Lecture: Midterm Review & Exam
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 8
Opening
Picture three people in three places. A preschool teacher is watching two children build in the block area without saying a word to each other. A pediatric nurse is explaining a newborn's Apgar score to a tired, happy family. And a parent on a playground bench is wondering why two toddlers in the sandbox won't play together. Each of them is leaning on the same few ideas, and those ideas are what this lecture gathers up.
Here's where we are. Week 1 gave you the domains and nature and nurture. Week 2 gave you the theories. Week 3 taught you how researchers and educators observe. Weeks 4 to 7 followed one child from before birth through the first two years. You've done a lot, and a pile that size is hard to review. So I want to ask each topic for one thing: the distinction it asks you to keep.
Here's the plan. We'll take Weeks 1 to 7 one distinction at a time, and every example will be one you've already worked. Then we'll add one small piece of new material, play, and read a short record of one preschooler's play. The midterm checks Objectives 1 to 5 as taught in Weeks 1 to 7, and you'll take it without AI help. After this week, Week 9 opens early childhood.
1. The domains travel together
Think about a toddler's morning at a childcare center. The child walks in, says a word or two, and cries at goodbye. That's one morning, but it's three kinds of growth at once.
Week 1's first distinction is the three domains. The physical domain is the body, brain, motor skills, and health. The cognitive domain is thinking, memory, language, and learning. The social-emotional domain is feelings, relationships, and identity. They affect one another.
Our example is record R3 of the running case, an illustrative child the course made up to teach with. At 14 months, at morning drop-off, the toddler walks alone, says "ball", "up", and "more", and cries when the parent leaves. Walking is physical. The words are cognitive, because language is part of thinking. The crying and the comfort are social-emotional. Across all 8 records, Week 1 counted 4 physical readings, 5 cognitive, and 4 social-emotional, which makes 13 readings from 8 records. The extra readings come from records that show more than one domain at once.
Week 1's second distinction is nature and nurture, which work together. Genes and experience interact, and neither acts alone. R3's walk needs a maturing body and brain, and it needs the chance to practice.
Pause and try this. A friend asks you whether R3's walking at 14 months comes from genes or from practice. What do you say?
Think about what the walk needs.
Here's the answer. Both, working together, because walking needs a maturing body and brain and the chance to practice, so you can't split it into a genes part and a practice part.
2. Each theory notices something
Picture three friends describing the same movie. One talks about feelings, one about the plot, and one about the setting. Nobody is wrong, and each notices something the others miss. That's how the course uses theories.
A developmental theory organizes observations into an explanation that makes testable predictions. Let's run record R4 through three of them. At 2½ years, in a childcare center's block area, the child pushes away a caregiver's hand and says, "Me do it."
Erikson's psychosocial theory, from Erikson (1950), Childhood and Society, places this in toddlerhood, about 1 to 3. That's stage 2 of his 5 childhood and adolescent stages, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, and "Me do it" fits its autonomy side. The learning lens asks what has followed doing things alone, and whom the child has watched. The record can't show either, so this lens asks for more observation. The ecological lens places the block area in the child's microsystem, the setting the child is in every day.
Pause and try this. Which of the three lenses would want to know whether the child has been praised for building alone?
Think about which theory cares about what follows a behavior.
Here's the answer. The learning lens, because it asks what has followed a behavior, such as success or praise, and whether that makes the behavior more likely.
3. Goes together, or causes?
Imagine a researcher who visits families at dinner. She finds that families who read together more have children who use more words. It's tempting to say the reading causes the words. But a family with more evening time might do both.
So here's Week 3's first pair. Correlational research measures whether two things vary together. It can show that they're related, but it can't show that one causes the other. Experimental research changes one thing and compares conditions that children were randomly assigned to, so it can test a cause. Week 3 called back Bandura, Ross, and Ross (1961), who compared children who watched an aggressive adult with children who did not.
Week 3's second pair is about records. Objective description is what the child did and said. Subjective interpretation is what it might mean, and it lives in a separate column. In R4's running record, "pushes the caregiver's hand away" is description. "The child was annoyed" is interpretation. The record shows a push and three words; it doesn't show a feeling.
