Child Development (8th Edition)
September 28, 2009 by Admin
Filed under Child Development
Child Development (8th Edition)
Long considered THE standard text in child development, the Eighth Edition of this best-selling topical approach to child development continues its tradition of being the most current and comprehensive text available. Laura Berk, renowned professor and researcher in the field of child development, has revised her Child Development text, adding new pedagogy, a heightened emphasis on the interplay between biology and environment, expanded coverage of culture, and an enhanced focus on education, health, and social issues, including many social policy topics addressed throughout the text. Berk’s revision provides contemporary and cohesive coverage on contexts for development, including but also extending beyond the family to peers, scho
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(out of 17 reviews)
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Review by for Child Development (8th Edition)
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I am currently using this book for my Early Childhood Education(ECE)Diploma studies.This book has detailed and comprehensive topics and theories on Child Development.It also provides lots of pictures and graphics to enhance your understanding of what you read.This book is a must for anyone studying ECE or for those teaching children and wish to know more about Child development.
Review by Amy Nava for Child Development (8th Edition)
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I am so displeased with this publisher PEARSON I had to return and comment. The description of this book on Amazon hints to having the MyDevelopmentLab code seeing as how it’s in the description. After spending over $100 I received the book with no codes. Our class is two weeks in and only a small handful of kids have the book. It was promised a month ago. Bad business of a publisher. I hope teachers re-think buying the latest editions. Not much has changed, I’m sure, in the last few years that a teacher couldn’t look up herself and tell us about it. Instead we are forced to buy a book that doesn’t even come with all it’s parts!!
Review by Sandra A. Johnson for Child Development (8th Edition)
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I have enjoyed reading Laura E. Berk’s book on Child Development and I am looking forward to reading more books written by her. Excellent!!!
Review by Cassandra R. Smith for Child Development (8th Edition)
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This book was a very good, bargin. However, the cover that is displayed on the internet isn’t the one the I received. The book does the job, it’s just that I was expecting it to look like the one on the internet.
Review by S. Mueller for Child Development (8th Edition)
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This is one of the worst textbooks I’ve ever used (bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, working on 2nd master’s). The writing is not the worst, though it’s not very lively. My attention wanders after about 4 pages and by 10 pages I want nothing more than to do anything but keep reading. But read on I must, because it’s a long book and it’s determined to overlook no detail, no matter how peripheral.
It’s definitely packed with data, a fault, not a virtue. In its zeal to be comprehensive, it spends page after page on disproven theories, unproven theories, half-proven theories, and even theories nobody has cared about for decades. (I know, because I was working in cognitive AI in the 1980s when some of those theories were already history and many of the rest of them greeted with a Spock raised eyebrow.)
Everything is jumbled together so the student ends up in the state of “buzzing confusion” often used to describe a newborn infant. Case in point: the author seems enamored of Jean Piaget. Piaget asked good questions. He also got many wrong answers and his research methodologies broke nearly every guideline laid down in an early chapter of this very textbook. So does the reader get a summary of Piaget’s major ideas, with a focus on those that have proven useful, with a side mention of the mistaken details? Nope. You get play by play detail. Pages of Piaget, followed by pages of research that disproves him. After wading through all that, the reader has to flip back and forth to figure out on their own what might be worth remembering and what not. It doesn’t help that the author phrases every statement of Piaget’s theory, proven or not, as though it were true, and often qualifies statements that summarize research that clearly disproves him, e.g., “So, Piaget may have been wrong about …”
The study guide and questions are no help. They focus on the details of who did what and when as much as or more than the ideas themselves. They find disproven theories worth memorizing as much as validated ones. Worth knowing if this were a history of the field. Incredibly confusing otherwise.
Ironically, the text’s focus on distracting side detail gets in the way of learning in precisely the ways it criticizes when discussing effective strategies for teaching.
A very frustrating book.