologists and life-span developmentalists see child development as resulting from the interaction between an active, organized individual and an active, organized environment. Individuals act on their environments, evoke behavior from others, select settings, and discriminate among stimuli to which they respond. Moreover, the individual exists in multiple levels of embeddedness in his or her environment, for example at the individual psychological level, the dyadic level, the family level, the community level, the historical level, and so on. There is a dynamic interaction among these contextual levels and between the individ ual and the contextual levels. Development is a process of constant change based on the interaction between the changing individual and these changing contextual levels.Although the ecological movement, led in child development by Bronfenbrenner ( 1979), has had a profound impact on theory in child development, much developmental research still presents a picture of the child developing within rather static ecosystems. Certainly more attention is focused on individual

Scale and Geologic Time Lab Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Scale and Geologic Time Lab - Assignment Example This time to count to one hundred is your human timescale. The time elapsed while you counted to one hundred was probably somewhere between 30 and 60seconds. This is a timescale that you can relate to, especially considered you just experienced it! You are familiar with this amount of time and you are comfortable with discussing events (like counting) that can occur over a period of 30 to 60 seconds. Now you are going to start converting the human scale to the geologic scale. For the purposes of this exercise, you are going to consider each 100 years along the timeline provided above as equivalent to the time it takes you to count to 100. So, counting to 100 equals the passage of 100 years. Lets convert our dates before present to counting times (fill in the blanks): This human scale is the amount of time you would have to count to reach the founding of the United States at your new scale. Now, perform these conversions for each of the other events on the timeline (fill in all the blanks): Remember, the human scale represents the number of seconds you would have to be counting to arrive at a given event. Most people consider the founding of the United States or the founding of Rome to have occurred a long time ago. How do these dates compare with the time between now and the first appearance of humans? Comparing these dates with the time when the first human occurred on the earth surface, there is a large difference since the first humans occurred approximately 100,000 years to present while United States and Rome were formed approximately 250 and 2750 years to present. The Cambrian explosion is estimated to have occurred approximately 540 million years to present while the earth is approximated to have been formed approximately 4,600,000,000 years to present. The difference in the length of time is quite large. Place humans within the perspective of Earths history? How does human history