C2
5.1 Basic Sensory and Perceptual Processes
Are newborn babies able to smell and taste? Do they respond to touch and experience pain?
Newborns can smell
They look relaxed when the scent is pleasant
Their Amneotic Fluid
Their Mother’s breastmilk and other familiar odours
They frown, grimace or turn away from unpleasant smells
Newborns have highly developed sense of taste
They prefer sweet and salty substances
They grimace when fed bitter or sour things
Infants will nurse more after their mother has consumed something sweet
Newborns are sensitive to touch
Touching a newborn will cause them to move
Babies can feel pain
You can bribe them with sugar
How well do infants hear? How do they use sounds to understand their world?
Fetuses can hear at 7/8 months
Auditory threshold refers to the quietest sound that a person can hear
They do an observation to find out what babies can hear
Adults can hear better than babies
Infants can differentiate between vowels and consonant sounds
4.5 months they can recognize their name
Infants can distinguish music
6 months they respond to most sound information
How accurate is infants’ vision? Do infants perceive colour?
Visual acuity is defined as the smallest pattern that can be distinguished dependably
Infants like patterns more than plain
Testing acuity using this fact and…
as we make the lines narrower (along with the spaces between them), there comes a point at which the black-and-white stripes become so fine that they simply blend together and appear grey, just like the all-grey pattern
Measurements of this sort indicate that newborns and 1-month-olds see at 6 metres what normal adults see at 60 to 120 metres
Cones: specialized neurons used for colour detection in the retina of the eye
At 3 months we can see a colour
At 6 months we can see a full range of
How do infants integrate information from different senses?
Integrating information from different senses underscores the theme that has dominated this module: Infants’ sensory and perceptual skills are impressive.
5.2 Complex Perceptual and Attentional Processes
How do infants perceive objects?
4 months of age: infants use a number of cues to determine which elements go together to form objects
One important cue is motion: Elements that move together are usually part of the same object
Other cues include:
Colour
Texture
Aligned edges
Brightness
infants more often group features together (i.e., believe they are part of the same object) when they’re the same colour, have the same texture, and when their edges are aligned
Size Constancy: the realization that an object’s actual size remains the same despite changes in the size of its retinal image
Determining left and right as well as high and low is relatively easy because these dimensions (horizontal, vertical) can be represented directly on the retina’s flat surface.
Babies who can crawl can def see depth
The visual cliff is a glass-covered platform; on one side, a pattern appears directly under the glass, but on the other, it appears several feet below the glass.
Infants Use many cues
Kinetic Cues: motion is used to estimate depth
Visual expansion refers to the fact that as an object moves closer, it fills an ever greater proportion of the retina.
Motion Parallax: refers to the fact that nearby moving objects move across our visual field faster than those at a distance
At 4 months Retinal Disparity: based on the fact that the left and right eyes often see slightly different versions of the same scene
At 7 months Pictorial Cues: arrangement of objects in the environment. They are the same cues that artists use to convey depth in drawings and paintings
Motor skills come with the vision
Babies can manipulate objects
They react to moving forward/backwards momentum wise
Babies like faces
Prefer:
Upright to Inverted
Attractive to Unattractive
2-3 months can tell faces apart
Atypical development of facial recognition skills
may be a sign of autism
May have vision issues
What are the components of attention? How do they develop?
Attention refers to processes that allow people to control input from the environment and regulate behaviour.
There are three attention networks
The orienting network is associated with selection—it determines which stimuli will be processed further and which will be ignored.
The alerting network keeps a child’s attentional processes prepared, ready to detect and respond to incoming stimuli.
Both of these are existing in infancy
The executive network is responsible for monitoring thoughts, feelings, and responses as well as resolving conflicts that may occur.
This is the one that takes a long ass time to develop and is the main difference between the typical and divergent children
Promoting attention (usually the executive network)
Playing pretend and staying in character is good for strengthening this in preschoolers
Parents can help improve the attention of their kids
What is attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder? How does it affect children’s development?
3-7% of school aged children have ADHD
4 boys : 1 girl
Higher in indigenous populations (It may be either that there is evidence of high ADHD prevalence in such communities, or that there are “unique learning and behavioural patterns in Aboriginal children that may erroneously lead to a diagnosis of ADHD”)
Three main symptoms of ADHD
Hyperactivity: Children with ADHD are unusually energetic, fidgety, and unable to keep still
Inattention: Youngsters with ADHD skip from one task to another. They do not pay attention in class and seem unable to concentrate on schoolwork.
Impulsivity: Children with ADHD often act before thinking
The degree of each of these symptoms is different per person
Genes may contribute to getting ADHD
ADHD therapies can be stimulants or psychosocial
5.3 Motor Development
Two motor skills must be learnt
Locomotion: to move about in the world
Fine Motor Skills: associated with grasping, holding, and manipulating objects
What are the component skills involved in learning to walk, and at what age do infants typically master them?
Toddlers: named after their manner of walking (right before or after age 1)
Dynamic Systems Theory: motor development involves many distinct skills that are organized and reorganized over time to meet the demands of specific tasks
Premature babies can develop motor skills using a skateboard
Baby walkers can be dangerous since children can walk but can't control where they are going leading to injuries
Upright posture is fundamental to walking but babies are very top heavy
Growth of legs muscles are important
Posture must be continuously adjusted
Balance needs to be relearned at each stage of movement due to the different muscle groups used in each movement type
Children need to be able to take a step to be able to walk
Infants before 10 months will hop or let their legs be dragged when held upright on a treadmill
Infants can learn to walk on relatively security flat uncluttered floors
They eventually need to learn how to identify different surfaces and if they are safe to walk on
Coordination is very important to learning movements and manipulating objects
Differentiation: mastery of component skills
Integration: combining them in proper sequence into a coherent, working whole
After learning to move we learn other movement skills as we get older
How do infants learn to coordinate the use of their hands? When and why do most children begin to prefer to use one hand?
Reaching and Grasping
4 months can successfully reach for objects
5 months can coordinate movement in both hands
7/8 months can use their thumbs
1yo reach for objects with one hand
2yo can grasp with both hands as needed
After infancy the motor skills progress rapidly and preschoolers become much more dexterous
Fine motor skills
Ability to move tiny things and grasp and other stuff like that
Dynamic Movement Theory: the interaction of many distinct movement skills that are continuously organised and reorganised to complete complex tasks
Dexterity is worse than it used to be
Young babies do not have a preference to use their right or left hand
Eventually they become emergent handedness where they steady with one hand and manipulate the other
Genes might bias handedness // industry might also favour a handedness
Are children physically fit? Do they benefit from participating in sports?
Exercise is good for you
Promotes muscle and bone growth
Cardiovascular health
Cognitive processes
30 minutes x 3 a week can reduce the risk of obesity, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes and psychological disorders
Children’s sport participation is influenced heavily by their parents
We are less fit then we used to be
Children do more sedentary activities
Participating in sports is good for social and because coaches can be good mentors
6.1 Setting the Stage: Piaget’s Theory
What are the basic principles of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development?
Children are naturally curious and are like little scientists
Their theories are often incomplete
Assimilation: when new experiences are readily incorporated into a child’s existing theories.
Accommodation: when a child’s theories are modified based on experience
The model is in equilibrium when children regularly are assimilating information and occasionally needs to accommodate their theory
Disequilibrium occurs when children need to accommodate information more then
Schemas: mental formations of organisation of information
Children need to completely adjust their theories when they reach a new stage of development
How does thinking change as children move through Piaget’s four stages of development?
Sensorimotor Stage (birth to age 2, encompassing infancy): a period during which the infant progresses from simple reflex actions to symbolic processing
1-4 months: Newborns reflexes to new stimuli are modified by experience
They put thumbs to their mouth like their sucking reflex
4-8 months: the infant shows greater interest in the world, paying far more attention to objects
8 months: infants reach a watershed: the onset of deliberate, intentional behaviour
12 months: infants become active experimenters. An infant may deliberately shake different objects, trying to discover which ones produce sounds, or may decide to drop different objects to see what happens.
