Lifespan Development Essays

Lifespan Development Essays Lifespan Development Paper Lifespan Development Paper The paper analyzes the influence of various external factors on the cognitive and physical development of children. The results of an interview with an old relative are used to analyze the real-life implications of such influences and interactions. The paper includes the discussion of Piaget’s development theory, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and touches upon the questions of food insecurity, maternal personality, and their influence on the developmental and socioemotional outcomes in children. The goal of the paper is to analyze how multiple factors influence children’s development in real-life conditions. The paper can be used in the analysis of the parent-child interactions and the role in the cognitive and physical development of children. Lifespan Development That physical and cognitive development of children is influenced by a multitude of factors is difficult to deny. The availability of the basic resources like food, family environment, social conditions of living and relationships with peers altogether produce a marked impact on how children grow, how they interpret the reality and what they learn about themselves and their lives. A wealth of theories was created, to explain how different factors influence children’s physical maturation and cognition. However, only real-life cases and the analysis of real-life personalities can provide researchers with the detailed information about how children develop and learn. For the purpose of this paper, an interview was conducted with one of the distant relatives: a 85-year-old woman, she has numerous stories to tell about her childhood. Born in extreme poverty, she learned the difficulties of the infant life in a poor family at the early age. Her father died when she was 4 years old, and her mother was left with two older children, no job, and no desire to continue her life. The woman was growing and getting mature in the atmosphere of the continuous family stress. She remembers her mother, living in a constant state of depression, because she could not provide for her children. It was not before she was 9 that her mother married for the second time, and they gradually returned to a normal pace of living, with abundant food, clothes, and even additional resources to travel around the country. Before that time, all the woman could remember was hunger. Neither during her infancy nor during the first school years could she create close attachment bonds with her mother. Her mother was never interested in her school successes. She never asked about her problems and was never willing to share her concerns with the other children. There was a continuous sense of separation between them and their mother. As a child, the woman experienced serious problems at school. She failed to catch up with the learning successes of her peers and was one of the worst pupils in her class. She did not have any opportunity to learn at home because of the stressful atmosphere and the feeling of hunger. She could not devote herself to studies and learning, especially after the lunch time which she usually spent away from her classroom room. Surprisingly, but she was able to form numerous friendly relations with the peers from her neighborhood – now she deems these friendships as the only way to escape the stressful atmosphere of her family and house and to have someone to answer her questions about life. Those were the questions her mother could never answer. Another problem was in that she was the smallest in her class, and her classmates used to mock her because of this. Often, she would run away from school and miss lessons because she could no longer tolerate the pressure of her better-off classmates and felt absolutely unprotected in the face of social inequality. The woman believes that it was due to her family difficulties and her mother’s negligence toward her problems and personality that she could not learn to read until the age of 9 and that she lagged behind her peers in the basic disciplines. Based on this information and the results of the recent studies, it is clear that the lack of food and constant hunger did influence the woman’s physiological and cognitive maturation. The lack of maternal attachments/ bonds and family stress added to the complex family atmosphere and made it difficult for the woman to become a successful learner at school. The woman says that school years were the years of discovery and the time when she finally learned the reasons of her failures. This is logical given that, according to Piaget, at the age of 7 the child enters the stage of concrete operations (Anonymous, 2009). At this stage of development, the child learns to conceptualize the surrounding reality and to create logical structures that explain his or her physical experiences (Anonymous, 2009). School experiences led the woman to link her school failures to her hunger, her socially disadvantaged position compared with other classmates, and the lack