PSY 2350 Child Development
Book Questions: Chapter 6
1. What is a scheme? How can children change their schemes?
2. What are the major characteristics of the sensori-motor stage (Describe them briefly)? How long is this
stage? (Do not worry about knowing individual substages)
3. Did Piaget underestimate or overestimate children’s abilities in the sensori-motor period? What does
recent research indicate?
4. What marks the change into the preoperational stage? How does language play a role? What did Piaget
think about the importance of language?
5. How does make-believe play develop and what are the benefits of make-believe play?
6. When do children understand symbol-real word relations?
7. What are the limitations of preoperational thought? What does recent research indicate about the
limitations of preschool children’s thinking?
8. What are the major cognitive changes that occur when a child enters the concrete operational stage?
When do children enter this stage?
9. What are the limitations of concrete operational thought?
10. Describe the characteristics of the formal operational stage? How old are most children when they
enter this stage? What are these children capable of?
11. What are the distortions of thought for adolescents in the formal operational stage?
12. What can improve formal operational thinking?
13. What would researchers today say about the assertion that cognitive development takes place in stages?
14. Explain the core knowledge perspective? Would this be considered a nature or nurture perspective?
Does research support this perspective?
15. Does Vygotsky view the child as active or passive? According to Vygotsky, what is an extremely
important influence on the child?
16. What is the role of private speech according to Piaget? According to Vygotsky? Which view is more
correct?
17. What is the zone of proximal development?
18. What are some characteristics of social interaction that promote cognitive growth?
19. What educational innovations have Vygotsky’s ideas spawned?
20. What are some of the major criticisms of Vygotsky’s theory?
PSY 2350 Child Development
Book Questions: Chapter 7
1. Briefly describe the information-processing approach. Does the informational-processing
approach view the child as active?
2. Explain the store model. What are the components?
3. How does connectionism explain development?
4. How does Case’s neo-Piagetian theory build on Piaget’s ideas? How do we increase our
working memory?
5. How is Siegler’s model of strategy choice evolutionary in nature?
6. What is cognitive inhibition? Does in increase or decrease with age?
7. What are the phases for the emergence and refinement of attentional strategies?
8. Describe the three strategies that enhance memory. When do children begin to use these
strategies?
9. What are the three ways information can be retrieved from memory?
10. What is the difference between semantic and episodic memory?
11. What is autobiographical memory?
12. What is infantile amnesia? What are some hypotheses explaining why this occurs?
13. What is meta-cognition? Theory of mind?
14. What are some of the applications of information processing to academic learning (discuss
them briefly)?
15. What are some of the criticisms of the Information Processing approach?
PSY 2350 Child Development
Book Questions: Chapter 9
1. What are the four components of language?
2. Describe Skinner’s view of language development. What is Chomsky’s view? Be able to
elaborate on both.
3. What are the two main language areas/structures in the brain and what are the functions of
each?
4. Does the research indicate a sensitive period for learning language? What, if any, evidence
supports this hypothesis?
5. What are some limitations of Chomsky’s perspective?
6. What is the interactionist perspective?
7. What are phonemes? What is categorical speech perception?
7. What are infants first speech sounds?
8. Explain the difference between protodeclarative and protoimperative gestures.
9. Explain the difference between referential and expressive styles of word production. Which is
more commonly used? Which style leads to a larger vocabulary?
10. When children are first learning language, do they have more object, action, or state words?
11. What are two common semantic errors that children make? Describe them briefly.
12. Describe lexical contrast theory, the principle of mutual exclusivity, and syntactic
bootstrapping as strategies for word learning.
13. Explain the grammatical error of overregularization.
14. What are some strategies for acquiring grammar?
15. What do adults do to offer feedback to children about their grammatical errors?
16. What are some conversational strategies used by children?
17. What is metalinguistic awareness?
18. What are the two ways children can become bilingual? Does childhood bilingualism have a
positive or negative impact on development?
PSY 2350 Child Development
Book Questions: Chapter 10
1. What is the functionalist approach? Emotions are central in which areas of development?
2. What are the basic emotions and what function do they serve?
3. When do children begin social smiles? When do they begin to laugh?
4. Explain the concepts of stranger anxiety and secure base.
5. What are the self-conscious emotions? When do they occur? What two components are necessary for
children to have self-conscious emotions?
6. What are some of the strategies children use for emotional self-regulation and how do they change with
age?
7. What are emotional display rules? What are some of these rules in our culture?
8. What is social referencing?
9. Explain the difference between empathy and sympathy.
10. What is temperament? Is a child’s temperament unchangeable?
11. What are the three temperament styles that Thomas and Chess proposed? Describe each. What
percentage of children fall into each category?
12. Is children’s temperament highly stable over time?
13. What does temperament predict?
14. Explain the goodness-of-fit model.
15. What are the early theories of attachment?
16. Describe the four stages of attachment in Bowlby’s theory. What is separation anxiety and when does
it occur? What is an internal working model? Why is it important?
17. How do we measure attachment? Describe the four patterns of attachment. What percentage of
children are in each?
18. What are the factors that affect attachment security? Which are detrimental? Which promote a good
attachment?
19. Why is American child care in a state of crisis? What are the signs of high-quality child care?
PSY 2350 Child Development
Book Questions: Chapter 12
1. What are some of the components of moral development?
2. Define internalization.
3. Recall how Freud theorized the development of morality. Does research support Freud’s view?
Understand the positive role of induction.
4. How is moral behavior acquired according to social learning theory? Is harsh punishment effective for
fostering positive moral behavior? Is time-out effective? How can parents increase the effectiveness
of punishment?
5. Describe Piaget’s theory of moral development. Does Piaget underestimate or overestimate the moral
capacities of children?
6. Kohlberg originally used what type of methodology to assess moral understanding? Describe
Kohlberg’s levels of moral understanding. Do NOT worry about stages.
7. Research indicates that moral responses based on both Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s stages DO or DO NOT
vary with context?
8. What are the environmental factors that influence moral reasoning?
9. What did Kohlberg say about moral thought and behavior? Do they correspond?
10. Explain the difference between moral and social-conventional transgressions? When do children make
this distinction?
11. What is distributive justice? What is the basis for this type of reasoning for 5/6 year olds? 6/7 year
olds? 8 year olds?
12. What is self-control? When and how do children first exhibit self-control? What are some strategies
for self-control?
13. What are the two main types of aggression exhibited by preschoolers? What are the two forms of
hostile aggression?
14. What are the age-related changes in aggression?
15. How can the family become a “training ground” for aggression?
16. How do aggressive children differ from non-aggressive children regarding cognitive biases and
distortions?
17. What are the types of treatment conducted with children who are aggressive? At what age is the
treatment more likely to be effective?