Infant and Child Development - Exam 4: Middle childhood

physical growth and development

girls and boys are same weight and height at age 7; girls are slightly taller and heavier by age 11

normative growth

gender differences as adolescent growth spurt begins (girls have more body fat, boys have more lean body mass); body proportions change (limbs get longer, torso becomes slimmer as "baby fat" is lost); loss of primary teeth; eyes maturing (myopia may develop)

Myopia

extreme nearsightedness

hormonal changes begin

adrenal glands secrete hormones > hypothalamus and pituitary glands > gonads (ovaries/testes); system of signaling takes about two years to become fully established

physical changes begin for girls

between 7-13, breast buds develop; between 9-15, onset of menarche (menstruation); secular trend (changes over generations): age of onset of menstruation has dropped over time

physical changes begin for boys

testicular enlargement occurs around age 11.5

childhood obesity

children today have higher overall BMI; increase in percentage of 6-11 year olds who are overweight; linked to lifestyle: fast food, advertising, schools, neighborhoods and communities, physical inactivity

consequences of being overweight

what were formerly "adult" problems are now seen in middle childhood: type II diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol; higher likelihood of asthma and apnea; early weight problems lead to bigger weight problems later; emotional consequences (rejection, lower sense of self-worth, risk for internalizing problems)

brain development

by 8 years, brain has reached 90% if its full adult size; growth processes continue on from early childhood (proliferation, myelin growth, pruning, contribute to refinements in brain structure); competitive elimination; corpus callosum thickens (improving communication between the hemispheres); refinements linked to cognitive development

competitive elimination

process that strengthens synapses that are used regularly and prunes unused synapses to eliminate clutter - leads to increased lateralization in middle childhood

normative brain development

growth follows cyclical process around the cortex (different areas undergo growth spurts at different times); areas of change associated with higher-level information-processing skills: frontal lobes (critical thinking, problem-solving), prefrontal cortex (planning and emotional regulation); changes in gray matter in temporal and parietal lobes

normative development: brain matter

gray matter: cell bodies responsible for information processing, changes in temporal and parietal lobes, follows a pattern of growth beginning with proliferation of neurons and their connections that reach a peak and then decline via competitive elimination; white matter: myelinated nerve fibers, increases linearly with age

gender differences in brain development

variation in timing and degree of change for boys and girls: girls - spatial-discrimination and gross motor skills, boys - language and fine motor skills; brain volume: boys' brains 10% larger than girls' brains

brain differences in intelligence

thickness of cerebral cortex related to proliferation and pruning of gray matter; patterns of competitive elimination

Traumatic brain injury (TBI)

sudden injury to the brain that can be caused by a blow to the head or penetrating wound; most common during auto accidents; 3% of children who experience a TBI suffer lifelong disabilities as a result (physical, cognitive disabilities, socio-emotional problems); symptoms may lead to misdiagnoses (learning disabilities, emotional problems, or mental retardation)

ADHD: predominantly inattentive (IA)

children are unable to sit still, have trouble paying attention, and attending to details; cannot modulate their emotions or energy to fit the situation

ADHD: predominantly hyperactive-impulsive (HI)

children are oppositional and noncompliant with adults, disruptive and aggressive with peers, and have difficulty making friends; provoke intense, negative feelings in others

causes of ADHD

differences in cerebellum (coordination of motor movements, timing and attention); abnormalities in neurotransmitters; delayed brain maturation

brain reactions to stress

stress > release of cortisol; prolonged exposure > toxic - injures or kills neurons in the hippocampus (involved in memory, learning, and emotion); PTSD; volatile parental relationships

brain reactions to stress: PTSD

symptoms: intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, nightmares/sleep disorders, withdrawal, high emotionality; severity of symptoms related to cortisol levels and size of hippocampus

effects of volatile parental relationships on children's stress

hypocortisolism (low levels of cortisol) numbness; linked to externalizing behaviors

behavioral coping

the effortful or purposeful response to challenging situations; involves three steps: 1. regulation of emotional arousal, 2. assessment of the situation and realistic recognition of what the child can control, 3. problem-focused coping: an effort to achieve some resolution of the situation that results in a feeling of mastery and/or resilience; social strategies: seeking help and comfort from peers/caregivers; solitary strategies: physical exercise, fantasy play

