Course syllabus

Child Development — Syllabus

Child Development Free sample edition

Child Development is a 3-unit, lower-division undergraduate course offered at [Institution] in [Term]. The class meets in person twice a week for about 75 minutes each time: [Meeting days/times].

This syllabus is the governing document for the course. It tells you what the course is, how your grade is built, what happens each week, and the policies you can count on. Weeks are numbered from Week 1 to Week 16; your instructor's course site gives the due date for each item.

Instructor and Contact

Instructor: [Instructor name]
Contact: [Contact info]
Office hours: [Office hours]

Bring something specific to office hours, such as an observation line you cannot decide how to read, two theories that seem to say the same thing, or an age range you are not sure how to state. Reach out early: a question asked in the week it comes up is far easier to answer than one saved for exam week. Learning to watch a child without judging takes practice, and almost everyone writes an interpretation into a record at first. That is normal, and it is what the weekly work is for. Check the course announcements at the start of each week.

Course Description

This is the introductory, one-semester child development course. It studies how and why children grow and change from conception through adolescence across three domains (physical, cognitive, and social-emotional) and in the contexts of family, childcare, school, community, and culture. It is taken by future teachers, early-childhood educators, nurses, social workers, counselors, and parents, and it has no prerequisite.

The course teaches the developmental way of looking. You observe what a child actually does, record it without judgment, read it against a range of typical development rather than a single deadline, and explain it with more than one theory. It is not a lifespan course: it stops at the end of adolescence. It is not a clinical or diagnostic course: no student assesses, screens, or labels a real child. It is not a parenting-advice course: where health and safety guidance appears, it is the issuing body's guidance, stated as that body's.

Every week practices one habit. You state an idea in plain words first, then attach the term, then show it in an observation record. Every reading of a child's behavior walks the same order: what the child did, what it might show, which theory explains it, and what a second theory adds. The reading ends in one plain sentence that names the concept and its evidence.

The arc of the course

The course opens with the foundations, because every later week uses them. Week 1 gives you the map: the three domains, the periods, the core questions of nature and nurture, continuity and discontinuity, and universal and context-specific change, and Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems. Week 2 gives you the lenses, the major theories of development, each taught with what it explains well and what it leaves out. Week 3 teaches the methods and ethics of studying children before you read a single record closely: research designs, five kinds of observation record, and the rules that protect children.

Development is then taught in the order it happens. Week 4 covers prenatal development and birth. Infancy and toddlerhood take three weeks, physical (Week 5), cognitive and language (Week 6), and social-emotional (Week 7), because the first two years change the most. Week 8 reviews the first half by the one distinction each topic asks for, adds one light piece of new material on play, and holds the midterm. Early childhood (Weeks 9 and 10), middle childhood (Weeks 11 and 12), and adolescence (Weeks 13 and 14) each take one week for physical and cognitive growth and one for social-emotional growth. Week 15 turns to the contexts that shape every period (family, culture, poverty, childcare, adversity, and resilience) and reads the running case from birth to 15. Week 16 holds the cumulative final.

What you will work with

One running case is studied all term. It is an illustrative, unnamed child followed from birth to age 15 through 8 observation records, written by different observers, each with permission, in different settings: a hospital birthing room, a family home, a childcare center, a preschool classroom, an after-school program and club, and a youth program. No real child, family, or program is described, and everyone in a record is identified by role and age only, such as "the child, 14 months" or "a caregiver". You meet the running case in Week 1 and return to it as the child reaches each period.

Around the running case, the course works with the standard Apgar scoring table, an illustrative play time sample of 20 intervals, six standard Piaget tasks, Erikson's five childhood and adolescent stages, the course's observation rules and permission script, an illustrative set of 12 parent responses for reading parenting styles, an illustrative set of 8 teen statements for reading identity statuses, and a small set of figures and guidance from issuing bodies. Everything that is not a sourced fact is labelled illustrative wherever it appears. Examples also come from clinics, kitchens, libraries, playgrounds, classrooms, and youth teams, and the people in them get roles and ages, not names.

