Example research essay topic: Observing A Child At Play - 1,123 words

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OBSERVING A CHILD AT PLAY Sometime about age three or four, children begin to enjoy playing in groups at first, usually on an informal and transitory basis (McBride-Chang, 1996). Young children are limited in their friends. Playmates come from the immediate neighborhood or from schools. Successful social relationships depend upon the ability of one person to take the point of view of another, the ability to empathize, and the ability to communicate. Contemporary research shows that not all children progress in the same order, nor do the categories totally disappear as children get older; however, the complexity of the categories does change with age (McBride-Chang, 1996). Children will combine type of play with what Parten classified as stage of play.

Observing a child at play is quite enlightening. Pamela, seven year old girl plays at their front yard and she goes back and forth to her mother. She now has gone back to the house and was back at teasing her mother. Suppose I hit you on the nose, she said. What would you do? Her mother glanced at me from the side of her peripheral vision and thought of an outrageous punishment, Id pack a picnic lunch and send you to the moon.

Pamela was becoming increasingly giddy and overexcited. Then she was at it again, What if I turned the music so loud that our neighbors complained? This time, without thinking, her mother replied, I think Id send you to your room for an hour and make you rest. Pamela's face fell. Now, youre not playing the game, she said.

Because thats a good punishment. Then shyly, and with obvious relief, she announced, I guess Ill pretend Im a baby and take a little nap. But just as soon as she said that, she ran out of the house again and kept playing with her remote controlled toy-car with her playmates in the neighborhood. I could hear their hearty laughter. They took turns in handling the remote and engaging in cooperative play. Andrea, her playmate, began to engage her in a rough and tumble play that made their remote car crash on the fence.

Pamela is now in her first grade of school and she is able to relate well with children of her age. I see this in the three solid hours I spent observing her. She relates well with the children who are of the same age as her. Every now and then during this time, she would go in and out of the house to play with the other children on the park right across their house.

Being in the concrete operational stage can easily put together a set of objects numerically equal to another set and can conserve this equivalence even though the physical arrangement of the objects changes. I tested her here. Typically, Pamela counts the objects in the original set, then counts out the same number to form a corresponding set, rather than place the second set, one by one, below the first, as pre-operational children do. When I rearranged the objects to make one row look shorter, Pamela knows that the two rows still have the same quantity, and that adding or subtracting is the relevant factor for change of quantity.

She has developed the ability to reason that if they were the same before and nothing was added or taken away, then, they must still be the same. But she must have the objects in front of her. As childrens physical and mental capacities and interests mature, the quality of their games changes; they tend to reflect the culture and they are apt to be more gender specific (McBride-Chang, 1996). Moreover, game patterns change with cognitive development (Hughes, 1995). Children become more and more capable of handling complex rules and strategies. Games also change with childrens psychological development.

For example, their self-concepts change. The games can now become tools to provide a non-threatening opportunity for children to venture into a leadership role. Childrens games reflect the culture in which they live. For instance, interpreting childrens play is different from culture to culture. It has been demonstrated that individuals with a strong influence from Euro-American cultural heritages look at, interpret, explore social phenomenon on an individual basis. Individuals with the eyes of looking of and interpreting childrens play are different from culture to culture.

This has been a strong influence from Euro-American cultural heritages. Individualism is apparent among people who are raised by a euro-American nuclear family, than when a person is raised by an extended or multi generational family. Within this sociocultural context, cooperative social interaction and social exchanges have been pervasive in the family culture. Becoming a cooperative player within a multi generational and multi-age family environment and developing that kind of socio cognitive schema may be an inevitable developmental phenomenon. In this cultural context, the young child may first explore more about others than about self. Mentally visualizing play with others, observing others' intercommunicative expressions, being aware of the existence of family members or others in a play context are common phenomena that this young child has been receiving ever since birth.

Thus, physically visualizing and cognitively realizing others during the early periods of childhood may be more apparent than the realizing of self as a single organism in such a child's developmental changes. Even though many European child development researchers have developed the theory that knowledge of self comes prior to knowledge of other, in this ethnic cultural context, knowledge of other may occur prior to knowledge of self. Realization of self may be a developmental phase that requires some degree of reflection of self with culturally shaped cognitive function because of the sociocultural influences. If we follow Parten's theory we may continuously underestimate or misunderstand the diverse young child's developmental abilities and potentials. More critically, we may be using some limited or culturally blind hypotheses to interpret the child's developmental changes and play behaviors. Pamela seems a well-adjusted child, surrounded by people who care for her general welfare and development.

Perhaps it helps that her mother is a part of a day-care center in the first place. The issues belong to parents and teachers who work with culturally diverse children who often encounter difficult times in helping them. These teachers may even think that these children do not know how to play. Thus, she assumes that it is tasked upon her to teach children how to play (Harter, 1982). REFERENCES Harter, 1982. The perceived competence scale for children Child Development. 54, 87 - 97.

McBride-Chang, C. 1996. Models of speech perception and phonological processing in reading. Child Development. 67, 1836 - 1856. Von Der Haar, Christine. Social Psychology: A Sociological Perspective. Upper Saddle river, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 2005.

Research essay sample on Observing A Child At Play