This article talks about the motor skills of orphans and children who live with their families. The main focus of the study is to compare the motor skills of orphans and children raised in a family from the ages 4 to 8 months, onto their walking stage. The conclusion of this study was that children who are raised in an orphanage have slow growth in motor skills due to lack of attention and other learning traits.
The participants of the study were 59 infants raised in a typical home environment and 62 orphans, each of the participants were healthy, and the study was held in their homes. Independent t-tests were used in this study to the different scores of the groups, and the results the researcher got from each child showed that orphans did score lower than the children raised in family homes.
This study had 3 limitations, the first one being that the they did not follow the early milestones longitudinally, secondly, they didn’t gather any data about growth, and lastly, in order to keep the results level, they selected orphans from an orphanage that provided great childcare.
The author got his data from infants, so I don’t think there is any bias here. The results gained from his study support his theory, and I fell that the topic he talked about fits into what we learned these last couple weeks in the course. I say this because in the textbook it talks about how parents and the environments of an infant can have a big influence on the way that an infant develops its motor skills.
“For example, infants need to be motivated to touch something out of their reach in order to develop the skills they need to crawl to it,” (Santrock, 2014). Simply put, the article and our textbook have shown us how important it is that infants have someone to guide them while they are in this learning period.
This is a longitudinal study that speaks about the development of motor skills in preterm and early preterm infants, it lasted from the time of birth until the infants hit 24 months, then at the age they enter school. The main focus of the study was to determine if early birth defects stunted motor growth.
In this study, they looked into 11 gross motor milestones and they collected their data from the Longitudinal Preterm Outcome Project study, which consisted of 45,446 files. They chose the participants by choosing 2 preterm each and then 1 full term, which gave them a total of 2517 participants and the results were scored by a physician, once it his 24 months, which determined who was developing their motor skills at a normal pace.
This was done again when the participants entered school, so that they could see how preterm factored into their motor skills at this age. The results they got from this study was that children who were born preterm were negatively affected, and it showed that they had lower motor skills.
Since the study uses research found by another individual to support its theory, I can honestly say that there was no bias. It is similar to what we have read in the textbook in connect to preterm children, even if the mention of it was brief. In our textbook it says that preterm children “show learning disabilities, behavior disorders, or lower than average IQ scores,” (Santrock, 2014).
This article talks about the qualities of gender and activity interest in children age 7 to 19. Its main focus was to figure out the different factors of genders and compare them to environmental situations. The article suggest that children get and understanding for what is feminine and masculine from the things around them. It states that most gender personality traits stem from childhood and socialization pressures, and this pressure only increases with age. According to the article most gendered personality traits come from their childhood and the socialization pressures.
The participants of this study were fathers, mothers, and 364 first or second born siblings from 185 families and had previously been involved in a longitudinal study on family relationships. The collection of data started in 1995 and was taken again in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th, and 7th years. A questionnaire was also given to help determine personal social qualities. The results of this study tell us that as time passes the individual goes toward what is geared towards their gender.
I don’t believe that this article was biased, and the results obtained from the study fit with the theory. I don’t really remember reading about anything related to gender in the textbook, but I can tell you that this study was done to show you that we are born a certain gender, but we society if what determines which things are gender specific.
This article examines how the mother’s response to a child when they get angry influences the likeliness of problematic behavior during early childhood. This study had two hypotheses, the first one was a child’s internalizing or externalizing behaviors, and the second one being infants who experienced anger at higher levels needed warm interactions from their mothers.
The study did give us a little detail about what internalizing and externalizing behavior was and the study concluded the infants who experiences higher levels of anger benefited from the affection of a mother while those who didn’t receive that same attention worsened.
The study made us of interviews, home observations, and child assessments, before as I mentioned above, coming to the conclusion that infants who got extremely angry had a higher chance of showing both internalizing and externalizing behaviors, however the first hypothesis was proven false since they found no correlation to the severity of the anger and the maternal responses, while the second was proven true.
I don’t believe that this article is biased but it does contradict what we have learned in our course work, from John Locke, who believe that children were born as an empty canvas and learned their temperament from what was around them (Santrock, 2014). The article suggest that the temperament of a child is there since birth and isn’t changed by the mother’s affection, if we were to believe Locke’s work then all children would learn to be calm as long as the mother showed them. It is difficult to know whether the child is born with this temperament or if it is learned from the environment they are in but without further research we won’t know.
This is an article that talks about the observational and experimental studies done on the connection of physical activity to cognitive development from birth to 5 years old. The main reason this article was done is to figure out if there actually is a connection between the two.
This study had a total of 414 participants and used seven studies, five of which were experimental and two observational. The results of six out of the seven studies showed there were significant beneficial effects on one of the cognitive developments, and none of them found significant detrimental effects. Despite the evidence provided to use in the article, it still lacks the proof it needs to support the theory.
I don’t believe this article is biased, and it does have some relation to out coursework, since our textbook does talk about physical activity being related to cognitive development. A great example of this is when it says, “in infants, such schemes represent concrete behavior-a scheme for sucking, for reaching, and for each separate behavior,” (Santrock, 2014). I can say that with a little more research he might have been able to prove his theory.
This article looks into the amount of time spent outside in preschool and if it if connected to cognitive development. The main reason this article was written was to see if daycares had any influence on cognitive development. It did this by comparing daycares who had an hour of outside play to those who had several hours of outside play.
The research that they included in the article shows that daycares could have be linked to cognitive development, and they have a lot of evidence that supports this theory, but there was also research that found there are benefits of indoor activities on cognitive development too. So, it is safe to say that the theory if not fully supported by the evidence given.
I feel that this research was unbiased, but once again needs more research to back it up, and I don’t recall there being anything in the textbook that supports this theory either. There is a small section in the textbook that says that children who have outside childcare may be less positive and not want to work alone, but this isn’t strictly just for outside the home. I don’t think the topic of this article relates to what we learned in the course too much.
