Developmental Psych

ADHD

difficulties in attention and/or hyperactivity. Medication coupled with behavioral intentions can help children learn strategies.
-diagnosis requires consistent display of minimum # of specific symptoms over a 6 month period

How can girls increase participation in athletics?

Educated parents can help increase self confidence and participation

Gender differences in athletics

Girls advance in fine motor skills
Boys outperform girls on throwing, kicking, & other gross motor skills

What should be the emphasis by parents, coaches, and PE teachers?

Should be about enjoyment, informal & individual exercise, focus on child's personal progress and team contribution.

Competitiveness & ability by age 5

Competition should be introduced appropriately

Growth Spurt

Girls slightly shorter & lighter than boys, age 9 trend reverses

Height - what grows fastest?

larger portion of the body is growing fastest, all legs.

Illness

illness rates rise the first 2 years of school, exposure to sick children, the immune system is still developing

What is the most common illness in children?

Asthma - chronic inflammatory disorder in the airways that cause wheezing & coughing

Why increase in team sports?

Associated with rule understanding from peer relationships, exercise and develop motor skills, develop more self esteem, motivation and teamwork

Motor development

In MC, ligaments are very flexible, agility, speed & reaction time improve. Skills develop due to experience and growth.
-Nutrition, opportunity, and health influence motor development
-Increases in body size & strength contribute to advances in motor skills

In middle childhood, gross motor skills combine and become more complex, permitting faster running, higher jumping, and greater coordination, such as the ability to balance on a balance beam.

Obesity rate

About 32% of children are overweight
- Dramatic rise in overweight & obesity has occurred in many Western points

How can we prevent childhood obesity?

Parents should monitor their children's activities and engage in physical activity with them

What are the effects of malnutrition in early childhood?

Prolonged malnutrition can result in permanent physical and mental impairments.
-more focus on new friends & activities, drop % in family meals, malnutrition resulting from poverty, poor quality diets high in soft drinks and fast foods

body image dissatisfaction

Appears as early as the preschool years and increases over childhood.

adrenarche

maturing of the adrenal glands

Somewhere between ages 6 and 8, children experience a shift in hormones that trigger the activation of the adrenal glands, located above the kidneys

As the adrenal glands mature, they begin to secrete androgens, sex hormones that influence psychological and physical development in older children.

Brain Development

by age 6, the brain has reached about 95% of adult size.
-Brain volume increases, especially in prefrontal cortex

Resiliency

the ability to adapt effectively and recover from disappointment, difficulty, or crisis.
-resilient children tend to have behavior regulation, proactive orientation, initiative taking, and strong supportive parental relationships

the ability to respond or perform positively in the face of adversity, to achieve despite the presence of disadvantages, or to significantly exceed expectations given poor home, school, and community circumstances

Attention becomes more ______, ________, & ________.

Selective, flexible, and planful

bilingual children language learning

Often taught english by immersion
-code switching is not a problem
-many cognitive skills for speaking more than one language

Is immersion or dual language learning superior when it comes to Bilingual children?

DUAL LANGUAGE LEARNING IS SUPERIOR TO IMMERSION!!
-using native language alongside English

cognitive self-regulation

the process of continuously monitoring progress toward a goal, checking outcomes, and redirecting unsuccessful efforts.

Utilizing self-talk to calm down, planning steps for a complex task, reframing a stressful situation.

How can parents foster self regulation?

By pointing out important features of a task, suggesting strategies & explaining effectiveness of the strategies.

Metacognition

awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes. Thinking about your own thinking.

Ex. Realizing that your mind has wandered while reading and re reading the previous paragraph

conservation

the principle (which Piaget believed to be a part of concrete operational reasoning) that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects

constructivist approach

A learner-centered approach that emphasizes the importance of individuals actively constructing their knowledge and understanding with guidance from the teacher. Children actively construct learning

convergent thinking

ONE SUNGLE SOLUTION. Focuses on finding one well defined solution to a problem by applying logic, facts, and established rules.

Divergent thinking

Involves creativity when thinking of solutions. Explore MANY potential ideas and best for BRAINSTORMING, INNOVATION, OPEN ENDED CHALLENGES.

decentration (Piaget)

The gradual progression in which a child moves away from egocentrism and shares a reality with others. Realization that others may not like what they like, and that is normal & okay

Goal structures

types and outcomes goal is the end state
-leads to fixed mindset goal is the process
-leads to a growth mindset

kinesthetic sense

the sense of position and movement in the body. Allow us to feel how our body moves & what it feels like when we move.

Vocabulary increases fourfold:

- reading contributes enormously to vocabulary growth
- children grasp double meanings, appreciate riddles and puns
-can detect discrepancies between what the speaker says and what they believe

Literal vs. Intended meaning differences lead to....

