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Observation Of A Child Observation

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I went to the Gracepoint Church’s Fall Fest on Halloween eve. Many interactive booths were prepared for the children, such as ring toss, dance floor, fishing for rubber dolphins, bean bag toss, beading station, and face painting. I hid behind my roommate who was working at the face painting booth that night. The location was perfect because of the high chairs at the booth gave me an easy view of the families in line and the children at the face painting station. I focused this observation on one pair of siblings, whom I will refer to as Jane (5 years old) and John (6 years old). Most children were impatiently waiting in line with their parents, including Jane and John. The two children discussed profusely what painting they wanted on their …show more content…

I understood this phenomenon as John remembering his sister’s attempts at getting on the chair before and judging that he could not get on the chair by himself. There are four sources of information that individuals employ to judge their efficacy: enactive experience, verbal persuasion, physiological reaction, and vicarious influences (Zimmerman, p. 228). According to the idea of vicarious influences, people can develop high or low self-efficacy indirectly through other people’s performances. John saw someone similar to him fail, which decreased his self-efficacy to climb onto the high chair.
“It’s my first time getting my face painted!” Jane said. As my roommate approached Jane with the paintbrush, Jane immediately started to ask many questions about the entire painting process. Jane also wanted to touch the paint, the wet sponge, my roommate’s keychains, and anything my roommate had that Jane was not familiar with. At one point Jane wanted to paint her face by herself. Jane was seeking new things, and trying to incorporate the new things into her understanding of the world (Ormond, p. 310-311). In order to make sense of these new things, she was interacting with her physical environment (Piaget, 1952b; as cited in Ormond, 2003). She was also intrinsically motivated (Mattingly, 2017) to improve her understanding of the world of face painting which she had never experienced before.
John was curious about everything

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