18 months: most infants have begun to talk and gesture, evidence of the emerging capacity to use symbols. Words and gestures are symbols that stand for something else.
Object Permanence: understanding that an object exists
Deferred Imitation: the ability to reproduce another person actions at a later time
Preoperational Stage (age 2 to 6, encompassing preschool and early elementary school): is marked by the child’s use of symbols to represent objects and events
become proficient at using common symbols such as words, gestures, graphs, maps, and models
Egocentrism: difficulty in seeing the world from another's viewpoint
Everyone's house is my house
Animism: assigning life or life like qualities to inanimate objects
Centration: a tunnel vision where youngsters are narrowly focused on one thought
Concrete Operational Stage (age 7 to 11, encompassing middle and late elementary school): children begin to use mental operations to solve problems and to reason.
Mental Operations: strategies are rules that make thinking more systematic and more powerful
Another important property of mental operations is that they can be reversed. Each operation has an inverse that can “undo” or reverse the effect of an operation.
Formal Operational Stage (age 11 and up, encompassing adolescence and adulthood): apply mental operations to abstract entities; they think hypothetically and reason deductively.
They can envision alternative realities and examine their consequences.
Formal operational thinkers can solve problems by creating hypotheses (sets of possibilities) and testing them.
Deductive Reasoning: draw conclusion from the facts
What are the lasting contributions of Piaget’s theory? What are some of its shortcomings?
Piaget was one of the first people to think to study the cognition of children
Emphasized constructivism: children are active participants in their own development who systematically construct ever more sophisticated understandings of their worlds
Sparked interest in the why behind his discoveries
Piaget’s theory underestimates cognitive competence in infants and young children and overestimates cognitive competence in adolescents.
a main theme of modern child-development science is that of the extraordinarily competent infant and toddler
Piaget’s theory is vague concerning processes and mechanisms of change
Piaget’s theory undervalues the influence of the sociocultural environment on cognitive development.
6.2 Modern Theories of Cognitive Development
In Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, how do adults and other people contribute to children’s cognitive development?
Vygotsky saw development as an apprenticeship in which children advance when they collaborate with others who are more skilled.
Sociocultural Perspective: Children’s cognitive development is brought about not only by social interaction, but it is inseparable from the cultural contexts in which children live.
culture often defines which cognitive activities are valued
culture provides tools that shape the way children think
higher-level cultural practices help children organize their knowledge and communicate it to others
Intersubjectivity: which refers to mutual, shared understanding among participants in an activity
Guided Participation: in which cognitive growth results from children’s involvement in structured activities with others who are more skilled than them
children learn from others how to connect new experiences and new skills with what they already know
Zone of Proximal Development: the difference between what a child can alone and what they can do with help
Scaffolding: Matches the amount of assistant to their need
Minimum required amount of assistance
Private Speech: comments not directed to others but intended to help children regulate their own behaviour.
If children use private speech to help control their behaviour, then we should see children using it more often on difficult tasks than on easy tasks and more often after a mistake than after a correct response.
as children gain ever greater skill, private speech becomes inner speech, Vygotsky’s term for thought
According to information-processing psychologists, how does thinking change with development?
information-processing theory proposes that human cognition consists of mental hardware and mental software
sensory memory is where information is held very briefly in raw, unanalyzed form (no longer than a few seconds)
working memory is the site of ongoing cognitive activity
long-term memory is a limitless, permanent storehouse of knowledge of the world
Executive Function: the ability to coordinate attention as it relates to remembering relevant information
As you get older the strategies you use to be able to problem solve improve and self regulate
This is gained via support from adults
Watching more experienced peers
Self discovery
Automatic Processes: cognitive activities that require virtually no effort
The older you are the faster you can think (in general)
How do connectionist theorists view the development of the mind?
Type of information processing theory called connectionist theories where the mind is viewed as a system of networks
These networks identify patterns
What naïve theories do children hold about physics, psychology, and biology?
