Autobiographical Developmental Essay Assignment Guide
Prompt:
The Autobiographical Developmental Essay is designed to assist you with identifying, integrating, and applying key concepts from developmental psychology to your own experience as a human. This assignment may also help spark ideas and/or prepare you for the Theory Essay assignment and/or Research Paper assignment later in this course. Please read through this document in its entirety before beginning your work on this assignment. Your Autobiographical Developmental Essay should be approximately 500 words double-spaced, using 12-point font and 1-inch margins. If you are using external research to support your claims, you must cite your sources with APA citations and an APA reference page.
Preparation:
Read Chapter 1 (Santrock) and reflect on key periods of development, theories of development, and methods for conducting developmental research.
To complete this assignment, you will:
Step 1: Select a developmental period of interest and consider the associated set of prompting questions (see Choosing an experience for your essay, below). You may wish to read through the entire list of developmental periods and consider all questions before choosing. You may also benefit from letting your mind float to different periods of your life, honing in on the developmental periods to which your curiosity and attention are drawn.
Step 2: Decide if you would like to focus on yourself as the subject, someone you know (or knew) well, or a public figure about whom you’ve read a biography or autobiography. If you choose yourself, you may disclose that you are writing about your own experiences and write from a first-person narrative perspective, or you may give yourself a pseudonym and discuss your experiences from a third-person perspective. If you choose someone you know/knew well, please give them a pseudonym. If you choose a public figure, you may disclose who you are writing about and please include the full reference of the biography or autobiography you read.
*Note: Steps 1 and 2 may be iterative, in that you may need to consider both the developmental period and subject (you or someone else) in tandem before choosing a focus for your paper.
Step 3: Write about an event from your life or someone else’s life that occurred during one of these developmental periods. Provide enough information and detail for the reader to understand the event in developmental context. (approximately 1 page)
Step 4: Discuss each of the 3 key developmental issues below (see Chapter 1, Santrock) as each relates to the event you described in Step 3. You should briefly (1-2 sentences) define each developmental issue before discussing how each issue is related to the event. (approximately 1 paragraph each, for a total of approximately 1 page)
Nature and nurture
Stability and change
Continuity and discontinuity
*Note: To complete this step thoroughly, you may need to briefly bring in information from other developmental periods (e.g., when discussing stability and change regarding an event that occurred in early childhood, you may reference the person’s experiences later in adolescence).
Step 5: Choose one of the developmental theories below (as discussed in your text; see Chapter 1, Santrock). Briefly describe the key components of the theory, and discuss in detail how the theory applies to the event you discussed in Step 3. (approximately 1 page)
Psychoanalytic theories (Freud, Erikson)
Cognitive theory (Piaget, Vygotsky, Information-processing theory)
Behavioral theory (Skinner)
Social cognitive theory (Bandura)
Ethological theory (Bowlby)
Ecological theory (Bronfenbrenner)
