Child Development 2nded

Elizabeth Levin is a professor of psychology at Laurentian University.

This volume of 27 readings was designed as a companion to typical
undergraduate child development textbooks. Editor Claudio Violato wrote
or co-authored half the articles; the rest are divided between
previously published “classics” and commissioned papers.

Each of the book’s six units includes an introduction and a set of
review questions. Part 1 examines the sociocultural, historical, and
scientific contexts of development. Among the four articles in this
section is Carol Nagy Jacklin’s classic study of the roles of biology,
socialization, and expectations in reproducing gender differences. Part
2 addresses schooling and pedagogy, and contains one interesting essay
that argues that the school system is expected to do too much and that
when education fails to meet its impossible goals, teachers become
convenient scapegoats. Part 3, titled “Intelligence, IQ and the
Development of Thought,” introduces the reader to the writings of
Terman (Stanford–Binet) and Piaget, and compares psychometric views of
intelligence to cognitive-developmental interpretations. Part 4 looks at
social and emotional development. Essays by Darwin and Freud are
followed by three papers on attachment and emotion in this section,
which unfortunately fails to articulate the linkage between
socioemotional development and education. Exceptional development is the
subject of Part 5, which includes papers on learning disabilities,
giftedness, suicide, and abuse. The final section explores adolescence
as a period of “storm and stress.”

The contributions are of varying relevance and quality, and the
collection as a whole could have been better integrated. Nevertheless,
prospective and practising teachers who wish to understand more about
how children learn will find much of interest here.