Pause and try this. The dinner study finds that reading and words go up together. Can it tell you that reading causes the words?
Think about what the study did and didn't do.
Here's the answer. No, because it's correlational: nothing was randomly assigned, so a third thing, like more evening time, could explain both.
4. Organs early, growth later, and five signs at birth
Picture a family at a prenatal clinic visit. One month the word the family hears is "embryo", and a few months later it's "fetus". Those two words mark two periods with two different jobs.
The embryonic period runs about weeks 3 to 8, and that's when the major organs and body structures form. The fetal period runs about week 9 to birth, a time of growth and refinement. If you remember one thing, make it this: the organs form in the embryonic period.
Then comes birth and the newborn's first check. The Apgar score rates five signs, each scored 0, 1, or 2, at 1 and 5 minutes after birth. The signs are heart rate, breathing effort, muscle tone, reflex response, and skin color. The total is always the sum of the five.
Our newborn is record R1. At 1 minute, heart rate and breathing each score 2, and muscle tone, reflex response, and skin color each score 1. Add them and you get 7. At 5 minutes, muscle tone and reflex response rise to 2, skin color stays at 1, and the total is 9. The most any baby can score is 10. MedlinePlus states that a score of 7, 8, or 9 is normal, and a 10 is uncommon.
Pause and try this. A relative hears that a newborn scored 7 at 1 minute and worries that the baby will struggle in school. What would you tell them?
Think about what the score is for.
Here's the answer. A 7 sits inside the normal range, and the Apgar score describes the baby's condition in the first minutes, predicting nothing about intelligence or later development.
5. A window is a range
Picture two toddlers at a family table. One stands up and walks to the window. The other, still seated, picks a pea off the tray with a thumb and finger. Both are moving, but with very different muscles.
Gross motor skills use the large muscles of the body, as in sitting, crawling, and walking. Fine motor skills use the small muscles, especially of the hands, as in grasping a spoon. So the walker is using gross motor skills, and the pea-picker is using fine motor skills.
Week 5's other distinction is a range versus a deadline. The WHO Motor Development Study, from 2006, reported a window of achievement for walking alone of 8.2 to 17.6 months. Take 8.2 away from 17.6 and the window is 9.4 months wide. R3 walks alone at 14 months, which sits inside it. A window that wide tells you there's no single right age to walk. A child outside a range is a reason for a family to talk with a health professional, never a conclusion this course draws.
Pause and try this. Someone says, "Babies walk at 12 months." How would you rewrite that sentence in this course's way?
Think about the window.
Here's the answer. Say that most children walk alone somewhere between about 8 and 18 months, because the WHO window is a wide range, not a deadline.
6. The hidden toy and the first words
Think of peekaboo at a family dinner. The adult hides behind a napkin, and the baby squeals when the face comes back. The game works because the baby is figuring out that things still exist when they're hidden.
That's object permanence: knowing that a thing still exists when you can no longer see it. Record R2 shows a famous slip. At 9 months, at home with a parent there, the infant finds a toy twice under the left cloth. Then the infant watches it go under the right cloth, and still searches under the left one. That's the A-not-B error, and Piaget placed it in the fourth sensorimotor substage, at about 8 to 12 months.
Week 6's other pair is about language. Receptive language is understanding words, and expressive language is producing them. At 14 months, R3 says "ball", "up", and "more". Those 3 words are expressive language. Receptive language usually runs ahead, so the toddler probably understands more than the toddler says.
Pause and try this. R2 searched for the hidden toy, but under the wrong cloth. Does that mean R2 has no idea the toy still exists?
Think about the fact that R2 searched at all.
Here's the answer. No, because searching at all shows some understanding, and the A-not-B error shows that object permanence grows in steps rather than all at once.
7. How a child reacts, and whom they reach for
Picture a crowded park. Two parents step away to buy a drink. One toddler wails loudly; the other frowns and goes quiet. When the parents come back, both toddlers reach for them. The loudness is one thing, and the reaching is another.
Temperament is the stable early differences among children in activity, mood, and reactivity. It's a child's own style. Attachment is a lasting bond with a particular caregiver, shown in whom the child seeks for comfort and uses as a secure base.
