Fall Semester 1998
Wednesdays, 1:00pm - 4:00pm
WHL 207
Sept. 2 | Overview of the course. Assumptions of a science of mind. A model of school learning |
Sept. 9 | Levels of explanations. Development as an explanation. Sept. 16 Criteria for developmental stages. Properties of developmental curves. |
Sept. 23 | Developmental tasks (pre-school and primary school) |
Oct. 7 | Developmental tasks (middle through high school) |
Oct. 14 | Mechanisms of human development |
Oct. 21 | Learning and cognition |
Oct. 28 | Classic theories of development |
Nov. 4 | Applied developmental issues: readiness and appropriateness |
Nov. 11 | Applied developmental issues: pedagogy and instruction |
Nov. 18 | Applied developmental & curriculum issues: reading and language arts |
Nov. 25 | Applied developmental & curriculum issues: social studies |
Dec. 2 | Applied developmental & curriculum issues: the natural sciences |
Dec. 9 | Applied developmental & curriculum issues: logic and mathematics |
Finals | Dec. 11-18 |
Apart from the initial handout of chapters, the subsequent readings will be taken from the following sources:
American Psychologist, February 1998 (vol. 53, no. 2). Special Issue: Applications of Developmental Science.
David Olson & Nancy Torrance (Eds). The Handbook of Education and Human Development,. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd, 1996.
Richard Lerner (Ed.) Theoretical Models of Human Development, Handbook of Child Psychology (Vol, 1), New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
Irving Sigel & Anne Renninger (Eds.) Child Psychology in Practice, Handbook of Child Psychology (Vol, 4), New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
Deanna Kuhn & Robert S. Siegler (Eds.) Cognition, Perception and Language, Handbook of Child Psychology (Vol, 2), New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
Usha Goswami, Cognition in children. East Sussex, UK: Taylor & Francis Group, 1998.
Eric Amsel & Ann Renninger (Eds,) Change and development: issues of theory, method, and application. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,1997.
Please confine your answers to your own ideas and your own analysis. Satisfactory answers cannot be had from a library or literature search per se. No bibliography is required or needed. You will be evaluated on the plausibility and cogency of your argument and analysis. Be sure you make statements that are true, supportable, and that follow from each other. It is possible to produce excellent answers on either side of each question.
In other words, it is not a matter of whether your response is right or wrong, but whether you make a coherent and convincing case. Essays may be revised after grading.
The topics and due dates for the essays are:
2. What kind of data could you obtain from an experiment or investigation that would entitle you to make the claim that your subjects were in a new developmental stage?
3. What difference would it make to a teacher to know that a certain behavior was developmental or not?
4. If psychology succeeds as a science such that there are a complete set of laws developed for human behavior, would novel or spontaneous behavior still be possible? How?
2. How can you tell a fact in developmental psychology from something that is not a fact? In your answer give an example of a fact and a non-fact.
3. Educators are fond of saying that educational practices should be developmentally appropriate. How can you determine whether an educational practice is developmentally appropriate or inappropriate? As in item 2, give an example of appropriate and inappropriate practices that occur in schools to support your argument.
2. If a second grade student had failed to master some subject matter, what kind of questions would the teacher want to ask before designing a remedial instructional program for the student?
Class attendance and informed participation is required, unless excused prior to class. Some class sessions may need to be rescheduled to a mutually agreed upon time.
The joint program in the behavioral sciences was discontinued at the end of the decade when each of the disciplines had secured the University's approval of their very own doctoral degree program. The faculty, in the face of the opportunity to specialize in their own fields, no longer supported the idea that there was a generic body of behavioral science knowledge that was sufficient for students from psychology, sociology and education, an idea that was so attractive in 1960s.
The College of Education established a Ph.D. program in curriculum, instruction, and learning in 1970, but the program, while more flexible and open to problems in curriculum development than the behavioral science program, was still heavily grounded in the methodology of the behavioral sciences. At the time the largest concentration of research faculty in the College were trained in one or another of the behavioral sciences, typically educational psychology.
The program was unique in its approach to the education of educational researchers. While there were few formal course requirements, students were required to demonstrate that they could handle all the tasks that research faculty in education routinely handle -- publishing research, designing graduate seminars, giving papers at professional meetings, developing curriculum materials for the schools, reviewing books, writing grant proposals, teaching courses, synthesizing portions of the research literature, and so forth. These demonstrations, the heart of the program, were compiled in a portfolio, as it was called.
In 1979-80 the College of Education was restructured and the Ph.D. program in curriculum, learning, and instruction was departmentalized. The new Department of Educational Development took responsibility for the students who were preparing themselves to do research in curriculum theory and the curriculum areas of reading, social studies, science, language arts, and mathematics, while the new Department of Educational Studies shaped the program to meet the needs of future researchers in applied human development, learning and cognition, research and evaluation, and educational policy.
Because the research training that was the strength of the Ph.D. programs did not address the needs of students who planned to work in the schools and education agencies as administrators and curriculum leaders, the College established in 1980 an Ed.D program in educational leadership for educational administrators in the region. The College recognized, in other words, that research training itself provided an inadequate basis for managing and leading the schools. The new program, like the Ph.D. in its day, was strikingly innovative. It was designed for those with full-time administrative responsibilities and it addressed their needs to be more effective leaders and to make better decisions. The heart of the program, in addition to the fact that students were admitted and progressed through the program as cohorts, was invention of the executive position paper device. To some extent the position papers replaced the traditional doctoral dissertation, which was taken as the proof that the student could execute a research study or program. The position papers were designed to show that the candidate could make and justify an important and wise educational policy decision.
In the fall of 1989, the College extended the Ed.D program to classroom teachers who were planning to take on the roles of lead teacher or career professional teacher as they are described in the various reform reports.
The doctoral programs in the College of Education are a microcosm of developments in Education over the last 25 years. The field of educational scholarship has matured in this period to the point that it can provide sound guidance for educational practitioners in a few areas. This has happened as educational researchers shed the limitations of the older behavioral research paradigms and included in the quest for better information about schooling and education, research paradigms from a wider set of disciplines and engaged more scholars who were closer to the schools than the educational researchers of the past.
The next phase in the development of the doctoral programs in education is currently underway in the merger of the College of Education with the colleges of urban affairs and human resources to form a new college, the College of Human Resources, Education, and Public Policy. The departments of the former College of Education have also merged and formed a new School of Education. The doctoral programs in Education are being restructured to take advantage of the combined strength of the former departments and the faculty within the new college who research issues of family, public policy, and communities.