Child adolescents observation

Child Observation Project Instructions & Grading Rubric

General Description: It is very easy to be around children without noticing fascinating aspects of their behavior. Indeed, it is rare when anyone intently observes a child for a continuous period, looking for behaviors that characterize an individual child or childhood. Conscientious fulfillment of this project will help the observer be a better and more appreciative student of child behavior. Many hours of study and practice will be required before a person would become an “expert” observer.

For this project, you need to find a child (0 – 12 years of age) and parent(s) who are willing to allow you to perform at least 2 hours of observation. Written permission must be obtained from at least one parent/guardian. A permission slip is included as a page in this document and should be turned in with your completed project. You should complete 2 periods of observation (1 hour each). Try to choose situations in which you think interesting behavior might occur, but avoid direct interaction with the child, if possible. The 2 hours do not necessarily need to be consecutive, but they should be of the same child.

During the first hour, you should observe specific behaviors of the child without focusing exclusively on one aspect of his or her behavior. Try to observe such behaviors as: general activities, activity of specific parts of the body, attention span, play, language, parent-child interactions, peer-child interactions, eating, television viewing, etc. Make detailed notes on what you observe. You may wish to make a list of activities you expect to observe before you start. Then, during the observation, you can note how often the particular behaviors occur and make specific comments about it. Make sure you concentrate on the child and are not carrying on conversations or performing other activities at the same time.

During the second hour, you should focus on one aspect of behavior that is particularly interesting to you. Choose a specific behavior such as shouting, reading, drawing, thumb-sucking, etc. Observe the child in a situation where you think this behavior may occur. Make detailed notes on the behavior. Try to observe antecedents and results of the behavior. For example, if you are observing aggression, what prompted the aggressive behavior and what were the results or consequences. If observation of antecedents and results does not apply, then you should attempt to determine the significance of the specific behavior in relationship to other behaviors.

You should type up the notes from both of your observation periods into a word document. These notes will be turned in with your paper, described below. The observation notes do NOT count towards the page requirements for your paper.

After you have completed the 2 hours of observation, you should find and read 2 peer-reviewed empirical research articles that present a study or discussion of the behavior you observed in the 2nd hour of observation. The article must come from a social science journal, not a popular magazine, newspaper, or book. One way to identify if an article is from a research journal is by checking if it reports collected data and statistical analyses of that data. Research journals can be found by using the Databases link on the UTPB library homepage. Examples of journals that are likely to contain peer-reviewed empirical research relating to child and adolescent development are Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Child Language, Journal of Social and Personality Psychology, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Adolescent Psychology, and many more. If you have tried to use the UTPB library databases or even going into the stacks themselves and still cannot find an article that directly discusses and/or studies the behavior you observed, please email me at fife s@utpb.edu, or come by during my office hours that are listed on your syllabus.

Paper: You will write a 3 – 5 page type-written paper in APA format that provides a description of what you observed, discusses how the research articles relate to the specific behavior that you focused on during the 2nd hour, and provides a brief critique of the observation technique that you used. Use APA style to cite your references in the text. Do not use sentences such as, in an article in Super Cool Research Journal, Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler observed some really neat things. Also, avoid using direct quotations as much as possible. You need to put things into your own words. If you must quote someone, be sure to properly cite it by including the page number. Your complete paper should contain the following sections:

1. Introduction (4 points): Provide a general description of the child subject (demographic information such as age, sex, etc) and the observation situation.

2. First hour of observation (20 points): describe the behavior or patterns of behavior that were interesting to you. Provide an analysis of the significance of the behaviors to the child’s development based on knowledge you are learning in class. Do NOT just put a chronological list of what the child did. You need to show evidence that you made careful observations. Describe the sequence of events and changes that occurred in the child’s behavior throughout the observation period

3. Second hour of observation (20 points): Demonstrate the occurrence or absence of specific behavior. Discuss the significance of behavior for the child and the child’s development in general.

4. Integration of research articles (20 points): Using your own words, describe how your chosen research articles relate to the specific behavior(s) you observed in the child. Describe what the research authors hypothesized and later found. Discuss how the research findings apply to the child whom you observed.

5. Scientific Methodology Implications (10 points): Discuss the implications of using an observation technique, like you had used, to learn about child development. Mention strengths and weaknesses of this technique. Include a discussion of why descriptive methods, such as observation, cannot prove the cause of the behaviors that are observed.

6. Reference section (4 points): You should include a reference section at the end of your paper with the citation information for your chosen articles, and any other references, in APA format.

7. Observation notes (6 points): You should type your observation notes from both the 1st and 2nd hour of observation. These notes should be included after the reference section and begin on a new page titled Observation Notes.

8. Signed permission (4 points): You must certify that you obtained a signed permission slip from a parent or guardian before you conducted your observations. You can certify this information in 2 ways. First, you can scan in, or take a picture of the signed permission slip and paste the picture onto an additional page that is added to your final word document. Second, bring the signed permission slip to me. If you choose to hand in a hard copy of the permission slip, I must receive it by the beginning of class on Monday March 20th.

9. General formatting (6 points): Please see the Formatting instructions section below.

10. Writing (6 points): Your writing should be clear, grammatically correct, and free of punctuation and spelling errors.

Plagiarism: Any copying and pasting from the actual research article or other papers or documents found anywhere (i.e., plagiarism) will result in all students involved receiving a 0 for the assignment.

Formatting instructions: Please format the document with 1” margins top, bottom, left and right. Please format the font to be 12 point Arial or Times New Roman. The line spacing should be double-spaced. You should use headings in accordance with the APA manual 6th edition. The following website provides a nice overview of APA style, http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/10/. Please include a title page as described in the APA manual 6th edition. Your paper should be between 3 – 5 pages in length in order to receive full credit. You should save your file as a word document that has your name and the name of the assignment (e.g., If your name is Optimus Prime your file would be named OptimusPrime_ChildObserve.doc or OptimusPrime_ChildObserve.docx). Your typed observation notes should be included at the end of your paper like an appendix.

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