Child and Human Development Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Rekha is in the embryonic period.

Prenatal development is divided into the germinal stage (the first two weeks after conception, until implantation), the embryonic period (from about the third to the eighth week, when the organs form) and the foetal period (from the ninth week until birth). The fifth week falls in the embryonic period.

The germinal stage has already ended by the fifth week, conception is the moment of fertilisation rather than a stage, and the foetal period begins only after the eighth week.

Answer: D

The statement that is not true is that human development starts from moment of birth till death.

Development begins at conception, not at birth: the prenatal period is one of the most rapid and important phases of development. That is why the first statement, that development is a pattern of change that begins at conception, is true.

The other statements are accepted principles of the life-span approach: development continues throughout life, and the physical, cognitive and socio-emotional domains are interwoven and influence one another.

Answer: A

The keyed answer is Represent it mentally. The wording of this question could not be traced to Piaget's own text, so what follows is what could and could not be confirmed.

Piaget held that knowledge is constructed by the child: infants first act on objects, and as they grow they build mental representations of the world, which they then use to organise and interpret what happens to them. On this reading, experience has to be held in the mind in some form before it can be sorted and made sense of, and the key follows it.

Option B, create schemes, is also close to Piaget, since schemes are the structures through which experience is organised, and they are built by assimilation and accommodation. The question's phrasing could not be checked against a source to show why A was preferred to B, so the University's key is kept as printed.

Intellectualise it is not a Piagetian term. Receive appropriate tuition goes against Piaget's view that children construct knowledge through their own activity rather than through teaching.

Answer: B

This is scaffolding.

Scaffolding, a term introduced by Wood, Bruner and Ross and closely linked with Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, is the support an adult or more skilled partner gives a learner: gaining attention, demonstrating, breaking the task into steps and adjusting help to the child's level, then withdrawing it as the child becomes competent.

Self-esteem building, 'cognitive structuring' and 'intelligence cueing' are not names for this kind of guided, temporary support.

Answer: A

This indicates muscular dystrophy.

Muscular dystrophies are inherited diseases in which muscle fibres progressively degenerate. Muscle strength declines over time, and movement and coordination become increasingly limited. Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the commonest form in boys, typically leads to loss of walking by the early teens.

Cerebral palsy results from brain damage around birth and is non-progressive. Spina bifida is a birth defect of the spinal column present from the start, and ADHD is a disorder of attention and activity, not of muscle strength.

Answer: B

An important daily living skill is using a microwave oven.

For a high school student with an intellectual disability, the curriculum stresses functional life skills that build independence: preparing simple meals, using household appliances safely, handling money, personal care and getting around the community.

Knowing multiplication tables, identifying states on a map and stating a paragraph's main idea are academic skills. They may be taught, but they are not daily living skills.

Answer: B

These are tasks of early adulthood.

In Daniel Levinson's theory of adult development, a young adult in the early adult transition and the stage that follows forms a Dream of the kind of life he wants, finds a mentor (printed 'mention') who supports that dream, chooses an occupation and forms intimate relationships and a family.

Middle adulthood involves reappraising the dream and becoming a mentor oneself, and late adulthood and old age deal with retirement, loss and making sense of one's life, not with these formative tasks.

Answer: A

The stages are gender labelling, gender stability, gender consistency.

In Kohlberg's cognitive-developmental account, children first learn to label themselves and others as boys or girls (about 2-3 years), then understand that gender is stable over time, so a boy becomes a man (about 4 years), and finally that it stays the same across situations, even if a boy wears a dress (about 5-7 years). This final understanding is gender consistency or constancy.

The other options put the stages in the wrong order; consistency cannot come before labelling, which is the foundation for the rest.

Answer: A

The most appropriate assessment is interest inventories.

For pre-teens, career planning is at the exploration stage: the aim is to help children discover what activities and fields appeal to them. Interest inventories, which ask about likes and dislikes among activities, are designed for exactly this and point children towards broad career clusters to explore.

Achievement tests measure what has been learnt in school subjects, behavioural observations record conduct, and intelligence tests measure general ability; none of them shows what kind of work a child would enjoy.

Answer: A

These are developmental stages.

Developmental psychologists divide the life span into periods, such as infancy, toddlerhood, early childhood, adolescence, early adulthood and old age. Each period of time with its typical changes and tasks is a developmental stage.

A developmental milestone is a particular skill reached at about a certain age, such as sitting, walking or speaking the first word, not a period of time. Psychomotor development is the growth of movement skills, one domain of development, and skill attainment refers to acquiring specific abilities rather than naming a period.