Core-Knowledge Theories: there are domains of knowledge that are acquired at different periods of life
Some things are easier to learn than others and are part of the general knowledge domains
Modules: mental structures used to learn and understand things
Language
Basic physics - how things move
Basic biology - how to stay healthy
Basic psychology - how to interact with others
6.3 Understanding in Core Domains
What do infants understand about the nature of objects?
Due to their naive understanding of physics infants will express surprise/interest when objects act in ways they do not expect
4.5 month olds will be surprised at
the occurrence of unrealistic disappearance of an object
6 month olds will be surprised at
An object being released midair that does not fall
An object staying put after being hit
An object passing through another solid object
When a tall object can completely hide under a shorter object
When liquids slide instead of spill
When and how do young children distinguish between living and nonliving things?
Due to their naive understanding of biology children are able to tell apart living and nonliving things
Movement: living things can move themselves, nonliving things must be moved by something
Growth: living things grow, nonliving do not
Internal Parts: living things have blood and bones, nonliving have cotton
Inheritance: living things inherit attributes, nonliving are given them
Illness: conditions are inherited, illness is contracted
Healing: living things heal, nonliving things must be fixed
Teleological Explanations: children believe that livings things and parts of living things exist for a purpose
Ex: fish are smooth so they don't cut the other fish they are swimming with
This is like animism in the preoperational stage of piaget
Essentialism: children believe that all living things have an essence that can’t be seen but that gives a living thing its identity.
Essence of what a creature is in western culture is associated with a vague notion of internal parts, but native children will believe it has to do with blood due to their culture
How do young children acquire a theory of mind?
Folk Psychology: people's internal beliefs about how people behave
People are very goal driven
Infants goal related part of the brain lights up before adults when adults go to do something
As we get older we develop more elaborate ideas of what people do
preschoolers understand that people can have different desires
children know that people can have different beliefs
children understand that different experiences can lead to different states of knowledge
Children (around 4yo) understand that behaviour is based on a person’s beliefs about events and situations, even when those beliefs are wrong.
Children understand that behaviour is based on a person’s beliefs about events and situations, even when those beliefs are wrong.
7.1 Memory
How well do infants remember?
Infants can remember days or even weeks at a time
In an experiment using a mobile that can be manipulated using a ribbon when being brought to the infant of 2-3 months they will sometimes remember to kick it depending on the amount of time that has past
(1) An event from the past is remembered;
(2) over time, the event can no longer be recalled;
(3) a cue can serve to dredge up a forgotten memory.
Youngsters can recall more of what they experience and remember it longer (as they get older into toddler years)
Memory is more flexible in older infants and toddlers: They are able to remember past events even when the context associated with those events has changed
Kids remember more than we historically thought
Growth in the brain is associated with the increase in memory
Developed in year 1: Initial storage of information is stored in the hippocampus
Part of the hippocampus does not mature until end of 2yo
Developed in year 2: The structures responsible for retrieving these stored memories
Once youngsters begin to talk, we can study their memory skills using most of the same methods we use with older children and adults.
As they get older they get more effective in the strategies they use to remember
First, as children grow, they use more effective strategies for remembering.
Second, children’s growing factual knowledge of the world allows them to organize information more completely and, therefore, to remember better.
How do strategies help children remember?
Memory Strategies: an action to promote remembering
Preschoolers look at or touch objects that they have been told to remember
Not a very effective strategy but at least they are trying
Elementary children begin to use more effective strategies
Rehearsal: repeating information that must be remembered
Organization: structuring material to be remembered so that related information is placed together
Elaboration: adding information to be remembered that makes it more memorable
Chunking: putting information in meaningful chunks
Working memory is about 7 chunks
Metacognition Knowledge: informal understanding of memory and other cognitive processes
Components of metacognition is perception, attention, intentions, knowledge, and thinking
Children also know that they can direct their attention and also can have their attention pulled places
To be successful in school children must master the abilities to pay attention, ignore distractions, be persistent at a task, be organized, and plan
These are used together to be cool
This allows you to be calm alert and focused
Cognitive Self-Regulation: pick goals and select effective strategies, and monitoring accurately
Some students do not understand how to do this themselves
How does children’s knowledge influence what they remember?