You will read the field's theories and studies with their authors, named with the year and the work on first mention: Bronfenbrenner (1979), The Ecology of Human Development; Erikson (1950), Childhood and Society; Bandura, Ross, and Ross (1961), the Bobo doll study; Apgar (1953), "A Proposal for a New Method of Evaluation of the Newborn Infant"; Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall (1978), Patterns of Attachment; Parten (1932), "Social Participation among Pre-School Children"; Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976), "The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving"; Baumrind (1966), "Effects of Authoritative Parental Control on Child Behavior"; Elkind (1967), "Egocentrism in Adolescence"; and Marcia (1966), "Development and Validation of Ego-Identity Status". Piaget, Vygotsky, Kohlberg, and others are taught with their key ideas, and with their critics where the field has them, such as Gilligan's In a Different Voice on Kohlberg's account of moral reasoning. Each theory is a model, a tool for reading a child's behavior, and none is the one right answer.

Our approach: care, accuracy, and evenhandedness

Four commitments run through every week.

Ages are ranges, not deadlines. Every age in this course is a typical range. You will read "most children walk alone somewhere between about 8.2 and 17.6 months", from the World Health Organization's Motor Development Study (2006), never "children walk at 12 months". A child outside a range is a reason for a family to talk with a health professional, never a conclusion the course draws. Piaget's, Erikson's, and Kohlberg's stages carry approximate ages, and no graded item treats a model's age as a rule.
Research categories are not labels. Attachment classifications, temperament types, parenting styles, and identity statuses are categories for patterns of observed behavior. The course never applies one to a real child, parent, or teen, and neither do you.
Attribution is checked. Each term goes to the researcher who proposed it. For example, "scaffolding" is the term of Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976), usually linked to Vygotsky's ideas but not his own word; the disorganized attachment pattern was described by Main and Solomon, after Ainsworth's three; the neglectful parenting style was added by Maccoby and Martin, not by Baumrind; and adolescent egocentrism is Elkind's term, while egocentrism in early childhood is Piaget's.
Evenhandedness is part of the work. Families raise children in many structures and cultures, and no family form, culture, language, or income level is presented as the norm the others fall short of. The course argues no policy question. Questions that are argued in public, such as screen-time limits, spanking, sleep training, and school start times, appear only where a week covers them, as named debates with each side's strongest case and no verdict. Where research findings are contested, each side's evidence is presented and no verdict is keyed. Findings that are documented, such as the evidence against learning styles, are stated plainly and not staged as debates. No living politician, party, outlet, or commentator appears in the course.

No grade depends on which view you hold on a contested question. Your grade depends on keeping behavior apart from interpretation, applying a concept accurately, stating an age as a range, attributing a theory or study correctly, describing each side of a real debate fairly, and supporting what you conclude with evidence.

Health and safety guidance

Some weeks touch on health and safety. In every one of them, the guidance is the issuing body's, quoted or closely paraphrased with the body and the year, and never softened, extended, or turned into advice for one child or family. The course does not tell you what a real child needs medically; questions about a particular child's health or development belong with that child's own health professional. The guidance you will meet:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states: "There is no known safe amount of alcohol use during pregnancy." (Week 4)
The American Academy of Pediatrics' 2022 safe sleep policy statement says to place babies on their backs for every sleep until age 1, on a firm, flat surface. The NICHD's Back to Sleep campaign began in 1994 and was expanded and renamed Safe to Sleep in 2012. (Week 5)
The World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first 6 months, stated as that body's recommendation and with respect for families who feed infants in other ways. (Week 5)
The CDC's milestone checklists, revised in 2022, list what most children (75 percent or more) do by each age. A checklist is a reason to talk with a health professional, never a diagnosis. (Week 6)
The American Academy of Pediatrics' 2018 policy statement Effective Discipline to Raise Healthy Children recommends against spanking, and its 2026 policy statement "Digital Ecosystems, Children, and Adolescents" replaced its earlier media guidance. Both are stated as that body's positions. (Week 10)
The American Academy of Pediatrics' 2014 policy statement says middle and high schools should aim for a start time of no earlier than 8:30 a.m. (Week 13)

