Syllabus

Course Description

The adolescent experience will be examined within a developmental and social context, with emphasis on the importance of the family. Other contexts to be considered include peers, religion, community, schools, and broader cultural systems. This is a three-credit course. On average, students spend 2–3 hours on homework per credit per week. Therefore, students usually spend 9–12 hours a week in this course.

Course Objectives

Through readings, class discussions, media presentations, course assignments, and examinations, students will be able to:

1. Recognize the important developmental changes that young people experience during this period that cause them to respond so differently to their world, and their world to respond so differently to them.

2. Understand the changing context that adolescents encounter as they move between childhood and adulthood. Recognize how these new contexts facilitate young peoples movement toward adulthood.

3. Understand the interaction that exists between adolescents individual development and their changing context, as well as the theories that link these different processes together.

4. Develop qualitative interviewing skills and be able to interpret the results of an adolescent interview.

5. Be aware of the at-risk issues that are most pronounced during adolescence and understand why they are more evident during this stage of development.

6. Have an awareness of the prevention and intervention strategies for helping adolescents and their families cope with many of the issues they are likely to encounter.

Course Requirements

1. Scholastic Dishonesty. As a student of Brigham Young University–Idaho, you are bound by the Honor Code to adhere to high ethical and moral values. While all students sign the honor code, many students have not completely mastered the specific skills necessary to correctly cite sources (especially in the internet age), as well as deal with the stress and strain of college life without resorting to cheating. Scholastic dishonesty includes (but is not limited to) cheating; plagiarism (not giving due credit to work done by another); submitting the same or substantially similar papers for more than one course without consent of all instructors concerned; or sabotaging anothers work. Consistent with the University Honor Code, any infraction will potentially be grounds for a failing grade in this course and referral to the Honor Code Office. See the university website, http://www.byui.edu/student-honor-office/ces-honor-code/academic-honesty, for specific examples of plagiarism or other forms of scholastic dishonesty.

2. The End of Unit Quizzes. There will be 6 end-of-unit quizzes. The quizzes will only assess your knowledge of the textbook. Each end-of-unit quiz will have between 70 and 100 questions to draw from. You will be given two chances to get your highest score out of a random selection of 35 questions taken from these hand-selected question banks. The quizzes will each be worth 2 points per question, or 70 points possible overall for each quiz.

3. The Lets Talk About It Discussions. You will have weekly opportunities to discuss with your classmates about some topic and/or articles that you have read for that week. Your comments in these discussions will be graded on two criteria. First, your discussion comments should be based on a thoughtfulness consideration of the topics of focus. Second, you must also demonstrate what you have learned from the required materials. These discussions will help your instructor assess whether you have really read the materials for that reading period. Your Lets Talk About It activities will be graded on whether you have read and understood the material, particularly the readings not found in the textbook. Each Lets Talk About It activity will be worth 15 points.

4.The What Do You Know Activities. You will also have a weekly opportunities to demonstrate what you have learned through the What Do You Know activities. These are similar to the journal entries that might be included in any other online class, but like the Lets Talk About It discussions, the What Do You Know activities will be graded on a more in-depth level than just participation points. These activities will be graded based on the thoughtfulness of your response, but also on your ability to demonstrate what you have learned from the required materials, particularly the readings not found in the textbook. Each What Do You Know activity will be worth 15 points.

5. The Four Main Assignments. All four of the assignments that will occur during the semester should be typed, double spaced, formatted using APA publication standards (Sixth Edition), and written to specified page lengths. Abstracts are not required for any of the assignments.

a. Personal Adolescence. The first assignment will be a self-reflection of your own adolescent experience. It will focus on those specific aspects of your adolescence that stand out for you, with an explanation about why they were important to defining this period of your life or in defining who you have become. Papers should be in APA format and are limited to 2 to 2½ pages of text.

