Essay Instructions: General instructions: The subject should be a made up child or adolescent (12 or younger). It can be in narrative form or a listing of information by category. The general assessment must be in narrative form.
Please use bold subheadings for each section/category of your paper (the eight sections/categories a-h are listed below and are equally weighted).
Objective: The student will observe and interview and write a paper on the experience covering at least the following topics:
a. Identifying information: age, sex, birth order, height weight, age, occupation, and educational background of parents, nature of the community with population and rural, urban, industrial, and agricultural features. Does this child have any known or observed exceptionalities or exceptional abilities?
b. Physical development: appearance, motor coordination, muscular strength, growth pattern, degree of activity, comparison with peers.
c. Emotional development: expressions of aggression, incidences of temper tantrums, extent of self control, general disposition, emotional problems, self concept, self esteem, egocentric behavior.
d. Social development: expressions of basic courtesies, peer relations, sibling relationships, relationships with adults.
e. Cognitive development: Intelligence, academic success/failure, thought processes, interest in school, attention span, memory, ability to reason
f. Language development: vocabulary, grammar, intelligibility.
g. Moral development: his or her view of right and wrong (Piaget, Kohlberg)
h. General Assessment: Write in this section your interpretation of the above information in view of your knowledge of human growth and development. How does the child compare with the average child of his or her age? What are the outstanding characteristics of this child? What kind of additional information do you need to understand this child better? Put this child in the developmental stages of as many theorists as possible (Piaget, Vygotsky, Erikson, Kohlberg) and explain why. What services could a person in the field of school counseling provide to this specific child? If any exceptionalities or exceptional abilities exist with this child, discuss strategies for differentiated interventions for this child.