Required Materials

You buy no textbook and pay nothing for course materials. Every reading and video is a link to an external resource, opened from the week's page so you always reach the version the course teaches from. Beyond a web browser, you need these free tools:

A notebook or any free note-taking app: for observation records kept in two columns, what the child did and said in one and possible interpretations in the other, with everyone identified by role and age, never by name.
A free spreadsheet: Google Sheets or any free spreadsheet, for the counts and percents in a time or event sample. Every step is spelled out, and every Child Observation Workshop also gives a route that works the counts by hand.
Free issuing-body sources: the guidance, definitions, and figures the course uses come from the issuing body's own pages, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Administration for Children and Families, the Census Bureau, and stopbullying.gov. You open each one from its link; none costs anything.
A free account with one approved AI chatbot, from the list in the AI-Use Policy below. A free tier is enough for everything in this course, and every AI-based activity also has a route that needs no AI at all.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course you will be able to:

Outcome A. Developmental observation and analysis: record a child's behavior in an observation record that keeps what the child did apart from its interpretation, apply a developmental concept accurately, read the behavior against a typical range rather than a deadline, and explain it with two theories, stating the reading in one plain sentence.
Outcome B. Evidence and ethics: distinguish correlational from experimental findings, attribute theories and studies correctly, follow ethical observation practice (no identifying details, no assessment or labelling of a real child), and verify any claim about an age norm, a study, or a health guideline, including AI output, against a primary or issuing-body source.

The nine course objectives below build toward those two outcomes. Each week's overview page names the objective that week serves and turns it into a short checklist of what you should be able to do by the end of the week.

Explain child development's domains, periods, and core questions (nature and nurture, continuity and discontinuity), the ecological systems model, and the major theories of development, describing what each theory explains and what it leaves out.
Describe research and observation methods with children — descriptive, correlational, and experimental designs; longitudinal and cross-sectional designs; running records, anecdotal records, checklists, and time and event sampling — and the ethics of consent, assent, and confidentiality.
Describe prenatal development and birth: the germinal, embryonic, and fetal periods, teratogens and sensitive periods, birth, and the newborn's Apgar assessment.
Analyze physical, cognitive, and language development in infancy and toddlerhood: brain development, reflexes, motor milestones as windows of achievement, safe sleep, the sensorimotor stage, object permanence, and early language.
Analyze social-emotional development in infancy and toddlerhood: early emotions, temperament and goodness of fit, attachment theory and research, and Erikson's first two stages.
Analyze development in early childhood: preoperational thought, Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, theory of mind, play, emotion regulation, parenting dimensions and styles, and gender development.
Analyze development in middle childhood: concrete operational thought, information processing, intelligence and learning, self-esteem, friendship, bullying, and moral reasoning.
Analyze development in adolescence: puberty, the adolescent brain, formal operational thought, adolescent egocentrism, identity statuses, and relationships with parents and peers.
Evaluate how family, culture, poverty, childcare, adversity, and resilience shape development, and synthesize the course's domains and theories in a reading of one child's development from birth to adolescence.

How this course works

Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so you can choose how to take it in. Each module's lecture page also carries the week's explanation as one spoken-style walk-through.

