Week 11 — Readings & Resources

Your primary reading is Chapter 11 (in this module). Everything below is the optional, go-deeper layer — pick what helps, skip the rest.

How to use this page

This page has 10 items (4 readings and 6 videos). Allow 71–84 minutes for everything. Each group points back to the matching chapter section and class-session segment, so use the full menu when you want more practice, or take the quick path below.

Every video here has captions: turn them on with the CC button in the player. The chapter covers the same ideas in text.

Pick-one quick path (16–20 min total)

• The Growth of Knowledge: Crash Course Psychology #18 — CrashCourse
• The Zone of Proximal Development: An Affirmative Perspective in Teaching ELLs/MLLs — a state education agency's teaching brief

① How does a child's thinking change? Piaget's four stages

Chapter 11, Section “Climb Piaget's staircase: four stages in one order” · Session 1, Segment 2, “Piaget's four stages” · Remember: the four stages always run sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational, with boundaries at about 2, 7, and 11.

• The Growth of Knowledge: Crash Course Psychology #18 — CrashCourse — a fast tour of all four of Piaget's stages, with a closing look at Vygotsky and scaffolding; use it while working through the Week-11 module overview. (video, 10 min) (captions: creator)
• Cognitive Development: Preoperational Stage (Intro Psych Tutorial #177) — PsychExamReview — a closer look at the preschool mind, with conservation tasks and egocentrism explained step by step. (video, 9 min) (captions: creator)
• Piaget's Theory and Stages of Cognitive Development — Simply Psychology — read the summary of the four stages and the section on each stage's key milestones; skip the history of the theory at the end, and keep the chapter's boundary ages where the wording differs. (reading, 10–15 min)

② What does good help look like? The zone of proximal development

Chapter 11, Section “Add the helper: Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and scaffolding” · Session 1, Segment 4, “Zone of proximal development and scaffolding” · Remember: the zone of proximal development is the gap between what you can do alone and what you can do with help, and scaffolding comes down as skill grows.

• The Secret to Better Learning in the Classroom — John Spencer — a short animated explainer of the zone of proximal development and how teachers build scaffolding on it. (video, 3 min) (captions: creator)
• The Zone of Proximal Development: An Affirmative Perspective in Teaching ELLs/MLLs — a state education agency's teaching brief — a short brief for teachers of students learning English; read the opening definition and the section on scaffolding, which shows how support is planned and then taken away. (reading, 6–10 min)

③ What does a baby need besides food? Contact comfort and attachment

Chapter 11, Section “Ask what a baby needs: contact comfort and attachment” · Session 2, Segment 5, “Contact comfort and the Strange Situation” · Remember: Harlow's monkeys clung to the cloth mother, and the Strange Situation reads attachment from what a toddler does at the reunion.

• Attachment & Bonding (Intro Psych Tutorial #180) — PsychExamReview — a careful walk through Harlow's work and Ainsworth's Strange Situation, ending with why attachment is hard to explain with one cause. (video, 12 min) (captions: creator)
• Harlow's Horrifying Monkey Experiments — SciShow Psych — what the cloth and wire mothers showed about contact comfort, and why Harlow's later studies helped push research ethics forward. (video, 5 min) (captions: creator)

④ Who am I, and what changes with age? Identity and two kinds of intelligence

Chapter 11, Section “Finish with adolescence and aging: identity, fluid and crystallized intelligence” · Session 2, Segment 7, “Identity, fluid and crystallized intelligence” · Remember: fluid intelligence tends to decline in later adulthood while crystallized intelligence holds steady, so development is lifelong.

• Adolescence: Crash Course Psychology #20 — CrashCourse — the teen years, including Erikson's idea that adolescence is the search for identity. (video, 10 min) (captions: creator)
• Older Workers Possess Unique Cognitive Strengths — Association for Psychological Science — a short research news story on how older and younger workers differ on reasoning and vocabulary tests. This builds on Week 9's work with intelligence. (reading, 4–6 min)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

• Teen Development — MedlinePlus — a federal health page on the physical, mental, emotional, and social changes of the teen years; read the summary at the top, where teens start to develop their own personality and opinions, and connect it to the chapter's picture of adolescence as the search for identity. (reading, 2–4 min)

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell your instructor and use the reference above in the meantime.

Provenance: Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com