Back to R3. How hard and how long the toddler cries may reflect temperament. Whom the toddler turns to for comfort, and how the toddler glances back toward the caregiver while playing, is attachment. R3 is one morning, not the Strange Situation, so the course gives it no classification. The research has 4 classifications in all: 3 from Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall (1978), plus 1 from Main and Solomon. Each describes a pattern in a procedure, never a child.
Pause and try this. In R3, which part of the record speaks to temperament: the loud crying, or reaching for the parent at pickup?
Think about style versus relationship.
Here's the answer. The loud crying, because how intensely a child reacts is temperament, while whom the child reaches for is attachment.
8. Play, in six categories
Now for the new material. Go back to that sandbox. Two toddlers fill and dump buckets a foot apart, with no word between them. Nearby, one child wanders the edge of the playground. Another stands by the slide watching older kids. Two older children happily argue over who gets to be the clerk in their pretend shop.
This is play as a window on development. Play shows all three domains at once: the body moving, the mind planning, and the child learning to be with others. Parten (1932), "Social Participation among Pre-School Children", described six categories for how a child is taking part with other children at a given moment. Here they are in order. Unoccupied behavior is not playing, like looking around without settling on anything. Solitary play is playing alone with your own things. Onlooker behavior is watching others play without joining. Parallel play is playing beside another child with similar materials but without a shared goal. Associative play is playing together and sharing materials, without a shared goal or roles. And cooperative play is a group organized around a shared goal, like the pretend shop.
Remember R4 in the block area? The child builds a tower beside another child, both talking to themselves, with no shared plan. Week 2 promised that a name was coming. It's parallel play. And notice how I say it: behavior consistent with parallel play, never "a parallel player". A category names a moment, not a child.
Pause and try this. The grandparent says the sandbox toddlers "won't play together." Which of Parten's categories fits them?
Think about side by side with no shared goal.
Here's the answer. Parallel play, and it's a common, social form of play rather than a sign of a problem, because the toddlers chose to be near each other with the same materials.
9. Counting moments of play
How would you show that a child moves among Parten's categories? You'd watch at set moments and write down what you see. That's time sampling, from Week 3.
Our record is an illustrative play sample. An observer watched one 4-year-old at a preschool for 20 intervals of 30 seconds, which is 10 minutes. At the end of each interval, the observer coded what the child was doing. Unoccupied came up 1 time, solitary 3 times, onlooker 2 times, parallel 6 times, associative 5 times, and cooperative 3 times. Those counts add to 20.
To get a percent, divide each count by 20. Parallel is 6 out of 20, or 30 percent, the single most frequent category. Cooperative is 3 out of 20, or 15 percent. Play with other children means parallel, associative, and cooperative together, which is 14 out of 20, or 70 percent.
One more careful step. When you compare two percents, the gap is in percentage points. Parallel play's 30 percent is 15 percentage points more than cooperative play's 15 percent. That's a difference, so it's points, not percent.
Now read it through two lenses. Parten's categories say each code is one moment, so this child moved among all 6 categories in 10 minutes. Social learning theory adds that the 2 onlooker moments may be a way of learning how to join, by watching. Here's the reading in one plain sentence: this 4-year-old spent 70 percent of the sample playing with or beside other children, mostly in parallel play, and moved among the categories moment to moment.
Pause and try this. Someone reads this sample and says the child "is at the parallel stage." What's wrong with that?
Think about what the codes describe.
Here's the answer. Parten's categories describe moments, not stages, and the sample itself shows the child in all 6 categories within 10 minutes.
Closing
Let's pull it together in the order we went. The three domains travel together, and nature and nurture work together. Each theory notices something the others miss. Correlation shows that two things go together, while an experiment can test a cause, and description stays apart from interpretation.
The organs form in the embryonic period, and an Apgar total is the sum of five signs. A motor window is a range, not a deadline. Object permanence grows in steps, and receptive language runs ahead of expressive language. Temperament is how a child reacts, and attachment is whom the child reaches for. Parten's six categories name moments of play, and a gap between two percents is in percentage points.
Next in this module, you'll find the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the practice set, the discussion, and the midterm. And in Week 9, early childhood begins, and the play sample comes back.
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