Literal (Denotation)- Explicit meaning of words as stated. No external context or hidden layers. Ex. Can you pass the salt? (A question about ability)

Intended (Pragmatics)- Underlying, contextual, or implied message. Ex. Can you pass the salt? (A request to pass the salt)

Phonics

start synthetically & then analytically. Sounding out the words and letters

whole language approach

recognize words as whole pieces, instead of breaking them down and sounding them out

learned helplessness

the tendency to fail to act to escape from a situation because of a history of repeated failures in the past
-ex: a child performs poorly on a test after studying, so they decide to not study for the next one because they see it as ineffective
-children view the focus as fixed (focusing on being smart rather than efforts leads to this)
-focus on effort is a growth outlook on academic ability

sociocultural approach to intelligence

emphasizes the influence of society that we are living in onto our learning processes

Constructivist classrooms

student centered, children actively construct learning

Teaches:

Difference in interactions with boys and girls

Transition to 1st grade

adjustment & behavior in 1st grade influences teachers perceptions & children's views of themselves & academic performance
-Positive interaction with teacher = great motivation & success

Giftedness: exceptional intellectual strength

Usually measured with a high IQ: 130+, but now includes talent
-the most exceptional performance is creativity

triarchic theory of intelligence

Robert Sternberg's theory that describes intelligence as having analytic, creative and practical dimensions. Argues that intelligence is a multifaceted set of abilities rather than a single general factor measure by traditional IQ tests.

Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory

intelligence is not just one dominant ability, outlines 8 different intelligence

Autonomous Morality (Piaget)

stage at which a person understands that people make rules and that punishments are not automatic.

Distributive justice

how to divide goods fairly
-children begin to understand the need to balance competing claims and begin to coordinate merit, need, and equity

concrete stage of cognitive development

Piaget, begins around age 6-7, able to think logically, able to reverse an action or operation, still have trouble understanding abstract concepts or hypothetical situations, can draw generalizations from specific situations

Conservation (Piaget)

Understanding that something stays the same quantity even though appearance changes

Seriation

Ability to mentally arrange items along a quantifiable dimension, such as height or weight

Ex. A child is given a handful of sticks of different lengths and asked to put them in order from shortest to longest. It requires understanding that each item is both longer than the one before it and shorter than the one after it

Transitive influence

Ability to recognize relationships among various things in serial order WITHOUT having to compare them all directly.

Ex. If A is longer than B, and B is longer than C, then A must be longer than C. It requires MENTAL SERIATION based on their shared relationship to a third object.

Spatial reasoning

Ability to think about and manipulate objects in 3 dimensions

information processing theory

theory proposing that human cognition consists of mental hardware and mental software
-children are able to take in more info, process it more accurately & quickly, and retain it more effectively.

executive function

Improves, supporting gains in planning, strategic thinking, and self-monitoring; Is influenced by combination of heredity and environmental factors.

Meta memory

understanding memory & using strategies to improve it

What are the 3 strategies for metamemory?

Rehearsal- repeating information to obtain it
Organization - categorizing information
Elaboration - create a story to link the material to be remembered

Competence

A measurable pattern of knowledge, skill, abilities, behaviors, and other characteristics that an individual needs to perform work roles or occupational functions successfully

problem-centered coping

when the situation is changeable, identify the difficulty, decide what to do about it. Fix it

Example; If you are stressed about a difficult upcoming exam, you create a study schedule, hire a tutor, or clear your calendar to focus on prep.

Emotion centered coping

- used if problem-centered coping does not work
- situation seen as unchangeable
- internal private control of distress

Ex; If you are stressed about the exam but feel it is to late to study effectively, you might practice deep breathing, talk to a friend for comfort, or tell yourself “it’s just one grade; it won’t define my life”

Industry vs. Inferiority (Erikson)

6-12 yrs

Industry (Positive Outcome): Child’s feeling of competence and belief that they can learn and do things well.

Inferiority (The negative outcome): The feeling that one is not good enough compared to others.

Frueds stage

Entering latency

Gender typing

child adopts behaviors they believe are apart of their gender
-children express gender knowledge as rigid rules which influence their preferences for toys, activities, and playmates. Prefer same sex peers

Gender typicality

degree to which a child feels similar to those of the same gender

Gender contendness

degree to which child feels comfortable with his/her gender assignment

Gender Differences: Stereotypes vs. Reality

gender stereotypes influence children's preferences and views of their abilities
-boys are more physically active and higher risk of injury
-boys have advantage in mental rotation
-girls have advantage in reading comprehension & verbal fluency tasks (gone by adulthood) and are better able to manage emotion than boys

Securely attached children is correlated with....

Parental support of autonomy: best provide parental oversight with child making moment to moment decisions (coregulation), simple reminders

Blended family

a family composed of a biological parent & nonrelated adult
-best when stepparent builds warm relationship & adopts role slowly rather than force/rush
-children reared in stepfamilies do not differ from those raised in single parent families

Influences on achievement: Parent

Children raised by parents with a fixed view of abilities tend to view their own ability as fixed and unchangeable and are more likely to show a learned helplessness orientation.

Influences on achievement motivation: Socioeconomic Statusn

Influences children’s motivation through the availability of opportunities and resources and through parents behavior