Script: a memory structure used to describe the sequence in which events occur
Networks of younger children are less extensive and so making connections is more challenging
Autobiographical Memory: people's ability to remember their life
Emergent sense of self also contributes to memory
Infantile Amnesia: the ability to remember your early life
2yo and before is almost impossible to remember
Child Witnesses
interview children as soon as possible after the event in question.
encourage children to tell the truth, to feel free to say “I don’t know” to questions, and to correct interviewers when they say something that is incorrect.
start by asking children to describe the event in their own words (“Tell me what happened after school . . .”) and follow up with open-ended questions (“Can you tell me more about what happened while you were walking home?”) and minimize the use of specific questions (because they may suggest to children events that did not happen).
allow children to understand and feel comfortable in the interview format by beginning with a neutral event (e.g., a birthday party or holiday celebration) before moving to the event of interest.
ask questions that consider alternate explanations of the event (i.e., explanations that do not involve abuse).
7.2 Problem Solving
Do older children and adolescents typically solve problems better than younger children?
Small children have easy problems to solve
Teens are bad at solving problems sometimes
What factors contribute to the success of children and adolescents in solving problems?
Encoding Processes: transform information into a mental representation
Children can and often will be mistakenly encoded
Children sometimes will fail to solve a problem because they did not plan ahead \
Children sometimes will think that just powering forward will work for them
Planning is hard
Children believe adults will solve problems for them as needed
Lack of specific knowledge
Can’t encode information in other forms
means-ends analysis: a person determines the difference between the current and desired situations, and then does something to reduce the difference.
Teens generally have better problem solving strategies that work to help them
Heuristics: mental shortcuts that are useful but not always correct
Collaboration can help solving problems because they can learn from each other
Can children and adolescents reason scientifically?
Children and adolescents often have misconceptions about scientific phenomena that interfere with their scientific thinking
Children and adolescents often devise experiments in which variables are confounded
Confounded: they are combined instead of evaluated independently, so that the results are ambiguous
Children and adolescents often reach conclusions prematurely, basing them on too little evidence
7.3 Academic Skills
What are the components of skilled reading?
Word Recognition: process of identifying a unique pattern of letters
Comprehension: process of extracting meaning from a sequence of words
Phonological Awareness: the ability to hear distinctive sounds of letters
Storybook reading is an informal way of learning about words
The first step of true reading is decoding identifying individual words by sounding out the letters in them
Recognizing familiar letters and syllables
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 36 countries around the world, performs regular assessments of student achievement, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
There are historically three reasons
Phonics: focusing on letter names and their typical sounds
Sight Words: learning the whole word
Whole Language: understanding the whole sentence in one go
Comprehension in reading
Children’s language skills improve, which allows them to understand words that they’ve decoded
Children become more skilled at recognizing words, allowing more working memory capacity to be devoted to comprehension
Working memory capacity increases, which means that older and better readers can store more of a sentence in memory as they try to identify the propositions it contains
Children acquire more general knowledge of their physical, social, and psychological worlds, which allows them to understand more of what they read
With experience, children better monitor their comprehension: When readers don’t grasp the meaning of a passage because it is difficult or confusing, they read it again
With experience, children use more appropriate reading strategies: The goal of reading and the nature of the text dictate how you read.
As children develop, how does their writing improve?
When you get older you know more about stuff in general and can improve your writing
Young Writers use Knowledge-Telling Strategies: writing down information on the topic as they retrieve it from memory
Adolescence Knowledge-Transforming Strategy: deciding what information to include and how best to organize it for the point they wish to convey to their reader
More writing you do the better at editing
When do children understand and use quantitative skills?
Basic number skills originate in infancy they can understand quantity kinda vaguely
Young babies can do simple addition and subtraction
Learning to count
One-to-one principle: There must be one and only one number name for each object that is counted.
Stable-order principle: Number names must be counted in the same order.
cardinality principle: The last number name differs from the previous ones in a counting sequence by denoting the number of objects.
Beginning school is around when kids can do arithmetic
4-5yo can do basic maths
8-9yo children can do addiction tables and sum single digit integers
Canadiens are okay-ish at doing math in general
Looking at other cultures is useful for
Improve teachers’ training by allowing them to work closely with older, more experienced teachers, and give them more time to prepare lessons and correct students’ work.
Organize instruction around sound principles of learning, such as providing multiple examples of concepts and giving students adequate opportunities to practise newly acquired skills.
Create curricula that emphasize problem solving and critical thinking.
Set higher standards for children, who need to spend more time and effort in school-related activities to achieve those standards.
7.4 Electronic Media
How does watching television affect children’s attitudes and behaviour?How does TV viewing influence children’s cognitive development?
Harmful effect of television
Because TV programs consist of many brief segments presented in rapid succession, children who watch a lot of TV develop short attention spans and have difficulty concentrating in school.
Because TV provides ready-made, simple-to-interpret images, children who watch a lot of TV become passive, lazy thinkers and become less creative.
Children who spend a lot of time watching TV spend less time in more productive and valuable activities, such as reading, participating in sports, and playing with friends.
Influences on Cognition
The Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) published best practice
Minimize screen time
Mitigate risks
Mindful about screen time
Model healthy screen use
How do children use computers at home and in school?
Technology is everywhere in rich countries
2-3yo are interacting online
COVID-19 increases the use of screens
Tech is in school
8.1 What is Intelligence?
What is the psychometric view of the nature of intelligence?
Psychometricians are psychologists who specialize in measuring psychological characteristics such as intelligence and personality.
Fluid Intelligence: refers to the ability to perceive relations among stimuli
Crystallized intelligence: comprises a person’s culturally influenced accumulated knowledge and skills, including understanding printed language, comprehending language, and knowing vocabulary
How does Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences differ from the psychometric approach?
Linguistic: Knowing the meanings of words, having the ability to use words to understand new ideas, and using language to convey ideas to others
Logical-mathematical: Understanding relations that exist among objects, actions, and ideas, as well as the logical or mathematical operations that can be performed on them
Spatial: Perceiving objects accurately and imagining in the “mind’s eye” the appearance of an object before and after it has been transformed
Musical: Comprehending and producing sounds varying in pitch, rhythm, and emotional tone
Bodily-kinesthetic: Using one’s body in highly differentiated ways, as dancers, craftspeople, and athletes do
Interpersonal: Identifying different feelings, moods, motivations, and intentions in others
Intrapersonal: Understanding one’s emotions and knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses
Naturalistic: Understanding the natural world, distinguishing natural objects from artifacts, grouping and labelling natural phenomena
Existential: Considering “ultimate” issues, such as the purpose of life and the nature of death
Other nontraditional forms of intelligence
Emotional Intelligence: the ability to use one’s own and others’ emotions effectively for solving problems and living happily
In teaching we should support all the kinds of intelligence that children are showing promise in in addition to classroom skills
What are the components of Sternberg’s theory of successful intelligence?
Analytic Ability: involves analyzing problems and generating different solutions.
Creative Ability: involves dealing flexibly with novel situations and problems.
Practical Ability: involves knowing what solution or plan will actually work.
8.2 Features of IQ Scores
Why were intelligence tests devised initially? What are modern tests like?
Mental Age: referred to the difficulty of the problems that children could solve correctly
Chronological Age: actual age
IQ (Intelligent Quotient): MA / CA * 100
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
Five core domains IQ score as well as scores for verbal comprehension, visual-spatial reasoning, fluid reasoning, working memory, and processing speed.
Infant testing involves Bayley Scales consist of five scales: cognitive, language, motor, social-emotional, and adaptive behaviour
IQ fluctuates between 10 and 20 points
What do tests predict? How does dynamic testing differ from traditional testing?
IQ scores can predict school grades, scores on achievement tests, and number of years of education
Also can predict some occupational success higher IQ ~ higher paying job and better achievement even when education between people are the same
Also can predict healthy behaviours
IQ scores and reading are not correlated strongly
Self-Discipline predicts school grades better than IQ
Dynamic Assessment: measures a child’s learning potential by having the child learn something new in the presence of the examiner with the examiners help
Dynamic testing differs from traditional testing by
The goal of traditional testing is to predict children’s performance relative to their peers; the goal of dynamic assessment is diagnosis, revealing a child’s strengths and weaknesses as a learner
Traditional testing follows a standardized format that focuses on a child’s unaided performance; dynamic assessment is interactive and, drawing on Vygotsky’s ideas of the zone of proximal development and scaffolding, focuses on the kind of guidance and feedback that children need to succeed
Traditional testing focuses on the child’s average performance across a variety of items; dynamic assessment focuses on a child’s peak performance—identifying the circumstances in which children learn best.
Response to Intervention: relies on more individualized classroom interventions and monitoring of progress
Allows early intervention for LDs
What are the roles of heredity and environment in determining intelligence?
Genetics can determine about half the impact of how you’ll score on IQ
Environment also increases the IQ score if it supportive, and more stimulating leisure time
Doing a headstart program makes you more likely to be successful in school
Native education
Collectivity: the interdependence of the members of the community, is a much more important aspect of life for Indigenous cultures than for mainstream Canadian culture.
The more holistic approach to learning taken by Indigenous cultures is also included and has positive benefits for literacy and education generally
How do ethnicity and socioeconomic status influence intelligence test scores?
Ethnic groups have different IQ scores but this is partially due to Socioeconomic Status
Kids do better when their family has money
IQ tests are also written in a way that experience with test contents are more likely to occur in people with rich European experience
Cultural-Fair Intelligent Tests: include test items based on experiences common to many cultures
An example is ravens progressive matrix seen below:
Stereotype Threat: the self-fulfilling prophecy in which stereotypes lead to anxiety and reduced performance consistent with their stereotype
Test-Taking is its own skill independent of whatever is being tested for
Stereotype threat works here when rich kids do better because they think they will versus poorer students
Collaborative problem solving cultures also tend to do worse
8.3 Individual Differences in Ability
What are the characteristics of gifted and creative children?
Gifted: individuals with scores of 130 or greater on intelligence tests
Giftedness has recently been expanded to include other domains aside from academic skills
Gifted children tend to be passionate about their subject and want to master it
They also are creative
Divergent Thinking: the aim is not a single correct answer but fresh and unusual lines of thought with is associated with creativity
Exceptionalness is nurtured and these kids get IEPs
What are the different forms of intellectual disability and disorder?
Developmental Disorder (Intellectual Disability): “is characterized by deficits in general mental abilities, such as reasoning, problem solving, planning, abstract thinking, judgment, academic learning, and learning from experience”
Intellectual Developmental Disorder or Intellectual Disability: refers to substantial limitations in intellectual ability, as well as problems adapting to an environment, with both emerging before 18 years of age
Down syndrome
ADHD
AUD
Adaptive behaviour includes conceptual skills important for successful adaptation in daily living (e.g., literacy, understanding money and time), social skills (e.g., interpersonal skill), and practical skills (e.g., personal grooming, occupational skills).
Talk to other people like parents or close friends to determine this
There are risk factors associated with having a developmental disorder
Biomedical factors, including chromosomal disorders, malnutrition, and traumatic brain injury
Social factors, such as poverty and impaired parent–child interactions
Behavioural factors, such as child neglect or domestic violence
Educational factors, including impaired parenting and inadequate special education services
Specific Learning Disorder: (a) have difficulty mastering an academic subject, (b) have normal intelligence, and (c) are not suffering from other conditions that could explain poor performance, such as sensory impairment or inadequate instruction.
5% of students have one of these
Development Dyslexia: difficulty reading words
Related with not understanding how sounds work
Impaired Reading Comprehension: difficulty understanding words that have been successfully read
Mathematical Learning Disorder (Discalculia): difficulty in math