Sandstorm's four patterns of coping

Active coping (problem solving, assertiveness, humor, constructive distraction, getting help); Aggressive coping (teasing, arguing, getting angry, getting others to turn against another child); Denial coping (telling oneself that it does not matter); Ruminative coping (worrying, withdrawing, wishing it were not happening) - Linked to temperamental predispositions and parenting

Gross motor skills development

becomes smoother and more coordinated (improved flexibility, balance and coordination, agility, and strength, "growing pains"); no sex differences in fundamental movement skills among elementary-age children K-2 (boys and girls can run, jump, climb, etc. equally well); middle childhood is sensitive period for development of motor skills (riding a bike, learning to skate, hitting a gold ball, etc)

physical activity development

essential to growth and maturation: builds strong muscles and bones, increases energy and alertness, maintain healthy weight, reduces stress, academic achievement, brain development

youth sports: good and bad aspects of sports for children

good: provides exercise and teaches important life skills; bad: may cause anxiety and stress

fine motor skills in middle childhood

involved in many new accomplishments (i.e. writing in script, more detailed drawings, typing, playing instruments,etc); Development Coordination Disorder (impairment of motor coordination)

amount of sleep

parents overestimate children's sleep times; family circumstances affect sleep quality

actigraph

measures sleep onset, morning awakening, and nighttime awakenings; used to determine a child's sleep period

sleep and cognitive funtioning

"hard-wiring" of information learned during the day; fragmented sleep and sleep duration linked to decrease in information-processing skills; preference for circadian rhythm emerges during middle childhood

nap-time

increased ability to remember things they just learned, including motor memory for physical learning, visual skills, and cognitive tasks; OR provides better alertness and performance

illness and chronic medical conditions

after injury, cancer is the leading cause of death; fewer acute, life-threatening illnesses today, HIV; asthma, allergies, Diabetes

Piaget's Concrete Operational period

ages 7-12; development of logical reasoning skills for concrete materials and tasks, enable thoughtful and active interaction with the world; succeed at conservation tasks (characteristics such as mass, volume, and number stay constant, despite changes in appearance); five competencies that underlie logical reasoning: classification, class inclusion, seriation, transitive inference, reversability

classification

the ability to divide or sort objects into different sets and subsets, and to consider their interrelationships; includes the ability to group items along multiple dimensions

class inclusion

ability to recognize that a class (or group) can be part of a larger group

seriation

the ability to arrange items in a sequenced order according to particular properties; requires recognition of bi-directional relations

transitive inference

builds on an understanding of seriation; requires that two relations are combined to derive a third relation - i.e. if I am taller than her, but shorter than him, then he is taller than me and taller than her

reversibility

the understanding that relations can be returned to their original state by reversing operations - if nothing has been added or taken away

horizontal decalage

differences in performance on conceptually related Piagetian tasks - i.e. conservation of mass first, then of number

information processing importance

attention and memory are necessary for logical reasoning, which in turn is necessary for problem solving

processing speed

greater improvements in middle childhood than in adolescence (mirrors pattern of gray matter development); procedures used: visual matching, cross out

Visual Matching procedure

involves task cards with 60 rows of 6 digits each; children asked to find the two matching rows; number of cards completed in a set amount of time is the child's processing speed

Cross Out procedure

involves task cards with a target shape on left and 19 similar geometric figures to the right, five of which are identical; child asked to cross out the five identical figures, number of cards completed is the processing time measure

working memory

conscious, short-term representations of what the person is actively thinking about at a given time; Digit Span Task (repeat in order a series of rapidly presented items); Chunking info allows w.m. capacity to be functionally much larger

long-term memory

information that is mentally encoded and stored, potentially with no time limits; types in middle childhood: gist, verbatim, declarative, procedural

long-term memory: gist

a generalized, rather than specific, memory of common occurrences

long-term memory: verbatim

detailed memories of specific events

long-term memory: declarative

memory of facts, such as names of people, places, and phone numbers

long-term memory: procedural

implicit type of memory; a memory of complex motor skills, such as riding a bike or typing on a keyboard

long-term memory strategies

rehearsal and repetition, mnemonics, writing things down (an advanced form of rehearsal), explicitly relating new info to prior knowledge (building on foundations), organizing info into meaningful "chunks"

false memory

a memory that is a distortion of an actual experience, or a confabulation of an imagined one; can be created by the process of constructing memories: DRM procedure, misinformation paradigm

Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure

5 yr olds tend to falsely remember nonpresented words based on how they sounded; 8 yr olds tend to make errors of all because they made both phonological and semantic associations with nonpresented words

misinformation paradigm

person's recall becomes less accurate because of post-event information; younger children are more susceptible than older children

children's testimony: influenced by...

length of time between event and interview (longer = more distortions); number of interviews (fewer = more distortions); interviewer bias (use of leading/misleading questions)

interviewer bias

use of leading and/or misleading questions

to minimize distortions in children's testimony

trained interviewer has one-on-one conversation; free recall > neutral prompts > cued recall > paired recall

Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test

measures verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, abstract visual reason, short-term memory

WISC Test

verbal scale and performance scale: arithmetic, vocabulary, comprehension, block design, similarities, digit span

Spearman's general factor "g"

different abilities are all a manifestation of a single general cognitive factor

Thurstone's seven distinct factors

verbal comprehension, verbal fluency, inductive reasoning, number, memory, perceptual speed, space

Gardner's multiple intelligences

linguistic, logical-mathematical (ability to reason about abstract concepts), spatial (ability to see world and mentally recreate what is seen), musical, bodily-kinesthetic (ability to use one's body effectively), interpersonal (skill in interacting with others), intrapersonal (ability to understand one's own emotions and thoughts and express them), naturalistic (ability to distinguish/categorize naturalistic phenomena)

intelligence in different social contexts

dependent on different social contexts and experiences; concerns that favor white, middle class children

IQ scores

stabilize in middle childhood; environmental issues: early enrichment in one's enviro has positive impact; genetic influences: monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twin studies indicate that intelligence has high heritability

Giftedness

indicated by extraordinary creativity or performance in music, sports, or art, as well as traditional academics; top 1-2% of IQ scores; both genes and enriched environments implicated

intellectual disabilities

significantly below average general intellectual functioning that is accompanied by deficits in adaptive behavior and that has adverse effects on educational performance; IQ score of <70; genetic origins: Down Syndrome, Fragile X Syndrome; environmental deprivation: Romanian orphans

language development in middle childhood

vocabulary continues to increase - root words; sentence structures become complex with more use of subordinate clauses; code switching; language reflects their experiences at home

root words

words that must be learned (as opposed to derivations and compounds, which build on root words) - i.e. root: fish, derived: fishy, compound: fishhook

code switching

knowing how to use one type of language for one audience and another for another audience

English Language Learners (ELLs)

at risk for losing their first language, although this is buffered if parents are highly educated; using first language at home does not harm the acquisition of English as long as English is also used at home

skills required for reading

decoding (applying knowledge of letter-sound relationships to read written words) and comprehension (understanding what you have read)

required for reading: comprehension

understanding what you have read

teaching reading: phonics approach

emphasizes decoding letters and words, matching letters to sounds, analyzing sound structure of words; Alphabetic principle: letters represent the sounds of speech, and there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken words; phonemic awareness: children learn letter sounds first and then blend them to form words

teaching reading: Whole language approach

emphasizes comprehension and context; inferring words from context, oral reading fluency, understanding words and text meaning

difficulties learning to read

early literacy is linked to later academic achievement and aggressive behaviors; SES matters; Dyslexia; English language learners

