ACORNS: visualising nature-nurture and developmental difficulties
Welcome to the ACORNS web pages. These pages have been created to help researchers, clinicians and students visualise and represent the complexity of child development by providing a clear way of portraying wide theoretical accounts of developmental difficulties; hopefully, in the process, overcoming some of the overwhelming feelings that can descend when you are faced with this complexity (see left).
ACORNS (an Accessible Cause-Outcome Representation and Notation System) provides a structured and clear way of representing theoretical models of developmental processes, giving more precise and clear visualisations of how development unfolds. ACORNS allows the representation of fully dynamic, transactional models of the changing influences of nature and nurture, and can be applied to typical and atypical development. We hope ACORNS will be useful for students, clinicians and theoreticians from genetics to social policy and be a seed for the development of new interdisciplinary theoretical oak trees!
The web site provides free access to the ideas behind ACORNS, and allows you to create your own models. The thinking behind ACORNS is outlined in our original paper,a pre-print version of which can be downloaded from here, or the definitive version can be accessed from JIDR (see below). The issues are also explained in pages accessible from the menus. You can also download templates and read about how to use indicators to precisely illustrate relative rates, degrees and variance of functioning over different capacities at different time points.
We hope you find this site useful and welcome feedback on ACORNS and on the site in general. If you create a representation of a theoretical model using the ACORNS method then please cite our paper and please upload the model to the website so all can access it and use them as templates for their own versions.
Moore, D.G. & George, R. (2011) ACORNS: A tool for the visualisation and modelling of atypical development. Invited review. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 55(10) pp 956-972 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2788.2011.01471.x
Derek Moore & Rachel George
© 2008
Please contact us if you have further suggestions, comments or queries. Prof. Derek Moore
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