Deck 2: Why You Are Assessing

Question 1

Give three examples in which culture has been shown to influence prenatal development.

Answer 1

Evidence that prenatal humans are influenced by culture has been shown in relation to maternal food selection, emotional stress experienced by pregnant women, and language spoken in the environment of the mother.

Question 2

Regarding the role of culture in development, what conclusions can be drawn from research using false-belief tasks to investigate the emergence of theory of mind in early childhood?

Answer 2

When carefully stripped-down versions of false-belief tasks are presented to people of widely different cultural backgrounds, they perform the same, but cultural variations appear when language and explanation are made part of the assessment.

Question 3

List three of the six characteristics of institutionalized public basic schooling (IPBS) that reflect the notion of "culture as medium."

Answer 3

The settings in which schooling occurs are distinctive in that they are removed from contexts of practical activity; there is a peculiar social structure to formal schooling, in which a single adult interacts with many children at a time; there is a distinctive value system associated with schooling that sets educated people above their peers; there is a special mediational skill, writing; group-based assistance is used to facilitate individual achievement; patterns of verbal communication are used in distinctive ways (e.g., teachers ask children to answer questions to which teachers already know the answer).

Question 4

What evidence exists to support the claim that schooling in middle childhood has effects on parenting in adulthood?

Question 5

Which of the following approaches tends to regard culture as an antecedent or independent variable that acts on psychological processes?

A) Cross-cultural psychology
B) Cultural psychology
C) Culture-as-medium
Multicultural psychology

Question 6

The accumulated wisdom and refinement that produces a tool or artifact would be considered an example of _____ culture:

A) Material
B) Ideal
C) Mental
D) Symbolic

Question 7

Cultural psychologists such as Shweder contend that human artifacts:

A) Are combinations of ideal and material culture
B) Are largely only symbolically inherited
C) Reflect universal features of human culture
D) Exist primarily in material culture

Question 8

Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of a developmental niche?

A) Shared biological changes related to brain development
B) Physical and social settings in which the child lives
C) Culturally regulated childrearing and socialization practices of the child's society
D) Psychological characteristics of the child's parents

Question 9

Current research on the role of schooling in cognitive development during middle childhood suggests that concrete operational thinking is not influenced by schooling but rather:

A) Schooling influences people's ability to understand the presuppositions of the testing situations
B) Preoperational thinkers tend to acquire domain-specific knowledge that is concrete
C) Children seek out opportunities to use concrete operations in school settings
D) Teachers are biased in their perception and assessment of students' concrete operational thinking

Question 10

Culturally embedded changes in relations between children and their social world as an integral part of the changing relations between their biological makeup and their behavior are known as:

A) Bio-social-behavioral shifts
B) Developmental stages
C) Culturally mediated development
D) "The garden metaphor"

Question 11

How do the three traditional views of human development held by Gesell, Skinner, and Piaget equate culture with environment, and in what ways does the view presented by Cole and Packer of "culture in development" offer an alternative?

Question 12

How does research on the influence of schooling suggest that language is a fundamental cultural influence on development in middle childhood?