A typical week runs in this order:

Week overview. Open the module's overview page, titled "Week N Overview" (for example, Week 1 Overview). It lists the week's work in order with time estimates and names the week's checkpoint, the one thing you should be able to do by the end of the week.
Chapter (about 35 to 55 minutes; each chapter prints its own time). The week's primary reading, where each idea moves from plain words to the term to an observation record. Read it first.
Lecture page and slide deck (about 15 to 20 minutes for the lecture, plus time with the deck). The same ideas, explained aloud and in slides.
Readings and videos. An optional go-deeper menu; every video has captions.
Lecture tutorial (60 to 90 minutes). A one-on-one session with your chatbot that teaches, gives practice, and ends with a completion summary you submit.
Practice set (15 to 25 minutes). Ungraded practice with a Socratic coach that asks questions, offers hints, and gives you a short self-check rubric for each problem, at your own pace and on fresh everyday scenarios.
Child Observation Workshop (about 90 minutes). One small observation worked end to end. You work from an illustrative record the workshop supplies, written in the week's method, with what the child did kept apart from what it might mean. You apply the week's concept, compare what two theories say about the record, and work any count or percent in words. Next, you ask your chatbot to read the same record, check every claim it makes about an age norm, a study, or a guideline, and catch and correct one of its slips by hand. You finish with a short reflection on what your own experience with children led you to notice or assume.
Discussion (about 45 minutes) and assignment (60 to 90 minutes). Where you put the week's ideas to work on an arguable, applied question and on problems of your own.
Quiz. A short auto-graded check of what you now know, taken on your own.

Week 8 is lighter: the chapter (about 35 to 45 minutes), the lecture, slides, readings, practice set, and discussion, then the study guide, exam-prep tutorial, practice exam, and midterm. Week 16 has no new module; it holds the final exam and its study guide, exam-prep tutorial, and practice exam.

Grading

Your course grade is the weighted average of the six groups below. The weights sum to 100%.

Grading weight by assessment group
Component	Weight
Tutorials & Practice	10%
Quizzes	10%
Workshops	20%
Assignments	25%
Discussions	15%
Exams	20%
Total	100%

What each group holds

Tutorials & Practice: the 14 weekly lecture tutorials, one in every module except Week 8. The practice sets sit beside them and are ungraded.
Quizzes: 14 weekly quizzes, one in every module except Week 8. Quizzes are closed to AI.
Workshops: the 14 weekly Child Observation Workshops, one in every module except Week 8. Each Workshop publishes its rubric with it. The rubric rewards keeping behavior apart from interpretation, applying the concept accurately, using two theories fairly, catching and correcting the chatbot's slip, and the respect you show for the child and family, never a judgment of the child.
Assignments: 14 weekly assignments, one in every module except Week 8. Each assignment publishes its rubric with the assignment.
Discussions: 15 weekly discussions, one in every module from Week 1 to Week 15.
Exams: the midterm in Week 8 and the cumulative final in Week 16. Within this group, the final carries twice the midterm's weight.

Each week's discussion, and each week's assignment outside Week 8, ships in two versions. The adaptive version is published and graded by default. A traditional version that uses no AI is also in the module, unpublished; your instructor may publish it instead. An unpublished version does not appear to you and does not count. A published traditional version takes the adaptive one's place in the same group and counts the same.

Letter grades follow the standard scheme:

Letter grade by final course percentage
Letter	Percentage range
A	90–100
B	80–89
C	70–79
D	60–69
F	below 60

Weekly Schedule

The course runs for sixteen weeks: fifteen weeks of modules and a finals week. Every module from Week 1 to Week 15 holds the same materials: the week overview, the chapter, the lecture page (titled "Lecture:" followed by the module's title), the slide deck, the readings and videos page, and the practice set. Every module also ships both an adaptive discussion and a traditional no-AI alternative, and every module except Week 8 ships both an adaptive assignment and a traditional no-AI alternative. The adaptive versions are scheduled, graded, and published; the traditional alternatives are unpublished by default and count only if your instructor publishes them instead.

