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Academic Goals
Learning Goals for Psych 414: Cognitive Development
Jessica Sommerville
Course Overview: This course covers key theoretical perspectives and research findings concerning the development of children's thinking from birth through the early school years. We will focus on both the content of children's knowledge across a variety of domains and the abilities that contribute to the acquisition of this knowledge (e.g., mechanisms of change).
Learning Goals: The following learning goals can be accomplished by attending lectures, doing the readings, and completing class assignments.
- Acquire knowledge about basic aspects of cognitive development. What do children know about the world and how do they achieve this knowledge? (assessed by weekly quizzes)
- Develop oral communication skills through active participation during in-class discussions (assessed by small group discussions and presentations).
- Locate, select, read, and evaluate relevant research articles and distill the important information about the methodology employed, the main findings, how the findings fit into the larger literature, and why they are important. Use your own writing to summarize research articles and their implications (assessed by group discussions and research proposal)
- Develop written communication skills. Formulate a written argument that is logical and coherent, that relies on scientific evidence, and that draws appropriate conclusions from that evidence (assessed by research proposal).
- Learn how researchers design experiments to assess cognition in children, develop the ability to critically assess these studies, and put this knowledge into practice by designing your own experiment (assessed by group work and research proposal).
- Extend classroom knowledge and apply it to research and real-world issues. Use information from lectures and text to evaluate issues that pertain to children's cognitive development (assessed by small group discussion and small group asssignments).
