Cognitive and sociocultural perspective essay

General Instructions

You will write ​two​ ​brief persuasive essays related to prompts here. The essays present you with an opportunity to demonstrate your ability to apply course readings and discussions to issues affecting youth today. You will choose ​two​ of the four prompts. The essay is like a take-home test, which means it is “open book.” Your essays should reflect your own independent work and should not be written with the help of other students. See information below regarding how to avoid the appearance of plagiarism.

The purpose of this exam is to give you the chance to synthesize course readings and formulate complex arguments about them. Successful essays will demonstrate a clear conceptual understanding of the course materials and an ability to make connections between them, as well as an ability to relate key concepts to practical application. Clear and thorough justifications should be given for why and how you are using course materials to make your argument.

PLEASE NOTE: Each essay must have 3 distinct sources. This means there should be at least three novel sources in each essay. A total of at least 6 sources should be used in the full submission. ​If you want to include more than 3 sources in a response, it is OK for the extra source to overlap with the other response. Please do not use class lectures, though assigned videos, podcast, etc may be included as sources.

Each essay should be between 600-750 words​. Essays over this amount will be penalized. Essays with 600 words or fewer tend to score low, because they do not provide sufficient evidence and reasoning to support claims. References will not be counted against the word limit. Your grade will be the average of your two essay scores.

Written work should be in Times New Roman, 12 point font, double-spaced, with 1 inch margins submitted in ​MS Word format​. Writing should observe APA guidelines (American Psychological Association, 6th Edition). This includes, for example, how references are cited (in the text and in the reference section). You do not need to include an APA formatted cover page. Both essays should be in the same document. The APA writing manual is available in the Education library. You can also find information at the following link: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/​.

Plagiarism​: The definition of plagiarism is that you use the ideas of other people without appropriately citing or quoting them. CU Boulder’s Canvas uses software that detects when writing overlaps with writing on the web or in other student papers. To avoid plagiarism, you need to do two things: 1) use quotation marks and citation information when directly using

language written by other people and 2) when paraphrasing a source, cite the source of your paraphrase using common citation methods (APA style).

Choose 2 of the 4 prompts below to write 2 Essays. You ​must pick ​one from from Group A and one from Group B:

Group A: Answer Only One (Practical Application)

Prompt 1.

You’ve been asked to plan a two hour training session for educators that is attentive to youths’ varied social and historical circumstances. In your workshop you want educators to challenge deficit thinking and encourage a more complex and strength-based views of young people and their ability to be resilient. How can teachers enable and position students to become agents of their own healing and further cultivate student resilience? What points or ideas would you include in the workshop? Why?

Define these ideas with support from course texts. Using evidence from the texts, make an argument for why the points and ideas you would include in the workshop are valuable and necessary.

Prompt 2:

You are a supervisor of volunteer tutors at one of our partner sites. You notice that
CU students are struggling primarily with two things at the site. First, they are having trouble connecting with youth interpersonally. Second, they do not appear to be providing good tutoring assistance, as they are often unfamiliar with course content and are uncertain about their roles and boundaries when working with youth.

As the site supervisor, how would you coach CU student volunteers to better connect with youth and become more effective tutors & mentors. Be sure to describe the things you plan to do and to justify your choice by drawing on concepts and/or evidence from the readings and lectures. Describe how the coaching you offer volunteers can help empower the youth they work with promote positive youth development.

Group B Answer Only One (Conceptual Understanding)

Prompt 3

This semester we have considered adolescent development from multiple perspectives including the cognitive and sociocultural. Relatedly, we have seen the way educators’ and mentors’ views matter to youth learning and development both at the sociocultural and cognitive levels. Please draw on one of the people we have met this semester (e.g. Daniel Kisch, Kayla from 8th Grade,

one of the men from Minding the Gap, Mike the African American basketball player, etc.) to craft an essay that demonstrates how we can understand their case from both a cognitive and sociocultural perspective. In this essay, you must name the specific case (person) you choose, include details about the case itself, and draw on evidence and theories from the course to sensemake about the case. In doing so, draw on both the case and 3 additional sources to that case.

Prompt 4

Throughout our study of adolescent development we have explored topics from the perspectives of cognitive psychology and socio-cultural learning theory. With this in mind, please revisit class materials and pick one topic that we have discussed in class (including, but not limited to, risk, resilience, behavioral norms, belonging, decision making, trauma, etc). Once you have picked a topic, craft an essay that demonstrates how the topic would be understood both from a cognitive psychological perspective and from a sociocultural perspective. Then explain whether you think these two perspectives can be aligned with each other (contributing to a more holistic understanding of the topic) or are at odds with each other (fundamentally in disagreement about the topic). There is no “one right answer” to this question; your job is to explain your reasoning by defining the ideas with support from course texts.