Extra Credit Paper On Child Psychology Assignment (Article Sample)
Extra Credit Paper in Child Psychology (Spring 2017):
Young Children’s Ability to Predict Their Recall
You can add up to 4 percentage points to your average for the course by completing this extra credit assignment. It is due by Thursday, April 27 (5:00 PM). Only hard copies will be accepted (i.e., no email attachments).
1. On Blackboard Learn, I have posted an article from the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. It reports an investigation of preschoolers’ unrealistic predictions about how well they will remember things.
2. Read the article, then write a paper in which you do the following:
a. Describe one previous study showing that children’s predictions about their memory performance tend to become more accurate with age.
b. Describe one previous study showing the same thing for physical task performance.
c. Describe the evidence that children’s overestimation of memory performance may have a different explanation than children’s overestimation of physical performance.
d. Describe the two explanations for young children’s overestimation of their memory performance that were tested in the current investigation.
e. Explain why the findings of the experiment are more consistent with one explanation than with the other.
f. Describe the evidence from the current study that children don’t simply predict that they will recall the same number in their second recall attempt as they actually recalled in their first attempt. (Calculate averages over the trial means in Table 1, and compare these averages.)
g. Describe the “memory-for-past-test heuristic”, and the evidence in the current study that preschoolers do not use this heuristic, at least not consistently, when making a second recall prediction.
h. Look up the phenomenon of “spontaneous recovery in human memory” in Wikipedia or a psychology text. Do many preschoolers appear to believe that their own memory shows spontaneous recovery? Justify your answer based on the results of the current study.
i. Describe one advantage (mentioned in the article) and one disadvantage (not mentioned in the article) of having a tendency to overestimate how well one will do on a cognitive test. Why might the advantage outweigh the disadvantage for young children, but not for older children or adults?
3. Details of the assignment
a. The paper should be typed, double-spaced with one inch margins on all sides.
b. There is no minimum or maximum word length. Answer each question without leaving any important information out or putting any irrelevant information in.
c. Put your name and a title for the paper at the top of the first page. Do not include a reference page at the end of the paper.
d. Do not use too many verbatim excerpts from the article. Summarize in your own words. Whenever you do include a verbatim excerpt, even a sentence fragment, put quotation marks around it and cite the source. If the source is the article, just put (Lipko-Speed, 2013) after the excerpt.
Instructor
Date
Child Psychology
The paper gets to answer some questions on the topic in child psychology. The children predictions about their memory performance become more accurate with age. This is evidenced by a study whereby nursery, kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade were asked on their memory of about ten pictures once the pictures were covered. All the students were overconfident, but the kids in nursery and kindergarten were much over confident than the others. The same thing happens with the physical task performance task evident also with a task whereby four years old kids were asked to estimate how good they could move a cart upwards a tower using a pulley with the marble falling. The children overpredicted the ability. Also, older children were told to estimate on how many beanballs they would throw into a basket.
The predictions were still above, but the older ones made some accurate predictions than the young children. The children overestimation on memory performance is not the same as the one on physical performance. This is because, for the memory, the same test was used, but in the physical performance the children went through different tests. There are reasons as to why the children overpredicted their performance. One is because the kids predict their work as per the wish they want and not the true estimate of what they can do. Therefore, they talk out their wishes and not the exact ability that they have. The other explanation is about the monitoring deficiency hypothesis where the young children are unable to accurately monitor their operations on a task and that shows that they end up predicting above the performance level. The explanations are more consistent in the physical performance than in the memory predictions because studies show that the results are not supported in the memory tests which makes the results to be partial. It is true to say that in the current study the kids do not just predict on their recalling the same figure in the second attempt than in the first. The current study involved the naming of the ten pictures where the children were asked to remember their former predictions and after that estimate again on the predictions. The predictions were still over, but the results were not different from the kids who had not been reminded about their first predictions.
Memory for past test heuristic is seen in the current study where the children are not a...