of maternal support (the woman says that she felt absolutely unprotected in the face of the social inequality). Her failure to close the knowledge gap is easy to explain through the prism of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. According to Maslow, physiological needs are the first and the most important. â€Å"These are biological needs. They consist of needs for oxygen, food, water, and a relatively constant body temperature† (Simons, Irwin Drinnien, 1987). The lack of appropriate food and the constant feeling of hunger created conditions, in which a young girl could not think about anything but the physiological desire to eat. Whether the lack of food explains why the woman was the smallest in her class is difficult to define, but it is clear that she could not successfully meet her learning needs and goals until she could meet her physiological needs. Because of hunger, she could not concentrate on her studies, and felt weak and unprepared to grasp the new knowledge in the classroom. Abraham Maslow states that higher levels of needs are impossible to achieve and satisfy, until the first levels have been satisfied (Simons, Irwin Drinnien, 1987). Surprisingly or not, the sense of hunger in the small girl was constantly accompanied by the lack of maternal support. The feeling that she was not attached to her mother was a part of her daily reality. Those feelings and the pressure of the stressful family atmosphere on the physical and cognitive development of the young girl are easy to explain: Zaslow et al. (2009) discuss the implications of food insecurity for attachment and mental proficiency during infancy and toddlerhood. According to Zaslow et al. Food insecurity is â€Å"limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire food in socially acceptable ways† (p. 66). Zaslow et al. (2009) are confident that food insecurity does produce a marked impact on the cognitive and physiological development of children and results in behavioral and cognitive problems. Food insecurity raises the probability of grade repetition at school and leads to increased maternal stress and, consequentially, the lack of parental attachment (Zaslow et al. , 2009).

Full Analysis of ACT Grammar Rules Which Are Most Important

Full Analysis of ACT Grammar Rules Which Are Most Important SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips When you are planning your study approach for ACT English, it’s important to know where your time is best spent. Which grammar rules are really the most important to learn? What can help you make the greatest improvement to your score? What kind of questions are on ACT English? ACT English is a passage based test. There are 5 multi-paragraph passages and 75 questions to go with them. The makers of the ACT break the test down into two main sections: Usage and Mechanics questions and Rhetorical Skills. Usage and Mechanics covers questions about punctuation (including internal and end of sentence punctuation and avoiding ambiguity), grammar and usage (including subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, verb formation, pronoun case, comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs, and idiomatic use), and sentence structure (including modifier placement and relationships between clauses). In the past, these questions have made up about 53% of the questions on the test. The second main category is Rhetorical Skills. These questions will ask about strategy (including understanding when to add or delete information and how to best revise writing for a certain audience), organization (including choosing effective openings, transitions, and conclusions), and style (including choosing correct words, tone, style, and avoiding wordiness). Also grouped with Rhetorical Skills are questions that ask about the author’s goal. These questions test your ability to recognize main ideas and understand what the passage is about, and understanding the scope of the passage. These questions usually compose about 47% of the questions on the test. Since the most recent updates to theACT, the test makers are not sticking as strictly to these percentages, butthey are still good guidelines. What concepts are tested? And why should you care? Almost as predictable as the question types are the grammar and style rules that ACT English will test you on. ACT English heavily favors a few main grammar and style rules, and lightly touches on a multitude of others. Why should this matter to you? This means that especially if you are aiming for a mid-range score, you should focus your studying on the main grammar and style rules that are covered. But if you are aiming for a high score, you should make sure you know all the concepts listed here. Since ACT English has so many questions, even concepts that appear a low percentage of the time will almost definitely be featuredand could affect your score. How did I find this out? I analyzed over 500 ACT English questions from seven official ACT tests that have been given in the past and wrote down the grammar and style concepts tested in