Dyslexia

a learning disability characterized by difficulties with word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding skills; in preschool, more speech errors and poorer at rhyming

mathematics: three main components in middle childhood

1. knowing math and procedures, 2. using the knowledge to solve routine problems, 3. using the knowledge to solve non-routine problems

mathematics ability

improves dramatically during middle childhood; informal mathematics contribute to the development of mathematical thinking; gender differences: school age girls consistently better grades but boys score higher on standardized tests

A Typical Classroom

predominant activities: class instruction and basic skill instruction; little time devoted to analysis, science, technology, or small group activities

achievement gap

between low-income Black and Hispanic students and middle-income White and Asian students

No Child Left Behind

a federal law that holds all schools accountable for student performance; requires states to meet specific goals measured by standardized achievement tests (failure = loss of federal funds); high-stakes tests (reading, math) begins in 3rd grade; Issues: all children held to same standards

strategies to narrow the achievement gap

class size, teacher quality, lengthening the school day/year, reorganizing the school curriculum, early childhood education, family involvement in school

self-conception in middle childhood

become more balanced and nuanced (describes strengths and weaknesses in comparison to other kids, recognize and reconcile conflicting traits); builds on cognitive advances made in this stage (success at conversation tasks translates into success at considering multiple dimensions of one thing); influenced by views of parents, peers, and cultural values/societal standards

Erikson's Industry vs Inferiority

come to enjoy persistence and hard work; sense of Industry: develops when recognized for production, desire for recognition drives development of valued skills, recognition fosters appreciation for persistence and hard work; sense of Inferiority develops when accomplishments are not recognized; social contexts affect the development of industry

gender development

provides organized framework for children to think of themselves in relation to others; self-concepts reflect gender norms

Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Reasoning

Preconventional moral reasoning (focus on rewards and punishments associated with different courses of action); Conventional (focus on judgment by others for behavior, rules not questioned b/c come from a higher authority and lead to the greater good); Postconventional (rules and conventions are relative, not absolute; behavior must support moral ends, sometimes rules must be questioned)

development of moral reasoning

moral reasoning becomes more principled over the course of childhood and adolescence; development into higher stages of moral reasoning occurs when child is ready: reasoning is predominantly at one stage but partially in the next higher one; scaffolding helps foster development

prosocial behavior

voluntary actions that are intended to benefit another person

prosocial development

increase through middle childhood (better able to read emotional cues of others, better at regulating own emotional states); changes in reasons for helping (early childhood = hedonistic reasoning > middle childhood = altruism); cultural variations in individualistic and collectivistic cultures

hedonistic reasoning

focuses on one's own wishes and needs

physical aggression

hitting, pushing

verbal aggression

threats, name calling, yelling angrily

social aggression

damaging another's self-esteem, social status, or both

relational aggression

damaging or manipulating relationships with others

aggression in middle childhood

decreases as children acquire strategies for dealing with conflict; aggressive children process social info differently (more likely to perceive ambiguous encounters as hostile, relationship between aggression and poverty, parenting); social and relational aggression peaks during transition between middle childhood and adolescence

gender differences in aggression

girls have steep decline in physical aggression and steep incline in social aggression

bullying

aggression by an individual that is repeatedly directed towards particular peers; physical (hitting, kicking, shoving, tripping), verbal (teasing, harassing, name-calling), or social (public humiliation, exclusion); characterized by specificity (target specific peers) and imbalance (usually older or bigger, or unequal in some way to their victims); likely to use force unemotionally and without provocation

victims of bullying

shy, anxious, socially withdrawn children - easy prey b/c don't have friends to protect them; aggressive, irritating children - may engage in irritating behavior that elicits bullying, few friends

styles of coping with bullying

aggression, anger, and contempt; passive capitulation or submissive avoidance; adaptive and constructive strategizing (involves getting help or recruiting friends)

post-modern families

variety of possible structures, fairly fluid; most children live in a two-parent household; 4 million households are multigenerational, more common in immigrant families

advantages of two-parent households

income, higher education levels, less maternal depression, parenting more likely to be authoritative