PSYC Exam 3

Ages 2-6

* child grows 2-3 in per year
* gains 5 lbs per year

role of genes

* influence rate of growth
* height and weight similar to parents

ossification

the process in which the long bones of the arms and legs form new tissue

dietary needs

* calcium, vitamins, potassium
* most daycares provide high sugar, high salt foods

food preferences

largely shaped by parents food preferences

variations in appetite

generally declining

picky eating

* develops around age 3
* sensitivity to tactile sensations
* most children grow out of it

Gross motor skills

* increase in physical strength
* continuity in motor development
* contextual influences
* socioeconomic factors
* learning new motor skills
* play is experimenting with skills
* influence of cultural context

fine motor skills:

* proximodistal principle: children gain motor skills from the body outward to their hands and fingers
* interaction between cognitive and motor domains
* increased hand-eye coordination
* buttoning a button, not spilling a cup
* development of drawing techniques
* shows cognitive development
* planning, spatial understanding, symbolic representation

Brain development: At age 2

the brain reaches 75% of its adult weight, and 90% by age 5

* increases in brain matter, pruning, early experience, and myelination contribute to advances in childrens motor and cognitive advancement

Lateralization

the process of the hemispheres becoming specialized to carry out different functions

* begins before birth
* left hemi= language skills and right handedness
* right hemi= predicts attention, memory and control

Role of corpus callosum

* coordinates both sides of the body
* important for catching

Plasticity

* brains capacity to change its organization and function in response to experience
* young children who were given training in music demonstrated structural brain changes over a period of 15 months that correspond with increases in music and auditory skills
* most plastic during early life
* brain is both prepared for learning and sensitive to injury
* ability to compensate for an injury depends on
* the age at the time of injury
* site of the injury
* brain areas and capacities compromised

physical activity

* contributions to brain development
* barriers to physical activity
* children who live in homes with yards engage in more phyical activity than those who live in appartments, and yard size is positivly associated with children’s level of physical activity

Screen use

screen usage rates

* 95% of homes in 2017

Effects of educational programs

* sesame street has long lasting positive effects
* co-viewing helps

Effects of noneducational programs

* assoc. with cognitive and behavior issues

Negative effects of screen use

negative correlation between screen time and physical play and activity, which is then associated with weight issues

Sleep

* declines by 20% from infancy to early childhood
* effects of sleep problems
* poor sleep can have a cascading effect on brain dev. - affecting memory attention, and processing speed
* Nightmares are anxiety-provoking dreams; sleep terrors are more severe

Cultural differences

many eastern cultures do not view bedtime as a distinct event (no distinct bedtime), unlike many western cultures

unintentional injuries

* leading cause of death
* injury risk factors: impulsivity of the child
* parents who feel little control
* neighborhood disadvantage: poor surface maintenance of streets/sidewalks and poor design or maintenance of housing and playgrounds
* preventative factors
* supervision by parents

Physical and Motor Development in Middle Childhood

* children grow 2 to 3 inches and gain 5 to 8 pounds per year
* the average 10-year-old weighs about 70lbs and is about 4.5 feet tall
* children who enter middle childhood with stunted growth and nutritional deficits often do not catch up.

Rough-and-tumble play

* peaks in middle childhood


* an important way that children test their bodies, learn new motor skills, play with friends, and develop social skills

motor skills from birth to age 4 predict school-age children’s motor abilities

* characterized by vigorous physical activity
* differentiated from aggression by “play face”
* boys engage more frequently
* importance
* emotional regulation
* social skills
* muscle strength and control
* buffer against stress

Gross motor development become more complex

increases in body size and strength contribute to advances in motor skills

* includes advances in:
* flexibility
* balance
* agility
* strength
* middle childhood= motor skills become more complex and combine, faster running, higher jumping, greater coordination

fine motor advances allows for the development of new interests

school performance

* penmanship (handwriting)

girls tend to outperform boys in fine motor skills

advances in brain development as well as opportunities to practice help the development of motor skills

Accidental injuries

* most common cause of death in kids and adolescents in US
* motor vehicle accidents
* males are more prone than females
* contextual factors
* poor parental supervision and feelings of low control
* children with low impulse control
* poorer neighborhoods: poorly maintained streets, sidewalks, fewer safe places to play

obesity

* the most preventable health problem facing children today
* children today weigh more than ever before- Why??
* between ages 9-14
* more screen time
* fewer dinners together as a family
* U.S. children who eat an evening meal with parents are less likely to be overweight than other children are are less likely to be overweight as an adult

Rates of Body dissatisfaction

* half of all elementary schoolchildren reports dissatisfaction with some part of their body
* body image dissatisfaction arises from peer interactions
* influence of contexual factors
* exposure to media is one of the biggest contributers to dissatisfaction with one’s body

Preoperational Stage (ages 2-6)

* significant advances in representational thinking
* symbolic function- symbols become meaningful. children use language, interact w/ others, and play using their own thoughts and imaginations to guide their behavior
* deferred imitation- which is a mental representation of a previously observed event
* play & pretend

Lack of logic results in errors: causality-

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* preoperational thinkers cannot think logically about cause and effect
* instead use transduction: if two events happen close in time = events are linked

centration

focus on one part of a stimulus, excluding other parts

irreversibility

* failure to understand that reversing a process can often undo a process and restore the original state

Egocentrism

* the inability to take another’s perspective
* believes others share the child’s thoughts and feelings

Animism

\-the belief that inanimate objects are alive and have feelings and thoughts

concrete operational thinking (ages 6-7)

* children are able to apply logic to concrete tasks but not hypothetical
* classification: the ability to understand hierarchies, to simultaneously consider relations between a general category and more specific subcategories
* seriation: the ability to order stimuli along a quantitative dimension

class inclusion

involves understanding hierarchical relationships among items

transitive inference:

the ability to infer the relationship between two objects by understanding each object’s relationship to a third

reversibility

the ability to understand that an object can return to its original state

conservation

quantity does not change, even if you alter them

Vygotsky’s social constructivist approach

construction of knowledge through social interaction and culture

zone of proximal development

* range of tasks that’re too difficult for the child to master alone
* but that can be learned w/ guidance and assistance

scaffolding

assistance that is tailored to the child’s needs and permits children to bridge gap between their current competence level and the task at hand

private speech

a child speaks out loud, but only to themselves

Information processing

How do children process info?

Cognitive development entails developing mental strategies to guide one’s thinking and use one’s cognitive resources more effectively

Central executive function

* a control processor that regulates cognitive activities such as attention, action, and problemsolving
* Responsible for:
* coordinating performance on two tasks
* quickly switching between tasks
* selectively attending to key info and ignoring irrelevant info
* retrieving info from long term memory

Attention

the focusing of cognitive resources

executive attention

involves planning actions, monitoring progress on tasks, dealing with novel or difficult circumstances

sustained attention

remaining focused for an extended period of time

selective attention

the ability to systemically deploy one’s attention, focusing on relevant info and ignoring distractors

Working memory

* kids get better at holding information in working memory, manipulating it, inhibiting irrelevant stimuli, and planning, which allows them to set and achieve goals
* with advances in executive function, children become more skilled at controlling and deploying their cognitive resources to serve their goals

Executive functioning

* young kids get better at attention, memory, and cognitive tasks by staying focused and inhibiting impulses
* it is easier for children to control impulses when they’re better skilled in selfregulation
* brain development leads to improvement

Meta-Memory

understanding of one’s memory and ability to use strategies to enhance it

improves steadily during elementary years

Mnemonic strategies

* tricks to aid memory
* rehearsal
* organization
* elaboration

Memory suggestibility

repeated questioning may increase suggestibility in children

Theory of Mind (age 4, achieved at age 5)

a term that refers to awareness of one’s own mental processes and those of others. studies show the kid as “a thinker who is trying to explain, predict, and understanding people’s thoughts, feelings and utterances

False Belief Task

tasks require demonstrating the understanding that another person can have an incorrect belief

3-yo kids tend to perform poorly with these tasks.

Consequence of Theory of Mind

Empathy

being able to understand someone else’s viewpoint

Kid’s Language Development

* vocab acquisition
* vocab grows daily
* Age 2: 500-word vocab
* Age 3: 1000-word vocab
* Age 6: 14,000
* Age 11-12: 50,000

Logical Extension

when learning a word, children extend it to other objects in the same category. when learning that a dog with spots is called a dalmatian, a child may refer to a Dalmatian bunny (a white bunny with black spots)

Early grammer

* sentence formation is learned early on
* young children’s sentences are usually short and missing a few words

overregularization errors

overregularization errors are grammatical mistakes that young children make bc they are applying grammatical rules too stringently

pragmatics

the practical application of language to communicate

Phonics

memorizing rules and the sounds of each letter to sound out words

good empirical support for the efficacy

Intelligence

* ability to adapt to world in which we live
* \~Tests measure intellectual aptitude or an individual’s capacity to learn
* Psychometric Approaches
* most common form of assessment
* IQ tests
* individual testing
* good predictor of school performance

Intelligence tests

conducted in one-on-one settings by professionally trained examiners

WISC-V or the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children,

measures IQ in children and 5 indexes (verbal comprehension, visual-spatial, fluid reasoning, working memory, and processing speed)

* strong predictor of academic achievement

WISC-V

appropriate for children ages 6-16

WAIS

Wechsler adult intelligence scale

WPPSI

Wechsler preschool and primary scale intelligence

Analytical Intelligence

students with high analytic ability tend to be favored in conventional schooling. They often do well under direct instruction, in which the teacher lectures and gives students objective tests

Creative Intelligence

insight and the ability to deal with novelty

applied intelligence

how people deal with their surroundings. As adults, some become successful managers, entrepreneurs, or politicians

Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

everyone has all of these intelligences to varying degrees. As a result, we prefer to learn and process info in different ways. People learn best when they can do so in a way that uses their stronger intelligences

* Linguistic
* Logico-mathematics
* musical
* spatial
* bodily-kinesthetic
* naturalist
* interpersonal
* intrapersonal

Academically centered preschool programs

emphasize providing children with structured learning environments in which teachers deliver direct instruction on letters, numbers, shapes, and academic skills

child-centered preschool programs (montessori schools)

take a constructivist approach that encourages children to actively build their own understanding of the world. Children learn by doing, through play, and learn to problem-solve, get along w/ others, communicate, and self-regulate

Exposure to Poverty

* Effects of context- higher SES context = learn more words during childhood
* can result in lifelong differences in language competencies

* 30 million word gap

* high SES families encounter an average of 30 million words in their interactions w/ their mothers through age 4 than children from the lowest SES families,

Phonics instruction

* lessons and drills that emphasized learning the patterns of sound combinations in words
* effects of early reading deficits
* learning mathematics through role activities
* success of modified mathematics curriculum

Bilingual Language Learning

* children who are exposed to two language build distinct language systems from birth
* the course of language development follows the developmental path for each language
* The rate of growth in each language tends to be slower for bilingual children

ESL through English immersion

it places foreign language-speaking children in English- speaking classes, requiring them to learn English and course content at the same time. leads to reduction of native language

dual-language learning

English-speaking and non-English-speaking students learn together in both languages and both languages are valued equally

* influence siblings and peers
* speaking more than one language involves more cognitive advances

Specific learning disorder

diagnosed when children demonstrate a measurable discrepancy between aptitude and achievement in a particular academic area

developmental dyslexia

the most commonly diagnose SLD, children have difficulty reading and processing speech sounds

developmental dyscalculia

SLD that affects mathematic abilities

developmental dysgraphia

an SLD that affects writing abilities. writing relies on motor/sensory skills, and children w/ dysgraphia may lack these required abilities

ADHD

* Persistent attention difficulties and/or hyperactivity/impulsivity that interferes w/ performance and behavior in school and daily life
* structural abnormalities in brain responsible for attentional and motor control
* stimulant medication as common treatment

Autism Spectrum Disorders

* family of neurodevelopmental disorders that range in severity and are characterized by deficits in social communication and a tendency to engage in repetitive behavior


* common characteristic of ASD is repetitive behavior such as rocking, hand-flapping, twirling, and repeating sounds, words, or phrases
* Some are intellectually disabled, while other are above average
* brain development associated with altered neural

Intellectual disability

* IQ of 70 or below
* deficit in age-appropriate adaptive behavior, such as social, communication, and self-care skills, that begins before age 18
* behavioral component- inability to appropriately adapt or modify one’s behavior in light of situation demands

Educating children with Disabilities

legislation mandates that children w/ learning disabilities are to be placed in the least restrictive environment, or classrooms that’re as similar as possible to other class rooms

Individualized Education Plan (IEP)

written statement that is specifically tailored for the qualifying student

Least restrictive environment (LRE)

setting that’re as similar as possible to other class rooms in which typical students are educated in

inclusion

educating child w/ special ed need full-time regular exercise

Gifted students

* often qualify if IQ is at least 130
* may also qualify if advanced in particular academic area
* display immense curiousity for the area of interest and simultaneously share knowledge

Erikson stage 3 Initiative vs. Guilt: Initiative

make new plans

tackle new tasks

set goals and work to achieve them

Erikson stage 3 Initiative vs. Guilt: Guilt

fail to uphold rules and/or achieve a goal

parents are controlling or punitive, critical, or threatening

Emotional regulation

helps the child to manage demands and conflicts with others

Emotional development in early childhood

* __Emotional regulation__: helps the child to manage demands and conflicts with others
* it is essential to adaptation
* cognitive, executive function, theory of mind, and language development all affect emotion reg
* parents and interactions w/ peers influence emotional regulation

Empathy

is linked w/ the perspective-taking ability that emerges w/ theory of mind

empathy and prosocial behavior

* __Empathy:__ is linked w/ the perspective-taking ability that emerges w/ theory of mind
* the capacity to understand another person’s emotions
* the child must imagine another’s perspective in order to understand how they feel
* a secure attachment to a caregiver helps children develop the emotional understanding and reg skills on which empathy depends

Prosocial behavior

* voluntary behavior intended to benefit another
* instrumental assistance or tangible help, ex: 3 1/2-year-olds are more likely to bring an adult a needed object
* sharing tends to change w/ age

Development of prosocial behavior

* biological: temperament and physiological arousal
* emotional development
* family
* contextual

Aggression

instrumental

relational

instrumental aggression

* used to achieve a goal
* most common in early childhood
* it is a normal aspect of development

Relational aggression

* often verbal aggression
* name calling
* excluding peers from play
* tends to increase while physical aggression declines
* most common in girls than in boys