each. Usually, it was easy to find the answer to a question just by knowing one style or grammar rule. But a couple of questions required knowledge of more than one rule. For these questions, I counted them for both concepts. And the winners are†¦ Usage and Mechanics For usage and mechanics questions, the overwhelming winner of the frequency test is correctly forming and joining sentences at 20.5% of the grammar questions. This covers all the concepts involved in understanding what a correct sentence is, including bothfragments and run-ons. This topic also covers correct use of semicolons in joining sentences. Not far behind in second place are questions dealing with correct uses of commas, dashes, and colons. These questions make up 17.7% of the grammar questions. Following in third and fourth places are correctly used non-essential clauses and relative pronouns with 10.2% of the questions, and correct verb tense and form, with 9.6% of the grammar questions. This topic involves, among other things, knowing what tense is necessary, and forming the tenses correctly. So, if you master these four concepts, you will have all the information you need to answer almost 60% of the grammar questions on ACT English. Here is the full breakdown This is my analysis of the most commonly-tested grammar concepts on ACT English, along with brief explanations of what each grammar rule means. #1: Correct Sentence Formation: 20.5% Recognizing fragments Recognizing run-ons, including comma splices Joining sentences correctly Incorrectly used semicolons #2: Use of commas, dashes, and colons: 17.7% No comma between subject and verb No comma before or after preposition When to use commas to separate adjectives No comma between adjective and noun Commas used after introductory words No commas between compound subjects or compound objects No commas around emphatic pronouns Colons used for a list or explanation Dashes used with non-essential clauses, as intro for a list, and with a deliberate pause #3: Correctly formed non-essential clauses andrelative pronouns: 10.2% Non-essential clause must be surrounded by commas Correct use of which vs. that; who vs. which; who vs. whom #4: Verb tense and form: 9.6% Correct and consistent tense usage When to use past tense instead of past participle Past participle needs a helping verb Incorrectly formed past participle Will vs. would When to use gerund and when to use infinitive #5: Misplaced and dangling modifiers and word placement: 9.2% Descriptive phrases must be next to the word they describe. Would a word make more sense elsewhere in the sentence? #6: Apostrophe use: 7.5% Correct formation of plural nouns Correct formation of possessive form of nouns Common contractions and their meanings (such as â€Å"it’s†) #6: Pronoun Use: 7.5% Consistent use of pronouns Pronoun-antecedent agreement (including singular or plural pronouns) Pronoun case Present and clear antecedents #8. Idioms: 5.1% Idiomatic use of prepositions #9: Parallel Structure and Word Pairs: 4.1% Use of matching prepositions Items in a list match Such as neither†¦nor, either†¦or, not only†¦but also, from†¦to, as†¦as #10: Subject-Verb Agreement: 3.8% Singular subjects need singular verbs; plural subjects need plural verbs Subject – non-essential clause – verb construction Subject – prepositional phrase – verb construction Verb before subject #: Adjectives vs. Adverbs: 2.4% Adjectives are used to describe nouns Adverbs are used to describe adjectives, adverbs, and verbs Correct use of the comparative and superlative forms #: Comparison words: 2.4% Correct use of comparison words such as more/less than, less vs. fewer, much vs. many, and that of/those of Rhetorical Strategy These questions are based on making the passages more smooth and logical to read. As in the grammar section, the ACT heavily favors some rules over others. The big winners for Rhetorical Strategy are†¦ Logical transitions. Unsurprisingly, in a section all about making passages more logical, transitions reign supreme. Over 18% of the questions will test your ability to create logical bridges within and between sentences and paragraphs. In second place is adding information with 16.7%. These questions test your ability to see if new information is relevant to the paragraph in question, and also ask students to explain how the paragraphs are changed by the addition of new information. And tied in third with 15.5% each are conciseness and replacing and re-wording information. Similar to the concepts above, replacing information questions ask student to tell if information is relevant to the paragraph in question, and if not, to replace it with different information. Conciseness questions test students’ abilities to see when the author has been unnecessarily wordy. Repetitive words, circular talking, and the passive voice are all put to the test in these questions! Let’s break it down completely #1. Logical Transitions: 18.4% Includes transitions within sentences, between sentences, and between paragraphs Transition words make logical sense for context #2. Adding