Humanities 350: Cultures of American Childhood
Study Guide: Test 1

1. What is cultural studies?
	
2.  How is Reality defined within cultural studies?

3.  What is the cultural “Other”  

4.  What does cultural studies say about identity?

5.  What are subject positions?

6.  What does cultural studies say about beliefs?

7.  What are mores?

8.  What does cultural studies say about power in society?

9.  What is radical multiculturalism?

10.  What is cultural context?  Why is it important?

11.  Name the features of culture (i.e. Not Static)/

12. How does the Western Associationist Perspective see children’s minds at birth?

13. How does the Western Constructivist Perspective see children’s minds at birth?

14.  What defines a stage in children’s thinking?  How are concurrence, Abruptness, qualitative change, and choherent organization important to this process?  Be able to define each of these in relation to the stages of cognitive development.
	
15. What is a neuron?

16.  How do children develop as thinkers according to Piaget?

17. What is accommodation?

18.  What is assimilation?

19.  According to the information processing approach, what are  automatization, encoding, generalization, and strategy construction?

20.  How is IQ determined?

21.  What do Socio-Cultural Theories of intelligence take into account in determining intelligence? Why?

24.  How does socio-cultural theorist Vygotzky define Zone of Proximal Development, Social Scaffolding,  
       and cultural tools?  

25.  Understand how childhood is defined historically.
	
26.  How were children seen in the  Middle Ages ?.

27. What were courtiers?

28.  What time period saw Europeans looking back to the Classical Period, continuing crafts in cottage
        industries, and developing apprenticeship leagues to train the young in a trade?

29.  What is the “Age of Reason” ?
	
30.  What is the “Protestant Work Ethic”?
	
31.  What innovation in education occurred in the Age of Enlightenment?

32.  What were the effects of increased mechanization during  the Industrial Revolution, increased mechanization meant?

33.  Know the major changes in the construction of childhood that occurred in the Gilded Age.

34.  Why did the Romantics see children as “innocent”?

35.  Views of childhood shifted as people changed their “paradigm” for the role of children, but how were children seen for most of Western history?

36.  What new educational opportunity began in the Reformation?
	
37.  Who were often excluded from paradigms of childhood presented in Western definitions?
	
38.  According to our readings, how are gender roles determined?

39.  According to Mercurio, why aren’t boys allowed to express their emotions?

40.  According to Mercurio, what are the negative effects of not allowing boys to express their emotions? 

41.  What should we do to help boys develop their emotional expression?

42.  What are the emotional tendencies of girls?

43.  According to Pauley & McDonnell, why is gender segregated play is important?

44.  What are the common qualities of boy’s play?
	
45.  What are the common qualities of girl’s play? 
	
46.  How was moral reasoning in children was traditionally measured? What biases does it imply?
	
47.  How do boys commonly make moral decisions?
	
48.  How do girls commonly make moral decisions/	

49.  What are common effects of strict adherence to gender roles?

50.  According to Gilligan, how should we see the moral reasoning of kids and the gender differences among them?