Midterm Exam — Instructions

Overview

This is the scored midterm for Child Development. It checks the first half of the course, Weeks 1 to 7. That means the foundations: what development is, the theories that explain it, and how researchers and educators observe children. It also means prenatal development and birth, and the first two years of life: the body and brain, thinking and language, and feelings and first relationships.

The midterm has 25 questions, and every question counts the same. Twenty of them ask you to pick one option, three ask you to judge whether a statement is true or false, and two ask you to pick every option that fits. Any record, age, or table a question uses is written out in words inside the question, so nothing depends on reading a chart or a picture.

Every question practices a skill you have already used in the weekly quizzes, lecture tutorials, and Child Observation Workshops. You define one of the course's distinctions, name a model's categories in order, read a short observation record, total or read a pinned number, or state a health body's guidance the way that body states it. Children and families in the questions are illustrative: they are written for the course and describe no real child. Nothing on the midterm comes from outside Weeks 1 to 7.

Coverage and scope

The midterm covers Weeks 1 to 7, which is Objectives 1 to 5 as taught in those weeks. Here is what the drawn form holds, objective by objective, with the weeks its questions come from:

• Domains, core questions, and theories (Objective 1, 9 questions): 3 from Week 1, 3 from Week 2, 2 from Week 3, and 1 from Week 6. Review Week 1 as a whole: what the field studies, the three domains and how they work together, and the five periods as conventions with fuzzy edges. Then review the core questions (nature and nurture as interaction, continuity and discontinuity, universal and context-specific change, normative and non-normative influences) and Bronfenbrenner's nested systems around the child. Then review Week 2's theories, each with what it explains and what it leaves out. They are Erikson's psychosocial stages, behaviorism and operant conditioning, social learning and the Bobo doll study, and Piaget and Vygotsky as named lenses. Add the ecological model as a theory of settings, and ethology with critical and sensitive periods. Weeks 3 and 6 used those theories as lenses on records, so a few Objective 1 questions come from those weeks too.
• Research, observation, and ethics (Objective 2, 3 questions): 2 from Week 3 and 1 from Week 5. Review Week 3 as a whole: descriptive methods, correlational against experimental research, longitudinal, cross-sectional, and sequential designs, the five observation tools, objective description kept apart from interpretation, and consent, assent, and confidentiality with the course's observation rules. Week 5 kept what a child did apart from what it might mean while reading infant records, so that habit carries into it.
• Prenatal development and birth (Objective 3, 2 questions): both from Week 4. Review the germinal, embryonic, and fetal periods, genotype and phenotype, teratogens and timing, the three stages of labor, the Apgar score, and the two World Health Organization definitions, low birth weight and preterm birth.
• Infant physical, cognitive, and language development (Objective 4, 6 questions): 4 from Week 5 and 2 from Week 6. From Week 5, review the brain (synapses, pruning, myelination, plasticity), the six newborn reflexes, and gross against fine motor skills. Add the WHO windows of achievement read as ranges, safe sleep as the issuing health body states it, and the World Health Organization's breastfeeding recommendation. From Week 6, review Piaget's schemes, assimilation, and accommodation, the sensorimotor substages, object permanence and the A-not-B error, deferred imitation, the language sequence, and the CDC's milestone checklists.
• Infant social-emotional development (Objective 5, 5 questions): all from Week 7. Review the early emotions, temperament and goodness of fit, Harlow's finding and Bowlby's secure base, and the Strange Situation and its four classifications. Then review temperament told apart from attachment, Erikson's first two stages, and the emerging self, seen when a toddler recognizes their own image in a mirror.

By week, the 25 questions come out like this:

Weeks 5 and 7 carry the most questions, 5 each, so Week 5's brain, reflexes, motor skills, and safe sleep and Week 7's emotions, temperament, and attachment deserve the most review time. Week 3 comes next with 4. Weeks 1, 2, and 6 have 3 each, and Week 4 has 2. By objective, the domains, core questions, and theories carry the largest share, 9 questions, because three weeks feed them.

By difficulty, 9 questions are easy, 12 are medium, and 4 are hard. The medium and hard ones usually ask you to apply a concept to a fresh illustrative scene or to catch a common wrong turn, the way each chapter's misconception checks did.

Week 8's new material, Parten's six categories of play, is not tested on the midterm. It is still worth reading, because it reuses the time sampling you met in Week 3 and the three domains from Week 1.

These notes map the skills the midterm checks. The questions themselves are drawn from the course's question bank and are not listed here.

Instructions

• Attempts: one. The midterm is a single scored attempt.
• Time limit: there is no time limit. Take the time you need, as long as you submit before the exam closes.
• Window: the midterm opens in the Week 8 module and closes at the due time your instructor sets. Start early enough to finish comfortably inside that window.
• Navigation: the questions appear one at a time, and once you move on you cannot go back to an earlier question. Settle each one before you move to the next.
• Materials: every record, age, or table a question uses is printed in the question, so you need nothing else. The syllabus closes the midterm to AI and to help from anyone else. It sets no rule on paper notes, so your instructor will tell you whether any are allowed.
• After you submit: Canvas shows your result. The keyed choices stay hidden so the midterm stays fair for every student.

Academic integrity

The midterm is an individual, scored assessment, and it is closed to AI. Do not use a chatbot or any other AI tool, do not get help from another person, and do not share or post the questions during or after your attempt. These rules come from the course syllabus. The midterm confirms that you personally can define the course's distinctions, name each model's categories in order, and read an observation record.

The honest way to prepare is open to you. The study guide, the practice exam, and the exam-prep tutorial rehearse the same skills with fresh variants, and nothing on them appears on the midterm word for word.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com