Step 1: Find and describe two original empirical research articles that examine the same aspect of development in at least two different stages
- You can choose any two developmental periods from infancy to old age (Lessons 2 to 9). You do not need to choose consecutive stages. For example, you could compare parent-child relationships in early childhood to parent-child relationships in adolescence (skipping middle childhood).
- Within your set of articles, one article may focus on one stage, and the other article may focus on a later stage. But the topic needs to be the same, for example, personality in emerging adulthood and personality in old age. Another example could be to review two articles that include more than one age group (i.e., two cross-sectional studies, e.g., that both include comparisons between adolescents and adults) or two articles that follow participants from one stage to another stage (i.e., two longitudinal studies, e.g., that follow infants all the way to late childhood).
- In all cases you need to find two articles that discuss the development of the same topic at two different stages.
- Articles must present original research. Review articles and meta-analyses are not permitted. The researchers should have collected new data or conducted new analyses on an existing dataset.
- Your topic will likely be more specific than “cognitive” or “emotional” or “social” or “physical” or “perceptual” or “neurological” development because the research articles will be focused on a particular subtopic or process within one of these broad domains of development. That is, you will likely need to narrow in on a specific topic, like “working memory” or “emotion-regulation” or “peer support” or “executive function.”
Step 2: Discuss what you learned in the course about the topic and connect that to what you learned in the empirical research papers using the following structure.
Section 1: Introduce your topic (approximately .5 to .75 pages):
- Describe the aspect of development and how it is relevant within the stages/phases you have chosen based on what you have learned from the course material
- Describe and define the aspect of development.
- Describe the relevance of the topic to the stages/phases of development.
- Explain why you chose to discuss the topic at these two stages.
Section 2: Summarize the two empirical articles (approximately 1.5 pages; .75 pages for each article summary).
|
What to describe for each article: |
Where to find this in the empirical article: |
|
o Why did the researchers conduct this study? o What did they want to learn? o Think about the gaps in knowledge or limitations of previous research that they were aiming to address. |
Introduction (& Discussion) |
|
o How was the study conducted? o Who participated and what did they do? o Think about the study designs and types of measurement discussed in Lesson 1. |
Methods |
|
o What did they find? o What do the results tell us about the developmental process at these stages/phases of development? o Think about what the researchers learned and how it advances knowledge about this topic. |
Results & Discussion |
Section 3: Reflect on what you have learned about the topic across these stages (approximately .5-.75 pages).
- What question(s) did your review of the course material and the two empirical articles raise for you?
- Be sure to connect and integrate your learning across the course content and empirical articles.
- What research should be conducted in the future to answer your questions?
- What are the applied implications (programming, policy, etc.) for supporting positive developmental trajectories at these stages? That is, how could the results be used to help people at these stages? Who could use the results to help people? What would they do?
Formatting Guidelines
- Use essay format. That is, use complete sentences and paragraphs (i.e., no point form; no headings).
- Use 12pt Times New Roman font. Double space. 1-inch margins on all sides of the page (double check the defaults).
- Word limit = 1000 words (maximum 3 pages total). See page estimates above.
- Include a title, your name, course number on a separate title page (not included in the page/word count).
- To cite the text, follow this format: (Text, Section X.X).
- To cite a lecture, follow this format: (Lesson X, Section X, Slide X).
- To cite the empirical article, follow APA format.
- At the end of your paper, on a separate page, include the full APA reference citation for the two empirical papers. On separate pages after the references, copy and paste the abstracts, and include a hyperlink to the full version of the article (not included in the page limit).
- If you cite another optional source, like material from another course, or material from a popular media article, or material from another article you found during your search, use APA formatting to cite it in the text where appropriate and also include the full reference at the end of the paper.