Middle Childhood Development Flashcards

Flashcards for reviewing cognitive development, academics, motivation, mindsets, and environmental influences in middle childhood, as well as emotional and social development, parenting styles, attachment, bullying, and overarching developmental principles.

Class Inclusion Problems

Problems that ask children to compare a broader category to subsets, testing their understanding of superordinate-subordinate relations.

Deductive Reasoning

Drawing a specific conclusion from general principles, developing in middle childhood with a focus on experience.

Selective Attention

Directing attention to relevant environmental aspects for goals, while ignoring irrelevant information.

Cognitive Flexibility

The ability to adapt to changing circumstances, such as switching between rules and tasks.

Processing Speed

How quickly one can perform simple tasks, improving with age due to myelination and synaptic pruning.

Metacognition

Being aware of what you know and how thinking works, allowing for performance monitoring and strategy implementation.

Rehearsal

Repeating items to oneself as a memory strategy.

Organization

Grouping related items together as a memory strategy.

Elaboration

Creating a relationship between pieces of information from different categories as a memory strategy.

Outside-in

Using conceptual aspects of a text/story to analyze the meaning.

Inside-out

Decoding sounds of words and how letters reference these sounds.

Intrinsic Motivation

Motivation to engage due to internal factors, like finding the activity pleasurable.

Extrinsic Motivation

Motivation to engage due to external factors, such as rewards or punishments.

Incremental Theory of Intelligence (Growth Mindset)

The view that intelligence is changeable and may improve with practice over time.

Entity Theory of Intelligence (Fixed Mindset)

The view that intelligence is innate and unchangeable.

Process Praise

Praise focused on children’s work and efforts, fostering motivation and interest (Growth Mindset).

Person Praise

Praise focused on children’s fixed abilities or traits, potentially undermining motivation and achievement (Fixed Mindset).

Pygmalion Effect

Students tend to “live up” or “live down” to expectations of them.

Authentic Pride

Associated with positive, prosocial behavior, stemming from effort and achievement.

Hubristic Pride

Associated with antisocial, selfish actions, often involving a sense of superiority.

Internalizing Behaviors

Suppressing feelings to an unhealthy extent, potentially leading to depression.

Externalizing Behaviors

Acting out in unacceptable ways, such as aggression.

Situation-Centered Coping

Changing the environment to prevent a situation.

Emotion-Centered Coping

Reframing a situation to prevent negative interpretation.

Social Comparison

Judgment of one’s traits, abilities, and behaviors relative to other people, increasing with age.

Permissive Parenting

High in warmth/responsiveness, low in control/demandingness ("you’re the boss").

Authoritative Parenting

High in warmth/responsiveness, high in control/demandingness ("let’s talk about it").

Uninvolved Parenting

Low in warmth/responsiveness, low in control/demandingness (“you’re on your own").

Authoritarian Parenting

Low in warmth/responsiveness, high in control/demandingness (“because I said so").

Positive Attachment

Support is available, even though the child is learning to be independent.

Traditional Bullying

Victim can go home and avoid bully; discrete events.

Cyber Bullying

Victim can’t escape the bully because they continue to harass them on the internet; continues over time.

Describe Development

Documenting what development looks like

Explain Development

Understanding the multiple factors that underpin developmental change.

Qualitative Developmental Change

Change that happens in distinct stages that differ in the qualities of the behavior, or thing that changed

Quantitative Developmental Change

Gradual change over time in the amount, frequency, or degree of child’s behavior.

Developmental Cascade

Changes in one domain at one time have long-lasting and far-reaching implications for other domains and at later times.

Sensorimotor Period (Birth to 2 years)

no mental representations.: “Infants’ schemas-cognitive structures that organize information and guide understanding of and actions in the world are limited to sensory experiences and motor actions”

Preoperational Period (2 to 7 years)

Mental Representations; “Children are capable of mental representation or the internalization of thought, as seen in the growth of language, symbolic play, deferred imitation, and understanding of object permanence”

Concrete Operational Period (7 to 11 years)

limited to Concrete Experiences; “Children develop logical, flexible, organized, and rational thinking; however, their thinking is limited to concrete experiences”

Formal Operational Period (11 years through adulthood)

Abstract and Hypothetical Thinking.

Nativism

Theorizes that people are born with innate (or core) capacities that are essential for human adaptation.

Core Knowledge Theory

Domain-specific and innate representational systems.

Synaptogenesis

Creation of synapses, allowing the connection between neurons.

Synaptic Pruning

Unnecessary synapses are eliminated, strengthening the remaining connections.

Myelination

Formation of the myelin sheath surrounding axons (only in some neurons).

Cardinal Principle

The last word in your count list is the size of the set.

Essentialism

Statements that imply a whole group shares a characteristic.

Moral Domain

Encompasses reasoning about others’ welfare and rights, fairness, justice, and equal treatment.

Psychological Domain

Focuses on children’s understanding of the mental states, beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions of self and others.

Social Domain

Involves social systems, organization, and conventions, such as social norms about how to behave in a classroom.

Sensitive Parenting

Caregivers lovingly respond to infant cries and other behaviors.

Evocative Effects

Interactions between genetic predispositions (temperament) and the environment (ex. parent reactions).