Department: Master of Education
Module Description: Through this module, students will learn how to view individuals in the context of their overall life-cycle and stages of development. By learning about the different stages of development proposed by various developmental theorists, students are able to appreciate how individuals experience different developmental stages and what needs to happen for optimal development in cognitive, moral, and relational domains. Lectures will present theory and research in three main areas of child development including:
(i) Birth and early infancy - early experiences; changes in pre-adolescence, adolescence and adulthood; aging and death
(ii) Socio-emotional development - understanding and regulation of emotion; development in the context of relationships with parents and peers; understanding others; development of self and gender
(iii) Cognitive development - development of perception, language and cognition; developing minds and intelligence
Students are exposed to classical and modern theories of human development and to research which relates these theories to real-life examples. The initial assessment requires students to critique the ability of contemporary theories to explain behaviour, while the second assessment provides the opportunity for a reflective application to personal experience in educational settings.
Mitchell, P. and Ziegler, F. (2018). Fundamentals of developmental psychology. London: Routledge.
Watts, J., Cockcroft, K. and Duncan, N. (eds). (2013). Developmental psychology. 2nd edn. Cape Town: Juta.
Weiner, I. B. (2013). Handbook of psychology. 2nd edn. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
Bee, H. L. and Boyd, D. R. (2013). The developing child. 13th edn. New York: Pearson.
Boyd, D. R. and Bee, H. L. (2019). Lifespan development. 8th edn. Boston: Pearson.
Byrnes, J. P. (2007). Cognitive development and learning in instructional contexts. 3rd edn. Boston, MA.: Pearson International.
Coleman J. C. (2010). The nature of adolescence. 4th edn. New York, NY: Routledge.
Croker, S. (2012). The development of cognition. Andover: Cengage Learning.
Dolgin, K. G. (2018). The adolescent: development, relationships, and culture. 14th edn. New York, NY: Pearson.
Harris, P. L. (2011). The work of the imagination. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harris, R. (2009). The nurture assumption: why children turn out the way they do. New York: Free Press. Open resource
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1998). Development itself is the key to understanding developmental disorders. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 2(10), pp. 389-398. Request item
McClure, E. B. (2000). A meta-analytic review of sex differences in facial expression processing and their development in infants, children, and adolescents. Psychological Bulletin, vol. 126(3), pp. 424-53. Request item
Rajendran, G. & Mitchell, P. (2007). Cognitive theories of autism. Developmental Review, vol. 27, pp. 224–260. Request item
Santrock, J. W. (2010). Life-span development. 13th edn. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Schaffer, H. R. (2011). Key concepts in developmental psychology. London: Sage.
Shaffer, D. R. and Kipp, K. (2014). Developmental psychology: childhood and adolescence. 9th edn. Belmont, CA, USA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Siegler, R. S. (2018). How children develop. New York: Worth Publishers, Macmillan Learning.
Smith, P. K. (2010). Children and play: understanding children's worlds. Chichester: Wiley.
Wadsworth, B. J. (2006). Piaget's theory of cognitive and affective development. 5th edn. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