b. Adolescent Interview.The second assignment will be based on an interview that each of you will do with a real, live adolescent. Questions will be provided with the instructions for the assignment, and the resulting paper will be based on your summary of the young persons responses to your questions and your insights about his or her responses. Rather than a transcript of the interview, you should summarize within main topics those things that were addressed in the interview. Provide an introductory paragraph and a concluding section where you summarize your overall perceptions about your adolescent. An example would be your assessment of whether he or she seems like a pretty typical adolescent and whether his or her experiences and responses to those experiences seem normal, or are they and the issues they are dealing with very atypical? Demonstrate an effort to use class material that has been covered at that point in the semester to help justify the insights you provide. Papers are limited to 3 to 3½ pages of text and in APA format.

c. Community Perspective on an Adolescent Topic. The purpose of this assignment is to help you identify some of the information/advice that is available to parents and adolescents about a topic of interest to you. Select some aspect of adolescent development or adolescent risk-taking behavior that interests you. You will then identify one article from a popular adolescent magazine and one intervention or prevention article geared toward adolescents that is provided by a local outreach organization or by a well-respected information website. The articles you select to critique for this assignment should be attached (original material or copies) to your assignment. Papers are limited to 3 to 3½ pages of text and in APA format.

All reviewed materials are to be written for adolescents. Examples of adolescent magazines includeSeventeen,Teen,Teen People,YM, andNew Era. Examples of well-respected information websites include the site for the Center for Disease Control, the Virtual Office of the Surgeon General, the site for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (NCPTP), the site for the Center for Change, and AMA;Adolescent Health Online.

You should address the following four criteria for each article and intervention/prevention document you include:
i. Provide a brief overview of what the article is attempting to accomplish.
ii. Assess the quality of the article and its likely appeal to its intended audience.
iii. Identify the specific ideology or set of assumptions, if any, that the author(s) appears to be operating under.
iv. Indicate the extent to which you feel the information provided and advice given in the article would be beneficial to and in the best interest of the target audience.

Only one (if any) of your two sources may come from Church publications (Ensign,New Era,For the Strength of the Youth, etc.), so as to encourage students to look beyond Church publications to gain a better understanding of the perspective presented to the broader population.

d. Final Paper. This paper should be a capstone paper demonstrating your ability to utilize material learned during the semester to better explain the issues specific to an adolescent topic of choice. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate your ability to apply class material to some specific context of adolescence. Papers are limited to 3–4 pages of text and in APA format.

You must have at least two research-based articles or research-based book chapters (2) that provide a good background about your adolescent issue (our textbook doesnt count for one of the two). You can count one of the articles presented here during the semester, if they are applicable to your chosen issue. In the paper, you will briefly introduce your issue and establish why it is important to adolescents. Next, provide a review of literature about what is currently known about your topic based on your two research articles or research-based book chapters. This first part should take about half of your paper. In the remaining part of your paper explain how class material might improve our understanding of your chosen issue by considering it within at least three of the developmental and contextual topics covered in class (e.g. physiological, cognitive, psychosocial, family, peers, school, etc.). For example, how might the changes that are occurring during pubertal or cognitive development be important to adolescents decisions about whether to engage in sexual intercourse or use illegal substances. For this section of your paper you will need to be able to think about your chosen issue in ways that may not have been considered yet in the research. Also, in order to effectively use class materials in considering your adolescent issue, you will need to be able to think about how these materials might operate beyond what was covered in class or in our textbook. Support your use of class material using our textbook, presented articles, and class lecture notes. For example, if you are talking about how identity development is important to parent–adolescent conflict, refer to one of the articles provided in class or the section in the Berk textbook about identity development to support your ideas. Depending on the adolescent topic you select to write about, some class material will lend itself better to providing insights than others.

Grading. Your instructor will try to be as accurate as possible in recording scores; however, sometimes errors are made. Please keep all assignments that are returned to you until after the semester is completed and your grade has been assigned.

Your grade will be determined by the percentage of points you earn out of the total possible for the class. Points will be accumulated as follows: