10. Middle Childhood - Physical and Cognitive Development

Middle childhood

_______________ - School-age children up to adolescence

• 6 to 12 years

Physical changes

_______________ - Less obvious but still significant (5-8cm & 2.75kg/year)

Continued improvement in large-muscle, hand-eye, and fine motor coordination

• Sex differences:

  • Girls’ rate of growth is faster

  • Girls have more fat and less muscle tissue

  • Girls’ wrist bones mature faster → better fine motor coordination

  • Skeletal and muscle coordination: girls more coordinated but slower and weaker

Brain and nervous system

________________ - Diff. parts

• Myelinization: Continues at steady pace

  • Early on, happens rapidly in sensory and motor areas

  • Later, reticular formation and nerves linking it to frontal lobes

• Frontal lobe growth → logic and planning

• Selective attention

• Association areas – areas of the brain where sensory, motor, and intellectual functions are linked become almost fully myelinated

• Lateralization of spatial perception

• Spatial cognition

Selective attention

Brain and nervous system

____________ - ability to focus cognitive activity on important elements of a problem or situation

Lateralization of spatial perception

Brain and nervous system

______________ - ability to identify and act on relationships between objects in space

• Imagining how furniture could look in a different position

Spatial cognition

Brain and nervous system

__________________ - ability to infer rules from, and make predictions about, movement of objects in space

• Boys are better in this likely due to play like building blocks, etc.

Sleep + immunization

______________ - Sleep: Poor sleep patterns are common

• 9-11 hours of uninterrupted sleep/night = recommended amount

• Use of electronics in the bedroom associated with poorer sleep quality and amount

Immunization: Hepatitis B if not administered in infancy, Human Papillomavirus (HPV) should be considered between 9-13 years

Unintentional injuries

________________ - 2/5 fatalities among children age 5-9 years

• Increases with age

• Higher for males

• Playground accidents = ~1/2 of traumatic brain injuries

• Reduction in hospitalizations due to unintentional injuries because of reduced activity

Healthy bodies and weights

_________________ - Primary measure is body mass index (BMI)

• 12.3% of boys and 8.5% of girls are obese

  • Risk factors: overweight parents, large size for gestational age at birth, and early onset of being overweight

  • Overweight or obese children are at higher risk for a range of health and socioemotional problems

Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage

________________ - Third stage; children construct schemes that allow them to think logically about objects and events in the real world

• Concrete operations = set of schemes that emerge during this stage

• Decentration: thinking that takes multiple variables into account

  • Opposite of centration

• Reversibility: ability to mentally undo a physical or mental transformation

• Develop ability to use inductive logic: inferring general principles from specific experiences

• Not yet good at deductive logic: predicting a specific outcome from a general principle

Tests of Piaget’s theory

Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage

_______________ - Horizontal decalage and Siegler’s approach

Horizontal decalage: it takes years for children to apply their newfound cognitive skills to a variety of problems → Piaget was right that concrete operational schemes are gradually acquired between 6-12 years old

Siegler’s approach crosses Piaget’s theory with information-processing theory

• Concrete operational stage task performance conceptualized in terms of problem-solving

• Cognitive development = acquiring set of basic rules and applying them to more and more types of problems through experience

• No stages, only sequences

• Problem-solving rules emerge from trial-and-error experimentation

• Child’s position in logic sequence depends on specific experience with given set of material – not on age

Advances in info-processing skills

________________ - Memory improves the more you use it. Improved memory skills allow information and skills to be acquired much more quickly and with greater understanding

• Processing efficiency

• Automaticity

• Executive processes

Rehearsal

Memory strategies

____________ - Mental or vocal repetition

Organization

Memory strategies

_______________ - Grouping ideas, objects, or words into clusters to help remember them

Elaboration

Memory strategies

______________ - Finding shared meaning or a common referent for two or more things that need to be remembered

Mnemonic

Memory strategies

______________ - Pattern of letters, ideas, or associations that help remember something

Systematic searching

Memory strategies

____________ - Scanning memory for domain in which piece of information might be found

Expertise

Advances in info-processing skills

______________ - how much someone knows impacts how efficiently their information-processing system works

• Children's knowledge about a topic influences their creativity

• Expertise supersedes age differences in strategy use or memory ability

• Information-processing skills may be entirely dependent on the quantity and quality of relevant information stored in long-term memory

Language

_______________ - Develop greater skill at managing finer points of grammar

Learn how to maintain a topic of conversation, how to create unambiguous sentences, and how to speak politely or persuasively

• Age 9 years: can engage in fluent conversation with speakers of any age; speech rates approach those of adults

• Add 5,000 – 10,000 new words per year

Schooling

__________________ - Formal education is one of most important influences on cognitive development in middle childhood

• Authoritative teaching style = most effective

• Literacy is focus of education during middle childhood

• Phonological awareness continues to increase and is foundation for later-developing skills that predict reading comprehension ability in later childhood

• Effective beginning reading programs include systematic and explicit phonics instruction

• Balanced approach: reading instruction that combines explicit phonics instruction with other strategies for helping literacy acquisition

Second-language learners

Language

______________ - Increase in Limited English Proficient (LEP) children in English-speaking countries

• In Canada, analogous problems for non-proficient French speakers in certain regions

• Bilingual education = approach where children receive instruction in two different languages

• English-as-a-second-language (ESL) program: approach where children attend English classes for part of the day and receive most academic instruction in English

• No approach is more successful than others – all

Processing efficiency

Advances in info-processing skills

_______________ - ability to make efficient use of short-term memory

Automaticity

Advances in info-processing skills

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

Executive processes

Advances in info-processing skills

_______________ - devising and executing strategies for remembering and problem-solving

Bilingual education

_____________ - French immersion programs: exclusively French from kindergarten – Grade 2; incremental increase in subjects taught in English every year until approximately half-and-half in senior grades

• Initially delays in English-language development disappear by later grades

• High school-age French immersion students have better reading achievement scores

• Early immersion education facilitates all aspects of thinking development

• Learning a second language instills appreciation for another culture, provides an alternative way to view and value the world, and encourages objectivity and open- mindedness

• Indigenous language revitalization programs are having success

Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory

Theories of intelligence

_____________ - 8 types: linguistic, logical/mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal, and intrapersonal

Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

Theories of intelligence

______________ - 3 types: contextual intelligence, experiential intelligence, and componential intelligence

Goleman’s Theory of Emotional Intelligence

Theories of intelligence

_______________ - 3 parts: awareness of own emotions, ability to express one’s emotions appropriately, and capacity to channel one’s emotions into pursuit of worthwhile goal

Group diff. in achievement

_______________

Gender:

• No overall differences in IQ scores

• Girls achieve better school marks for all subjects

Differences in learning styles

• Analytical style: tendency to focus on details of a task

• Relational style: tendency to ignore details of a task in order to focus on the “big picture”

Analytical style better fits school expectations

Measuring/predicting achievement

_______________ - Differences in quality of education across Canada due to governmental structure

• Pan-Canadian testing

• Achievement tests: designed to assess specific information learned in school

• Standardized: scores based on comparison of performance to performances of other children in same grade across the country

• Criticism: quite similar to IQ tests → comprehensive portfolios of schoolwork may be better indicator of actual school learning than standardized achievement tests

• Assessment: use of formal and informal methods of gathering information to develop programming designed to improve student learning at a developmentally appropriate level

• Evaluation: process of assigning a grade or mark to a student’s performance that represents the student’s highest, most consistent level of achievement over tim

Learners w/ exceptionalities

Exceptionality Category	Description of Exceptionality
Behaviour disorders	Conduct disorders, social maladjustment, ADHD, emotional disorders
Communication disorders	Language impairment, speech impairment, learning disability
Sensory impairments	Deafness and hearing impairment, blindness and low vision
Intellectual differences	Giftedness, mild intellectual disability, developmental disability
Pervasive developmental disorders	Childhood psychosis, childhood schizophrenia, infantile autism
Physical disorders and impaired health	Neurological defects, physical disability, conditions resulting from disease or infection
Multiple	Multiple exceptionalities

Learning disabilities

________________ - Disorder resulting in a child having difficulty mastering a specific academic skill despite possessing average to above-average intelligence and having no physical or sensory impairment

• Lifelong, range in severity, and way they are expressed may vary over a person’s lifetime

• May significantly interfere with education unless special instruction provided

• Importance of early identification, timely specialized assessments, and cross-setting interventions

• 1/10 Canadians

ADHD

_________________ - Neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by executive dysfunction

• Two groups of symptoms – inattention and hyperactivity

  • Require at least six in either cluster

  • Symptoms must have appeared before the age of 12, persisted for at least six months, and occur in at least two settings

• Prevalence in middle childhood: 3.7% of Canadian boys and 1.5% of girls aged 6-9 years

  • Strong genetic component

  • Environmental risk factors: brain injury, exposure to environmental toxins, parenting styles, stressors, peer relations, interactions with teachers

  • Maybe an adaptive response to specific environments

• Possible solution: changing classroom environment to lessen the mismatch

• Lower academic grades

• May be disruptive and are often rejected by peers

• Sleep problems – cyclical relationship with symptoms

• Treatment: parent training, medications (middle childhood-on), problem-solving and training related to individual challenges