Middle Childhood: Brain and Cognitive Development

Brain Development

• In school-age, information, skills become more integrated and refined
• Greater capacity for new learning
• Build upon old connections, and synaptic pruning occurs for unused or irrelevant information
• Changes occur in both the structure and the functioning of the brain that support the cognitive development
• Specific brain structures that experience growth during middle childhood include: the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, temporal lobe, and the corpus callosum.
• The brain reaches its adult size at about age 7.
• Frontal lobes become more developed and improvements in executive function skills, logic, planning, and working memory are evident.
• Increased cortical thickness in temporal lobes relate to greater long-term memory formation, reading skills and abilities. academics
• Parietal lobe-spatial and sensory awareness. Movements less clumsy and more coordinated.
• Growth of corpus callosum – activity is more integrated
• Brain waves: by age 7, alpha waves, the ones associated with engaged attention, become predominant.

Cognitive Skills

• Increase in attention, memory, and automaticity
• The ability to sustain attention and avoid distractions increases greatly when children move into middle childhood.
  • This ability is affected by automaticity, the process by which skills become so well practiced that we can do them without much conscious thought.
• As cognitive skills become more automatic, they free up processing capacity (the amount of information the mind can actively deal with at one time) that can be used for other tasks.
• Example : Word Reading . We see this process in the way children learn to read words – becomes automatic, can then move on to more complex paragraphs, etc.
  • Learning disability versus Typical Developing

Memory and Encoding Strategies

• In school-age, need to memorize more facts, academic skills, rules.
• Begin to use memory strategies
  • Memory Strategies: organizing and chunking information, mnemonics
  • Examples:
  • ROY-G-BIV, PEMDAS
  • Visual imagery
  • Categorizing
  • Elaboration- connecting the material to previously learned ideas

Executive Function

• Executive function improves:
  • Supports gains in planning, strategic thinking, and self-monitoring
• Working memory, Inhibition, Flexibility, Planning and Organizing, Task Initiation
• Inhibition and flexible shifting of attention:
  • Inhibition improves sharply between ages 6 and 10
  • Flexible shifting benefits from gains in inhibition
• What supports executive functioning?
  • Clear & consistent routines
  • Signals for transitions
  • Visual supports- color-coded schedules, folders
  • Repetition ; review; exit tickets
  • Multiple modalities or multisensory
  • Brain and movement breaks
  • Mindfulness

Development of Thinking

• Metacognition: Thinking about one’s own thinking
• In younger school-age, can start evaluating strategies, older children - what they did wrong or right, not repeat same errors
• Need support and scaffolding , but skills become more internalized
• Critical thinking: thinking reflectively and productively and evaluating evidence.

ADHD

• Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: a neurodevelopmental disorder described as a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development.

• In the United States in 2016, approximately 9.4% of children between the ages of 2 and 17 had ever been diagnosed with ADHD, and boys are twice as likely as girls to receive this diagnosis.

• ADHD is usually diagnosed during childhood

• In some cases symptoms may not appear until adolescence or be apparent until adulthood.

• 3 subtypes

  1. Hyperactive-impulsive: a child with a hyperactive-impulsive presentation always seems to be in motion, fidgets, has trouble staying on task, can’t wait for others to finish before speaking, and does everything quickly and without much thought.
  2. Inattentive presentation: child is easily distracted, has trouble getting organized or following directions, continually loses things, and often shifts from one task to another without completing either of them.
  3. Combined presentation shows symptoms of both inattention and
     hyperactivity-impulsivity.

• Teaching of executive function skills and effective strategies and therapy, behavior modifications are beneficial

  • Psychopharmacology: use of medication such as stimulants + strategies/ modifications shown to be effective for individuals meeting criteria -Must be discussed with medical provider

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