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CLDDV 101 - Principles and Practices of Teaching Young Children

Use this guide for your research paper on Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) and Positive Discipline.

Understand Your Assignment

It may sound simple but understanding your assignment is one of the most important steps you take towards writing a good paper. Your instructor carefully crafted the assignment and may have even used language you can use to guide your search for useful information.

Pay special attention to:

  • Language - Pay close attention to verbs like argue, analyze, compare, or describe to guide your approach to a topic. For example, an assignment that asks you to argue requires you to take a position and support it with facts, statistics, and quotations. An assignment that asks you to analyze, requires you to critically examine your topic. Also, look for descriptive words your instructor uses because you might be able to use them as key terms in searching for relevant information.
  • Scope - Look for "multi-part" assignments in which instructors ask you to do more than one thing. Listing or outlining separate parts of an assignment can help you divide a daunting assignment into manageable parts. You also may see which sections will require research beyond what is covered in class.
  • Instructions - Take note of special instructions regarding format or length restrictions, information source requirements (does he/she require primary source materials or articles from scholarly journals), and grading criteria.

Your Assignment

You and your study partner are tasked with preparing a research paper on Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) and Positive Discipline.  You are asked to fully answer the following:

Part 1

  • What is DAP?
  • How is it implemented?
  • Why is it important?
  • Examples

Part 2

  • What is Positive Discipline?
  • How is it implemented?
  • Why is it important?
  • Examples

Part 3

  • How are DAP and Positive Discipline used in an early childhood classroom?
  • How are they related to one each other?

Part 4

  • What did you learn from this experience?
  • How will DAP and Positive Discipline be used in YOUR future?