PSYC 2235 Chapter 9 (Middle Childhood)

Concrete operational stage

Piaget's third stage of cognitive development, during which children construct schemes that enable them to think logically about objects and events in the real world (cannot think of hypothetical situations

- ages 7-11

- struggle with abstract concepts

Centration/decentration for concrete operational stage

- Usually master at this stage

- Children understand that an object's properties remain the same even if its appearance change

- Ex. Know that pouring the same amount of juice into a different-shaped glass doesn't change the quantity

Reversibility for concrete operational stage

- Grasp that some actions can be reversed to get to its original state

- Ex. math problems like 2 + 3 = 5 can be reversed to 5 - 3 = 2

Inductive logic

A type of reasoning in which general principles are inferred from specific experiences (specific to general, can lead to incorrect conclusions)

- Ex. "All the swans I've seen are white; therefore all swans are white"

- Ex. A child observing that every time they drop a ball, it falls to the ground, then concluding from these specific instances that all objects will fall to the ground when dropped

- Ex. Child see a ball, an apple and a book fall, "If these fall when I drop them, then everything falls when I drop it"

Deductive logic

A type of reasoning, based on hypothetical premises, that requires predicting a specific outcome from a general principles (General ideas applied to specific aspects, can't understand hypotheticals so they ignore the premises, cannot accept premises as true)

- Ex. If a child knows that a P1: toy car (A) is faster than a toy train (B), and that P2: the toy train (B) is faster than a toy plane (C) they can logically conclude that C: the car (A) is faster than the plane (C)

- If A=B and B=C then A=C

- Children are not good at applying this, using primarily inductive reasoning

Horizontal Decalage (Piaget)

Children grasp different concepts that are part of concrete operations at different points in time, even different conservation tasks though they're all conceptually identical (Ex. may understand class inclusion but not conservation of mass at the same time)

- The inconsistent or lagged development of similar cognitive skills within the same development stage

Rules for problem solving (concrete operations)

Siegler looks at children transitioning from one rule or problem-solving strategy to another. Typically they start out with less-sophisticated rules and move on gradually to more-sophisticated rules. Transitions depend more on experience than age (Ex. when asked 2+257, they won't switch the numbers to make it easier, rather they count from 2 and try adding 257, this depends on their education level)

Processing efficiency

The ability to make efficient use of short-term memory capacity (Increases steadily with age, we see the same age-related processing-speed increase in a wide variety of tasks)

- May be at the root of cognitive development for children

- Improving significantly, children move beyond single-minded thinking and consider multiple dimensions of a problem simultaneously

Automaticity

The ability to recall information from long-term memory without using short-term memory capacity

- Achieved mostly through practice (some are always automatic like reading for adults, familiar words making it easier)

- Frees up working memory for other information and tasks (Studying, paying attention to the actual material)

- Increasing

Executive Processes

Information-processing skills that involve devising and carrying out strategies for remembering and problem-solving

- Metacognition just beginning to develop

- Great improvement throughout middle childhood

Memory Strategies

Learned methods for remembering information (Ex. rehearsal, organization, elaboration, mnemonic tricks)

- Rehearsal sometimes works well

- Organization includes hierarchal strategies

- Elaboration which is relating things to other things such as your life usually works the best

- Children start developing these, moving to rehearsal, organization and visualization

- Can combine multiple strategies to improve recall, leading to better memory performance

Experts

- Categorizes information about that topic in highly complex and hierarchical ways

- Has more information to tie new information to when using elaboration

- Shows greater capacity for creativity in that topic

- Do not generalize their advanced reasoning skills on that topic to other topics

Language during middle childhood

- Learn to understand various forms of past tense and use them correctly

- Learn how to maintain a topic of conversation (Topics relate to the conversations rather than them jumping around)

- Learn to correct ambiguous sentences (Start asking for clarification)

- Learn to speak politely or persuasively

- Learn about 5,000-10,000 new words/year (Learning morphology)

- Learn to use and understand passive sentences (Such as "the book was read by the boy," don't usually use this)

- Pretty good at languages