Reflection Essay Assignment Form
Reflection Essay Assignment Form
Throughout the semester you have doubtlessly learned things about child development that led you to reflect on your own upbringing. For this assignment, you will be explicitly required to reflect on the topics we have covered in this class and what you have learned over the course of the semester, and relate this to your personal experiences.
For your essay, you are required to pick at least (2) major topics we have covered in class thus far and relate how your personal experiences have affected your development within this topic. For example, this could take the form of “X experience(s) shaped my (e.g.) gender role development because….”, or “My experience(s) with (e.g.) X parenting style influenced X, Y and Z aspects of my development”. While I am asking you to reflect upon your personal experiences and therefore there will be a bit of opinion within this essay (you are retrospectively inferring that these experiences may have influenced your development), you need to situate these opinions within the context of what we learned in class. You cannot just say “I think I am this way because of this experience…”. You need to include theories mentioned in class, and explanations for why this connection between your experiences and development might exist, using what we have learned in this course. This means that your essay should not just be a story of your childhood, but should also include a good deal of critical assessment of the topics you have chosen, using your personal experiences as base. To receive full credit for this assignment, you should present at least (2) personal experiences and use material from this course to argue how and why both of those experiences may have influenced your development.
Possible topics (this is not an exhaustive list and you are more than welcome to pick a different topic, this is just to help give you an idea of the topics you might consider; the only requirement is that it be a topic we covered this semester):
- Family genetic disorders
- Prenatal environmental influences
- Health
- Temperament
- Parenting styles/discipline
- Attachment
- Language development
- Social development (parents/peers/siblings/community/culture)
- Self-esteem
- Emotional development
- Gender role development
- Moral development
Important Note: You are NOT required to disclose any information about your childhood that you are not comfortable sharing. If there are aspects of your childhood that you think would work well to discuss for this assignment, but you do not feel good thinking about or sharing them – please pick another topic. There are plenty of topics that you should be able to relate to your development that should not cause any negative thoughts when reflecting upon and should not make you uncomfortable to discuss.
Specifics
- Length: 2-3 pages, double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point font (~500-750 words)
- Due (via Dropbox on iCollege) on December 6th @ 11:59pm
- 10% of points lost per day the paper is late
- Papers will not be accepted past December 10th
- Please review the rubric posted for additional information on how this will be graded