Module title, published graded work, and unpublished traditional alternatives by week
Week	Module	Graded and published	Traditional alternative (unpublished)
1	Introduction: What Child Development Is	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
2	Theories of Development	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
3	Studying Children: Research, Observation, and Ethics	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
4	Prenatal Development and Birth	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
5	Infancy and Toddlerhood: Physical Development	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
6	Infancy and Toddlerhood: Cognitive and Language Development	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
7	Infancy and Toddlerhood: Social-Emotional Development	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
8	Midterm Review & Exam	Adaptive discussion, midterm exam	Discussion
9	Early Childhood: Physical and Cognitive Development	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
10	Early Childhood: Social-Emotional Development	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
11	Middle Childhood: Physical and Cognitive Development	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
12	Middle Childhood: Social-Emotional Development	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
13	Adolescence: Physical and Cognitive Development	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
14	Adolescence: Social-Emotional Development	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
15	Contexts of Development and the Course Synthesis	Tutorial, Child Observation Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
16	Finals week (no module)	Final exam	None

What each week asks of you

Week 1. Workshop: Reading a Story-Time Record by Domain and by Setting. Discussion: Labels, Settings, and the Whole Child. Assignment: Reading the Running Case: Periods, Domains, and Settings.
Week 2. Workshop: Two Theories, One Kitchen. Discussion: Which Lens, and What Does It Miss? Assignment: One Moment, Three Lenses: Theories at Work.
Week 3. Workshop: One Playground Morning, Three Ways to Record It. Discussion: What Should a Record Keep? Assignment: Recording R4 Two Ways: An Observation Methods Report.
Week 4. Workshop: Reading a Newborn's First Record. Discussion: Before Birth: Nature, Nurture, or Both? Assignment: Reading a Newborn's First Score: Record R1, Step by Step.
Week 5. Workshop: Ten Minutes of Moving. Discussion: One Age or a Window? Assignment: A Window, Not a Deadline: Reading Motor Milestones and Safe Sleep.
Week 6. Workshop: Ten Hiding Games. Discussion: What Does the Baby Know? Assignment: Where Did the Toy Go? Reading Infant Thinking, First Words, and Checklists.
Week 7. Workshop: Ten Minutes at the Play Group. Discussion: Style, Bond, or Neither? Assignment: Style, Bond, or Stage? Reading First Relationships.
Week 8. Discussion: Side by Side, or Together? Then the midterm, taken on your own.
Week 9. Workshop: Ten Minutes at the Block Table. Discussion: Step In or Let It Be? Assignment: Playing Beside, Playing With: Reading a Play Time Sample.
Week 10. Workshop: Ten Minutes at the Sandbox. Discussion: Is There One Best Way to Raise a Child? Assignment: Two Questions, Four Styles: Reading Parent Responses Fairly.
Week 11. Workshop: Ten Minutes at the Game Table. Discussion: Stage Ages, or the Reasons Behind Them? Assignment: More Dogs or More Animals? Reading Class Inclusion and Conservation.
Week 12. Workshop: Ten Minutes at Soccer Practice. Discussion: Justice, Care, and the Word "Bullying". Assignment: Rules, Fairness, and the Word "Bullying": Reading a School-Age Child's Words.
Week 13. Workshop: Ten Minutes at the Robotics Table. Discussion: An Explanation, or an Excuse? Assignment: Sure Everybody Saw: Reading Record R8 and the School Clock.
Week 14. Workshop: Ten Minutes with a Teen Leadership Group. Discussion: Should a Teen Be Pushed to Decide? Assignment: Two Questions, Four Statuses: Reading Teen Statements Fairly.
Week 15. Workshop: Six Records, One Child, Many Settings. Discussion: Which Lens Reads the Whole Child? Assignment: Reading the Whole Child: The Running Case from Birth to 15. Together they bring the course to a close: family forms and culture described without ranking, poverty, childcare quality and early education, adverse childhood experiences and resilience, and the running case's 8 records read from birth to 15 across every domain and theory.

The midterm and the final

The midterm in Week 8 covers Objectives 1 to 5 as taught in Weeks 1 to 7. Week 8 itself reviews those weeks by the one distinction each topic asks for: the three domains and nature and nurture, what each theory explains, correlational against experimental research, description against interpretation, the embryonic against the fetal period, a range against a deadline, object permanence, receptive against expressive language, and temperament against attachment. Its one piece of new material, play as a window on development through Parten's (1932) six categories of social participation, is worked in that week's chapter, practice set, and discussion.

The final in Week 16 is cumulative and draws on all nine course objectives. It gives the most weight to the second half of the course, Objectives 6 to 9 (early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, and the contexts of development with the course synthesis), while still drawing on every first-half objective, Objectives 1 to 5. Both exams come with a study guide, a practice exam, and an exam-prep tutorial you work with your chatbot. Both are auto-graded, so every item is multiple choice, multiple answer, matching, or true/false, and any table an item uses is small and described in words.

Attendance and Participation

This course meets in person twice a week. Come to class having opened the week's overview page and read the chapter, because class time builds on that reading with records, theories, and comparisons. Your participation also shows in your weekly work: the tutorial, the Child Observation Workshop, the discussion, the assignment, and the quiz. Each week builds on the ones before it (you cannot read a preschooler's play through two theories until you can keep the record apart from its interpretation), so falling a week behind is the most common reason a grade slips. Keep to the weekly rhythm, and talk to your instructor the moment a week stalls. If you must miss class, follow the week's module from its overview page so you stay on pace.

Late Work

Late work loses 10% of the item's credit for each day it is late. If something serious comes up, such as an illness or a family emergency, contact your instructor before the due date whenever you can so the two of you can agree on a fair plan. The penalty exists to keep the course moving, not to punish genuine hardship.

Academic Integrity

The work you submit must be your own, and you are bound by your institution's academic integrity standard. Do not copy another student's work, do not submit work you did not do, and do not misrepresent how a piece of work was produced. In a course built on evidence about children, integrity also means honest evidence: every claim about an age norm, a study, or a health guideline traces to a source you can name, every theory and study is credited to the researchers who proposed it, and the running case and every course record are always treated as illustrative. Three violations matter most in this course: inventing a study, a statistic, a quotation, or a guideline, or crediting one to a real researcher or health body, including one a chatbot supplied; fabricating or doctoring a chatbot conversation or its share link; and using AI on the quizzes, the midterm, or the final. Violations are handled under your institution's academic integrity process and may result in no credit for the item.

Observing children: privacy and ethics

Protecting children is a course policy, not only a topic. No graded work requires you to observe a real child: every Child Observation Workshop supplies its own illustrative record, and the default material all term is the running case. Week 3 teaches the research ethics that sit behind this policy, as the Society for Research in Child Development sets them out in its Ethical Principles and Standards for Developmental Scientists, approved in 2021: informed consent from a parent or guardian, the child's own assent in words the child can understand, confidentiality, and every child's right to stop at any time.

If you choose to do an optional live observation, the course's observation rules govern it, and they are strict.

Where. Only in a public place where watching children is ordinary, such as a park, a library story time, or a children's museum, and only from a distance; or in a licensed program with the program's written permission.
What you never do. You never interact with, photograph, or record a child. You write no name or identifying detail about any child, family, or program.
No judging a real child. You never assess, screen, or label a real child, and nothing you write suggests that a real child is "behind". Research categories describe patterns in research, not the children you see.
Family members. A family member observing their own child follows the same rules and shares nothing that identifies the child.

Before an optional observation in a licensed program, you read the course's permission script to the program director, word for word:

"I'm a student in a child development course, and I'm learning to observe children's play. May I observe the children in one of your play areas for about twenty minutes? I won't interact with the children, I won't take photos or recordings, and I won't write down any names or anything that identifies a child or family. I won't assess or evaluate any child. Is that all right?"

If the director says no, you do not observe there. The same rules apply to everything you submit, post, or paste into a chatbot: children and adults appear by role and age only. Sharing a photo, a recording, or an identifying detail of a real child in course work is a serious breach of this policy and is handled under your institution's academic integrity process.

