Method of studying student behavior in the adolescent stage

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Method of studying student behavior in the adolescent stage. Thought becomes more abstract, logical and idealistic: they become more able to examine their own thoughts, the thoughts of others and what others think of them. Teenagers who develop the ability to reason give them a new level of cognitive and social awareness.

Piaget believed that formal operational thinking appears between the ages of 11 and 15. During this stage, adolescent thinking expands beyond real concrete experiences and they begin to think more in abstract terms and reason about them. In addition to being abstract, adolescent thinking is also idealistic. Teenagers begin to think about the ideal characteristics for themselves and for others to compare themselves and others with these ideal standards. For example, you can think about what an ideal parent is like and compare it to these ideal standards. This can make teenagers wonder which of the newly discovered ideal standards they should adopt.

Unlike the trial and error approach used by children in the early stages of development, adolescent thinking becomes systematic to solve problems. They think about the possible causes of action, why something is happening as it is and systematically look for a solution. Piaget called this type of logical reasoning-hypothetical deductive reasoning.

Growth and development of teenage students

Observation

Psychologists use a variety of methods such as observation, interview, experimentation and case studies to collect data. The purpose of these methods may be appropriate for different research purposes.

For example:

• You can observe the behavior of the spectators watching a football match.
• You can do an experiment to see if children who take an exam do better in the classroom where they studied the subject or in the exam room (cause-effect relationships)
• Can correlate intelligence, with saying self-esteem (for prediction purposes)
• You can use a psychological test to discover individual differences
• You can perform a case study on language development in a child.

The main features of this method are described in the next section.

i) Observation

Observation is a very powerful psychological research tool. It is an effective method to describe behavior. In our daily life, we keep busy observing numerous things throughout the day. Many times, we do not realize what we are seeing or what we have seen. We see but we do not observe. We remain aware of only a few things we see daily. Have you experienced something like that? You may also have experienced that if you carefully observe a person or event for some time, you realize many interesting things about the person or event. A scientific observation in many aspects. These are:

(a) selection:

Psychologists do not observe all the behavior they encounter. Rather, they select a particular behavior for observation. For example, you may want to know how children who study in class XI spend their time in school. As a researcher, you may think you have a pretty good idea about what happens in school. You can prepare a list of activities and go to school in order to discover their occurrences. Alternatively, you may think that you do not know what happens in school and, by your observation, would like to discover it.

In the time cycle, new and old do not matter

(b) Recording:

While observing, a researcher records the selected behavior using different means, such as marking the counts of the behavior already identified each time they occur, taking notes that describe each activity in greater detail using a short hand or symbols, photographs, video recording, etc.

(c) Data analysis:

Once the observation has been made, the psychologists analyze everything they have recorded in order to obtain some meaning. It is important to know that making a good observation is a skill. A good observer knows what he is looking for, who he wants to observe, when and where the observation should be made, how the observation will be recorded and what methods will be used to analyze the observed behavior.