Week 2 — One Moment, Three Lenses: Theories at Work — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 2 of the term — match everyday behaviors to the theory that explains them best, read one observation record through three theories, and explain the reading to someone new to child development.

This week you learned the major theories of development: Erikson's psychosocial stages, behaviorism and operant conditioning, social learning, Piaget's and Vygotsky's theories named for later, the ecological model as a theory, and ethology with critical and sensitive periods. Last week you learned the three domains, the periods of childhood, and Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Child Observation Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

You will use two things from this week's chapter: Dataset E, Erikson's five childhood and adolescent stages (trust vs. mistrust, about birth to 1; autonomy vs. shame and doubt, about 1 to 3; initiative vs. guilt, about 3 to 6; industry vs. inferiority, about 6 to 11; identity vs. role confusion, adolescence), and the running case's record R4. R4 is illustrative and describes no real child: a child of 2½ years at a childcare center's block area builds a tower beside another child, both talking to themselves, with no shared plan; when a caregiver reaches in, the child pushes the hand away and says, "Me do it." Every age in this assignment is an approximate range, never a deadline.

Part A — match five behaviors to a theory. Here are five illustrative moments, written for this course:

1. At a robotics club, a 10-year-old works for weeks to finish a model and talks proudly about the skills it took.
2. At a bus stop, a 3-year-old copies an older cousin's way of waving to the driver, though nobody praised the wave.
3. A 5-year-old gets a sticker each time the shoes go back on the rack, and putting shoes away becomes more frequent.
4. A child's sleep and mood change after a parent starts night shifts at a hospital, though the child never visits the hospital.
5. On a pond, newly hatched ducklings follow the first moving figure they see.

Match each moment to the theory that explains it best: Erikson's psychosocial theory, operant conditioning, social learning theory, Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, or ethology. Use each theory once, and give a one-sentence reason that uses the theory's definition. Then work this problem, showing your reasoning:

1. Erikson described 8 stages across life, and 5 of them fall in childhood and adolescence. How many of his stages belong to adulthood?

Part B — read R4 through three lenses. Work this problem first, showing your reasoning:

1. R4's child is 2½ years old, which places R4 at stage 2 of Dataset E's 5 childhood and adolescent stages. How many of those 5 stages come after the stage R4 sits in?

Then write a 6–10 sentence reading of R4 in the course's order: what the child did, the concept, one theory, and what a second and third theory add. Use Erikson's psychosocial lens, a learning lens (operant conditioning or social learning), and Bronfenbrenner's ecological lens. Say what each lens explains and one thing it leaves out. Describe the child's behavior without labelling the child. End with one plain sentence that gives the reading.

Explain it to a non-expert

A new assistant at the childcare center asks you why a toddler would push away a helping hand and say "Me do it," and whether it means something is wrong. Write a 3–5 sentence message in everyday words that explains what one theory suggests, why the age attached to it is a range rather than a deadline, and one honest limit of reading a single moment. Explain any term the assistant might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a swim-school volunteer who asks why young swimmers copy the instructor's arm strokes before anyone corrects them. Model answer: "Kids learn a lot by watching. Psychologists call it social learning: children copy what they see others do, even before anyone praises them. That's why the instructor shows the stroke slowly first. One limit: watching explains how a child picks up the stroke, but not why one child practices it more than another."

Use that pattern for your message to the assistant, with your own explanation of R4.

Revise and reflect

Put your first draft away for a few hours, then reread it against Chapter 2. For each match, underline the word in your reason that comes from the theory's definition; tick each lens in your R4 reading that names both what it explains and what it leaves out; and check that your message calls the age a range, not a deadline. Make at least one change and keep both versions. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

• (a) Which change made one of your matches or reasons more exact, and which definition showed you it was needed?
• (b) Which change made your three-lens reading of R4 more complete, and what had you missed at first?

Deliverables

Submit one document or recording that contains, in this order:

• your Part A matches with reasons and your count of Erikson's adult stages;
• your Part B count of the stages after R4's and your three-lens reading of R4;
• your message to the assistant;
• your first and revised versions of the part you changed, and your reflection.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about five minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the matching, the reading, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com