For the First assignment: Short literature

For the First assignment: Short literature

Back ground

Assessment 1: Short Literature Review

Assessment weight: 30%,

Word Limit: 950 words

Due date: Monday 28 March 11.59pm

For this formative assessment task, you will be required to write a short literature review.

i. Develop a title for your literature review that makes it clear to the reader what the literature review is about.

ii. Provide a short introduction (100-150 words) for the literature review summarising what will be discussed in the review

iii. You will need to locate5articles and for each article selected, you will need to indicate the following: a) The research question or research aims, b) Methodology, c) Results

iv. You will also need to synthesise your discussion of the different articles so that the review does not read like a series of summaries but rather is an integrated discussion of the different articles.

v. Indicate where the findings of different studies are different from one another and what may account for this. You may not know why there are differences but you can hypothesise based on differences in methodology.

vi. You will need to include in-text citations and a reference list in APA 7th format. You may be able to borrow a hard copy of the APA Publication Manual 7th Edition from the RMIT library, but you can also make use of online library guides for instance,https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_style_introduction.html(Links to an external site.)which provide detailed instructions as to how to apply this format.

Choose one of the topics from the list below. For each topic, I have provided a starting reference/s. You will need to locate 4 additional references or 5 if you choose not to use the starting reference in your literature review. A good way of locating relevant literature is to locate articles (using Google Scholar) that have cited a key article as well as looking at the reference list of a key article.

NOTE: You do not need to use the starting reference for your literature review! You can useany5 peer-reviewed articles.

1.The influence of nature and nurture on child development

Starting References:Heritability of Big 5 Personality Traits.pdfDownload Heritability of Big 5 Personality Traits.pdf

Learning_to_read_and_intelligence.pdfDownload Learning_to_read_and_intelligence.pdf

2. Epigenetic factors in child development.

Starting Reference:Epigenetics_Early_Child_Development.pdfDownload Epigenetics_Early_Child_Development.pdf

Tips for navigating this topic:Tips for the epigenetics topic.docxDownload Tips for the epigenetics topic.docx

3. Evolutionary psychology and child development.

Starting Reference:Child Development - 2003 - Bjorklund - Child Development and Evolutionary Psychology.pdfDownload Child Development - 2003 - Bjorklund - Child Development and Evolutionary Psychology.pdf

4. Implications of factors/substances affecting prenatal development on later psychological development

Starting references:prenatal_maternal_stress_psychopathology.pdfDownload prenatal_maternal_stress_psychopathology.pdf

Note that these topics are very broad so you will need to narrow them down and develop an 'angle'. So for instance for Topic 1, you might choose to look at the contribution of nature (genetic, biological factors) and nurture (environment) to a particular psychological variable such as personality or a cognitive function such as language, you may also choose to focus on the heritability of psychopathology (e.g. depression, anxiety, schizophrenia). For Topic 2, you might choose to focus on the role of genetic versus epigenetic factors in child behaviour or development. For Topic 3, you may want to evaluate evidence for the specialised modular brain structures which are an implication of evolutionary psychology. For Topic 4, you can choose to focus on any factor or substance that may affect prenatal development and locate literature looking at the long-term effects of this on psychological development of the growing child.

If you are unsure as to how to narrow down the topic, please reach out to me or your tutor.