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Research Manual in Child Development

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This unique hands-on lab manual in child development provides great ideas and resources for teaching research courses involving child subjects. It includes projects in psychomotor/perceptual, cognitive, and social development. Projects are preceded by background essays on the history of that topic, related research, theoretical issues, and controversies. Each project has hypotheses to test, detailed procedures to follow, all stimuli, individual and group data sheets, empty tables, suggested statistics, discussion questions, and an updated bibliography.

Special features of this second edition:

*The introductory text portion details research considerations, including an introduction to psychological research, sections on developmental research, children as subjects, and general experimental research procedures.

*The popular Infant Observation project has the student visit homes with babies for a semester and provides practice in observational data collection, reliability assessment, and report writing.

*The cognitive development section includes two new subfields: Theory of Mind and Language--Children's Interpretation of the Word Big, in addition to classic studies of Piaget's spatial perspective-taking and attention and memory. The final chapter describes a suggested neuropsychological project.

*The socialized child section includes a new study on sibling relationships as seen by the older or younger sibling, in addition to the earlier projects on self-esteem, sex identity, and cooperation-competition. The final section describes a suggested cross-cultural interview project.

Table of Contents

Contents: Preface. Part I: Introduction--Research Methods. A Primer of Scientific Research. R. Wozniak, Section 1: An Introduction to Scientific Research. Section 2: Developmental Research. Section 3: Children as Subjects. Part II: Observational Studies. Infant Observation. Observation Projects. Part III: Experimental Studies. General Experimental Research Procedures. Psychomotor and Perceptual Behavior--A Classic Experiment. K. Stanovich, Experiment 1: Age and Sex Differences in Two Reaction-Time Tasks. Cognitive Development. S. Miller, Piagetian Research. Experiment 2: Spatial Perspective Taking: The Three Mountains Task. Theory of Mind: False Belief. Experiment 3: False Belief in Children's Theory of Mind. Attention and Memory. K. Stanovich, Experiment 4: Age and Sex Differences in Interference Proneness. Experiment 5: Semantic Processing in a Picture-Word Interference Task. Experiment 6: The Influence of Category Blocked and Random Presentation in Free Recall and Clustering. S.A. Gelman, Cognitive Development and Language. Experiment 7: Children's Interpretation of the Word Big. The Socialized Child. Self-Concept. Experiment 8: Age and Sex Differences in Self-Esteem. Sex Identity. Experiment 9: Differential Recall of Sex-Typed Material. Experiment 10: Preferences for Sex-Typed Material. Cooperation-Competition. Experiment 11: Cooperation and Competition as a Function of Sex of Dyads. Sibling Relationships. S.A. Graham-Bermann, Assessing Four Domains of the Childhood Sibling Relationship. Experiment 12: Sibling Relationships and Sibling Status: Older or Younger. A Final Project: Suggestions. Part IV: Appendices: Notes for the Instructor. List of Experiments.