Understanding Newborn Assessment and Child Development
Apgar Score: Newborn Assessment
The Apgar score is a standard scoring system that allows hospitals to quickly and objectively assess the state of a newborn.
- Appearance (color of the child)
- Pulse (heart rate)
- Grimace (reflex irritability)
- Activity (muscle tone)
- Respiration (respiratory effort of the baby)
Understanding Child Development
Physical Development and Health
Reflexes: Automatic, involuntary, innate responses to stimuli.
Visual Preference: The tendency of an infant to look at certain stimuli more than others, which depends on the ability to make visual distinctions.
Action Systems: Increasingly complex combinations of previously acquired skills.
Denver Developmental Screening Test: A test to evaluate children between one month and six years of age to determine whether they are developing normally.
Depth Perception: The ability to perceive objects and surfaces in three dimensions.
Haptic Perception: The ability to acquire information about object properties such as size, weight, and texture by manipulating them.
Cognitive Development
Intelligent Behavior: Behavior that is guided by goals (conscious and deliberate) and adapted to the circumstances and living conditions.
Behavioral Approach: Based on learning theory, it focuses on how behavior changes in response to experience.
Psychometric Approach: Seeks to measure the quantity of a person’s intelligence.
Piagetian Approach: Studies the evolution of mental structures and the way children adapt to their environment and argues that knowledge is developed in stages.
Types of Conditioning
Classical Conditioning (Respondent): A type of learning in which a previously neutral stimulus acquires the power to produce a response after the stimulus is repeatedly associated with another stimulus that usually produces the response. (Respondent refers to automatic responses that are part of our genetic makeup)
- Unconditioned Stimulus: A stimulus that automatically produces an emotional or physiological response.
- Unconditioned Response: An emotional or physiological response that occurs naturally.
- Neutral Stimulus: An event, object, or experience that does not elicit the unconditioned response before conditioning begins.
- Conditioned Stimulus: A previously neutral stimulus that, after becoming associated with the unconditioned stimulus, eventually comes to trigger a conditioned response.
- Conditioned Response: The learned response to the previously neutral stimulus. It’s a reaction similar to the unconditioned response, triggered by the association of the neutral stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus.
Operant Conditioning: A form of learning in which a person tends to repeat a behavior that has been reinforced or cease a behavior that has been punished. (Operant refers to learning in which voluntary behavior is strengthened or weakened by its consequences or antecedents. These are actions that are initiated or voluntary. Examples: walking, watching TV, dancing.)
- If an operant behavior is followed by consequences acceptable to the learner, it is likely that the act will be performed more often.
- If a behavior often generates unpleasant consequences, it is likely to be repeated less frequently.