Accessibility and Disability

This course is designed to reflect universal-design principles and offers multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression. If you have a disability and need an accommodation, contact your institution's disability services office to arrange it, and let your instructor know so it can be put in place promptly. If any material is hard to use with your assistive technology, tell your instructor and an equivalent version will be provided. Every table, observation record, and chart in the course, including any that a quiz or exam item refers to, is described in words as well as shown. This course is not yet accessibility-certified, and your feedback helps improve it. The course page Accessibility & Inclusion in Module 0 explains how the course offers multiple modes, how to turn on captions, and how to request an accommodation.

AI-Use Policy

This course uses an AI chatbot as a sparring partner, and then asks you to check its claims and correct its work by hand. Use any one of the approved chatbots: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, or Microsoft Copilot. Your instructor may edit this list. Free tiers are fine, and Copilot is often included with a campus Microsoft 365 account.

AI may be used on these activities:

Lecture tutorials (completed with a chatbot). Each week you work the tutorial in a conversation with an approved chatbot, then submit the conversation share link and your completion summary.
Practice sets (ungraded). You work the practice exercises with a chatbot coach that asks questions and offers hints.
Adaptive discussions (completed with a chatbot). You hold a real-time dialogue with an approved chatbot, then post the AI's summary with the conversation share link. This version does not require replies to classmates.
Adaptive assignments (AI-coached). You do your own work first, then work it through with a chatbot coach that scores it against the assignment's scoring criteria, and submit the self-scored report, your revised work, and the conversation share link. You remain the author: the coach asks questions and checks your reasoning; it does not write your reading for you.
Child Observation Workshops (a pair-consult step and a required AI-critique step). After your own reading, you ask your chatbot to read the same record, and you check every claim it makes about an age norm, a study, or a guideline against the pinned source before trusting any of it. Then you catch and correct one of its slips by hand, such as stating an age as a deadline; using a developmental norm to judge or diagnose an individual child; presenting a stage theory's ages as exact; crediting a term to the wrong researcher; inventing a study, a statistic, or a quotation; presenting a myth such as learning styles as a finding; presenting a correlation as a cause; treating one culture's or family form's practice as the norm; using a research category as a label for a real child; or giving safety guidance that contradicts the issuing health body.
Exam-prep tutorials and studying. Use AI freely to review, to check your understanding, and to prepare for the exams.

AI may not be used on the quizzes, the midterm, and the final. These are closed to AI and must be entirely your own work, because they confirm that you personally can define the course's distinctions, name each model's categories in order, read an observation record, and match a parent's response to its style or a teen's statement to its identity status.

A chatbot is not a source. It can explain a term or quiz you on a distinction, but it often sounds most confident where it is least reliable. It may turn a typical range into a single age, credit a term to the wrong researcher, describe a correlation as a cause, or produce studies, statistics, and quotations that look real and are not. It may also give health or safety advice that differs from what the issuing body says. Every claim it makes about an age norm, a study, or a guideline you check against the pinned or issuing-body source before you use it.

If your instructor publishes a traditional alternative. A traditional discussion is your own post and your own replies to classmates; a traditional assignment is your own submitted work, graded by your instructor. AI may help you think, but you write and submit the work yourself.

Disclosure. The share link documents your AI use on the AI-based activities, so they need no separate note. For any other graded work where AI help is allowed, add one line naming the tool and how you used it.

BYO-AI Access: equity, cost, and privacy

Equity and a non-AI route. You never have to create an account with a chatbot company to complete this course or to reach any grade in it. Every AI-based activity in this course carries an Equivalent route (no AI required) on its own page. It assesses the same objectives, for the same credit, against the same rubric. Take it whenever you like, for any reason or none; you do not have to ask permission, explain, or arrange it in advance.
Cost. A free tier of any approved chatbot covers everything in this course. No graded work depends on a paid subscription.
Privacy. Before you start, read what your chosen chatbot keeps of your conversations and how it uses them. Never paste personal information you would not want stored, and never paste anything that identifies a child or a family: your records identify people by role and age, not names, and they should stay that way when a chatbot reads them. Remember that a share link lets anyone who has it read that conversation.

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