Human Development, Diversity, and Behavior in the Environment
What you must know
Human development gives you a baseline for "typical" so you can recognize atypical. Know Erikson's psychosocial stages, Piaget's cognitive stages, Kohlberg's moral reasoning, Bowlby and Ainsworth on attachment, and the family life cycle. Bronfenbrenner's ecological model - micro, meso, exo, macro, chronosystem - is the backbone of the person-in-environment framework this exam tests on nearly every section. Know identity development models: Cross's racial identity stages, Cass's sexual identity stages, and acculturation strategies (assimilation, integration, separation, marginalization). Understand oppression, discrimination, intersectionality, and privilege as structural forces, not only individual attitudes. The strengths perspective and resilience consistently point to the better answer: build on capacity rather than catalog deficit.
Traps
The exam rewards developmental flexibility and punishes rigidity.
- Treating stage theories as timetables. Development is uneven, and temporary regression under stress is normative.
- Presenting grief as linear Kübler-Ross stages. Those stages are neither sequential nor required.
- Applying one cultural norm to an entire group - heterogeneity within groups is frequently the correct answer.
- Ignoring mezzo and macro levels. If the stem mentions school, neighborhood, or policy, the best answer usually includes advocacy, not individual counseling alone.
- Pathologizing acculturation stress or culturally normative behavior.
Worked example
A 14-year-old who recently immigrated is failing school and withdrawing. Distractor answers jump to "adjustment disorder" and individual therapy. The stronger answer assesses family, school, and community supports and considers an acculturation gap between the teen and parents - a micro/mezzo interaction in ecological terms. Rule of thumb: name the system level before choosing the intervention.