My Virtual Life: Reflection & Application Paper

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My Virtual Life: Reflection & Application Paper (35%)

As part of your learning in this course, you are required to raise a virtual child from birth to 18 years. To do this, you will complete an online child simulation program through Pearson’s My Virtual Life program housed within the REVEL e-text. Through this simulation, you will observe the impact of your parenting choices on your child’s development over time, and identify how your choices interact with other environmental and genetic factors to determine developmental outcomes. You will then complete a reflection and application paper on this experience (specific guidelines for the paper are below).

How to access My Virtual Life

• Once in REVEL, under “Assignments”, you will see the ‘MyVirtualLife’ assignment. Click on this, and it will take you to the My Virtual Life Simulation.
• You will be required to complete the simulation from the ‘Create Your Virtual Child’ stage up until the end of the ‘Ages 12-18’ Stage.
• If you have trouble, please contact Pearson’s customer support service: https://support.pearson.com/getsupport/s/

Tips on completing the simulation

  • It takes a while to do the simulation meaningfully. Don’t leave it until the last minute or try to do it all in one sitting.
  • At the beginning of the simulation you are asked a number of questions about yourself that get inputted as “genetic” information about your child. You will not be able to go back and review those answers later, so you may wish to take note of what the questions were and how you answered them. (You will be able to review all parenting decisions that were made once your child is “born”, just not this introductory information.)
  • You will not be assessed on the answers you provide for the multiple-choice questions. We will only check that you completed the simulation up to age 18.
  • There are reflection questions embedded throughout the assessment. You are not required to complete these. Please submit them blank. We will only be checking to ensure that you have completed the entire simulation.

Reflection & Application Paper

Please follow the sections below to complete your reflection and application paper:

1. Introduction:

In the opening paragraph, introduce us to your child. Provide a brief summary of your child from infancy through age 18 (e.g., personality, attitudes, interests, choices, behaviours, achievements).

2. Reflecting on your child’s development:

The bulk of your assignment will be spent reflecting on your child’s development. A perennial question asked by lifespan developmentalists concerns the extent to which human development is determined by biological (i.e., “nature”) and environmental/cultural (i.e., “nurture”) factors. Although many early developmentalists conceived of this as an “either-or” relationship, nowadays developmentalists generally endorse an interactionist model, which recognizes the joint influences of nature and nurture on human development.

In this section, you will select three specific characteristics of your child (e.g., a specific aspect of personality, temperament, or attitude; a specific interest or choice; a behaviour or achievement; etc.), and identify factors that, in your reasoned opinion, had the most significant impact on the emergence of each characteristic. Do not explain your child’s development generally; please identify factors that are specifically related to your child within the context of this simulation (e.g., your specific parenting choices; genetic or other biological information that you provided about yourself; specific life events or experiences). The characteristics you choose can be from any stage of your child’s development, from birth to 18 years, and do not have to be from the same stage of development.

With these three characteristics in mind, you will then explain whether nature (e.g., genetics, biology, brain development), nurture (e.g., education, parenting, aspects of culture), or their interaction (the combination or joint impact of nature and nurture) best explains development of those characteristics. For some characteristics, you may believe they are best explained by nature; for others, you may think nurture offers the best explanation; and for others, you may think that it is the joint, interacting effect of nature and nurture that has shaped that trait. In all cases, make sure to justify your choice on the basis of concrete examples from your child’s upbringing. Also, be sure not to focus on one aspect only (nature only or nurture only) for all three characteristics – your paper should, overall, reflect an understanding of both.

This part of the assignment is an application of knowledge from the course, and perhaps other scientific sources that support course material. As such, it is not sufficient to explain in very general or colloquial terms why you think a certain characteristic developed the way it did.

Instead, you are expected to draw on course material from the text or lectures in order to explain your reasoning behind the nature, nurture, or interactionist perspective. Importantly, there may not be one “right” answer; that is okay. The goal is to have a reasoned and informed explanation of your child’s development on the basis of what you have learned in the course and any other scientific/scholarly material you think support that opinion.

3. Questions that you have about your child’s development:

As you were raising your child you likely came across some developmental outcomes that surprised you, confused you, or that you just didn’t understand given what you have learned about human development at this point or what you entered as background information. What questions do you have as a result of having completed the simulation? What are you curious about learning more about to help you better understand your child? In this section, identify two questions that have emerged for you and explain why you would like to learn more about these things (connected to development, education, or practice). Make sure that it is clear why these questions emerged (i.e., how they are connected to your child). (Note: The questions you identify might be connected to topics that will come up later in our course together or in another course in the program. You may also choose to use one of these questions to form your research question for your final paper in this course.)

4. Parting parenting advice:

In a paragraph, describe what advice you would give to another parent based on the experience that you had with your virtual child, and why you are giving that advice. Feel free to select one particular aspect of your experience to focus on (e.g., one decision that you made and the impact that it had). If you choose to be more general, be sure that the advice you give relates directly to your experience, and not vaguely to course material.

*Be sure to consider the evaluation criteria below to support your preparation of the paper.

Formatting Instructions

Paper should be no longer than 1,500 words. For this assignment, you are not required to draw on external research; therefore, in-text citations and a reference list are not required. However, you may do this if you choose (and this does not count towards the word limit). If you specifically reference something from your textbook, please cite the authors of the text (Boyd, Johnson, & Bee, 2020) and include a reference list with the textbook as the single entry. You may also cite other scientific articles if you feel they support your ideas, but this is not required.

If you do so, please be sure to include these in the reference list. Please use headings to differentiate the sections of your paper.

Submission Instructions

Your assignment is due on Monday November 4 th by 11:59pm. We will confirm your completion of the online child simulation program at the same time. Please upload your paper as a Word document and provide a filename in the following format: “Last name, First name_APD1200_MVL Assignment” to your personal My Virtual Life Assignment Dropbox folder on Pepper.


Evaluation Criteria 


Assignment Component
 Value
 Characteristics of a High-Quality Paper
Introduction
 /3


  • Provides a biographical sketch of the child
  • Describes key personal characteristics of the child
  • Helps the reader to “get to know” the child


Reflection on
Development
/15
  • Developmental characteristics are clearly described (in sufficiently elaborate and specific terms), including relevant contextual information, such as the child’s age or developmental stage and life circumstances at the point of development
  • Clearly identifies and describes what factors affected development and how they are thought to have influenced development (i.e., developmental mechanisms are clearly described)
  • Explains why the identified factor is thought to be more influential than alternative factors in explaining development
  • Demonstrates significant mastery of course material
  • Arguments are well-reasoned and based on evidence/examples from the virtual child simulation
Questions
 /5
  • Identifies two questions
  • Questions are thoughtful and make sense within the context of the child’s life
  • Explains why the author is curious and wants to learn more about these things, with a connection to development, education, or practice
Parting Parenting Advice
 /5
  • Provides thoughtful and reflective advice
  • Advice is specific and coherent
  • Advice makes sense within the context of the child’s life
  • Explains “why” the particular advice was given
Communication and Style
 /4
  • Writing is organized and cohesive
  • Reader can follow the ideas
  • Punctuation is appropriate
  • Paper includes required headings
  • Few or no spelling or grammatical errors
  • Word limit is adhered to
Completion of the online simulation
/3
Total
/35

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