Development
How do minds and behavior change across the lifespan?
Development concerns both change and continuity across a life. New ways of moving, thinking, communicating, and relating emerge through interactions between people and their surroundings. Adolescence and adulthood bring further changes in opportunities, responsibilities, and goals; development does not end when childhood does.
Start with How Do We Develop Across the Lifespan? for a broad introduction to these questions and the evidence used to answer them. The area connects observations of children, experiments, cultural comparisons, interventions, and longitudinal studies. Throughout, ask whose developmental course a finding describes, what the study actually follows over time, and which alternative explanations remain.
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How Do We Develop Across the Lifespan?
An introduction to development from infancy through old age: how new abilities emerge, how contexts matter, and what evidence can explain change over time.
Introductory · 11 core readings · 6 units · Prerequisites: No prior developmental psychology course is assumed. Familiarity with comparison groups and correlation is helpful; How to Read Psychological Science offers an introduction.
Begin the syllabus →Additional syllabi
How Do Infants Build Knowledge and Skills?
A guided path through infant knowledge, perceptual learning, action, and social experience, with close attention to what infant measures can establish.
Introductory · 11 readings
How Do Children Develop Language and Thought?
A guided path through language acquisition, conceptual change, causal exploration, developing regulation, and the cultural organization of children’s learning.
Introductory · 10 readings
How Do Relationships and Social Understanding Develop?
A guided path through relationships, emotion regulation, understanding self and others, friendship, moral judgment, and peer influence across development.
Introductory · 9 readings
What Changes During Adolescence?
A guided introduction to adolescent development: how bodies, motivations, identities, relationships, and opportunities change together.
Introductory · 9 readings
How Do We Develop in Early and Middle Adulthood?
Explore how adults build and revise lives through identities, work, relationships, caregiving, and goals—and how opportunities shape those changes.
Introductory · 9 readings
How Do We Adapt as We Grow Older?
Explore cognitive and sensory aging, changing goals and emotions, compensation, and everyday functioning while asking what it means to age well.
Introductory · 9 readings
How Do Contexts Shape Developmental Pathways?
Ten readings connect ecological and life-course theory with schools, work, poverty, resilience, caregiving and neighborhood interventions.
Introductory · 10 readings