Information: 16.7% Determining if new information is relevant to paragraph Understanding why new information is relevant #3. Re-wording or Replacing Information: 15.5% Replacing a word or phrase to add a certain emphasis to the passage Replacing irrelevant information with relevant information #3. Conciseness: 15.5% No using repetitive words to describe something General wordiness No passive voice when active voice is also correct and shorter #5. Deleting Information: .7% Is information irrelevant? If so, delete it. What information would be lost if sentence were deleted? #6. Diction: 8.4% Commonly confused words, such as then/than, have/of #7. Sentence Order/Placement and Paragraph Organization: 6.7% Does the placement of a sentence make sense in context? Does one sentence/paragraph logically follow from the last? Does a new paragraph start with a shift in topic? #8. Writer’s Goal: 5.4% Recognizing main ideas in the passage Recognizing specific and general passages #9. Formality: 1.5% Is the phrasing of an answer too casual or formal to match the rest of the sentence? So What Would a Perfect Test Look Like? If you took the ACT English and it broke down exactly according to these statistics, here is what you would expect to see: 8 questions on Forming Correct Sentences 7 questions on Commas, Dashes, and Colons 7 questions on Logical Transitions 6 questions on Adding Information 5 questions on Replacing or Re-wording Information 5 questions on Conciseness 4 questions on Verb Tense and Form 4 questions on Deleting Information 4 questions on Non-essential Clauses and Relative Pronouns 4 questions on Dangling and Misplaced Modifiers and Word Placement 3 questions on Diction 3 questions on Apostrophe Use 3 questions on Pronouns 2 questions on Idioms 2 questions on Parallel Structure and Word Pairs 2 questions on Sentence Order/Paragraph Organization 2 questions on Author Goal/Intent 1 question on Subject-Verb Agreement 1 question on Adjectives vs. Adverbs 1 question on Comparison Words 1 question on Formality †¦.for a total of 75 questions. Of course, it’s unlikely that any test will exactly follow these statistics, so don’t be surprised if you see a few extra (or fewer) questions of a certain type! How Should You Use This Information? Now that you know exactly what you can expect to find on ACT English, use this information to guide your studying. Here’s a study plan that will help you make the most of your study time to give you the best chance of improving your score. Take a diagnostic test. To do this, you should take a real ACT English test, because it’s best to work with realistic questions. You can find official ACT tests online, or you can get them from The Real ACT Prep Guide. After taking the test, score it to see how you've done. For every question that you either got incorrect or had to guess on, make a note of why you got it wrong, and what grammar concept it is testing. Compare your list of grammar mistakes with the â€Å"Perfect Test† list above. Which of your mistakes appears highest on the list? Focus your studying on the concept that is highest on the list. You’re likely to see that kind of question the most, and so mastering that grammar concept will give you the chance to improve your score by a few points. When you feel confident that you have mastered the highest concept on the list, move on to the next one. Keep working your way down the list. As you’re taking these steps, you should also consider what your target ACT score is. For example, if you're just looking to boost a mid-range score (around a 20) a bit higher (a 24), you’ll want to focus on the first 10 – 12 grammar concepts. If you can get these concepts down, you’ll have a great chance of hitting your target score, and you won’t need to worry about many of the less-frequently-tested concepts. On the other hand, if you're aiming for a high or perfect score, you should pay attention to every grammar and rhetorical point on the list. Missing even a few points could hurt your chances of getting the score you want. What’s Next? Now you know exactly what is on ACT English. Use the above links to master each topic. Know the concepts, but unsure of how to attack the questions? Read the best way to approach ACT English passages. Before you get studying, read our top 5 secrets to mastering the ACT English. Not sure if ACT English is for you? Read our comparison of ACT English and SAT Writing to see which is the best fit! Want to improve your ACT score by 4 points? Check out our best-in-class online ACT prep program. We guarantee your money back if you don't improve your ACT score by 4 points or more. Our program is entirely online, and it customizes what you study to your strengths and weaknesses. If you liked this English lesson, you'll love our program.Along with more detailed lessons, you'll get thousands ofpractice problems organized by individual skills so you learn most effectively. We'll also give you a step-by-step program to follow so you'll never be confused about what to study next. 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