COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• -          Characterized by problems in social interaction, problems in verbal and nonverbal communication, and repetitive behaviors.
• -          Intellectual disability is present in some children with autism; others show average or above average intelligence.
• Ø  EMOTIONAL AND BEHAVIORAL DISORDERS

  -          consist of serious, persistent problems that involve relationships, aggression, depression, and fears associated with personal or school matters, as well as other inappropriate socioemotional characteristics.

   
• Ø  INDIVIDUALIZED EDUCATION PLAN (IEP) is a written statement that spells out a program that is specifically tailored for the student with a disability.
• Ø  LEAST RESTRICTIVE ENVIRONMENT (LRE) is a setting that is as similar as possible to the one in which children who do not have a disability are educated.
• -          CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE - children can perform concrete operations, and they can reason logically as long as reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples:

   
• ·         OPERATIONS are mental actions that are reversible.

   
• ·         CONCRETE OPERATIONS are operations that are applied to real, concrete objects.
• -          SERIATION - which is the ability to order stimuli along a quantitative dimension (such as length).

   
• -          TRANSITIVITY - which is the ability to logically combine relations to understand certain conclusions.
• INFORMATION PROCESSING

  -          children dramatically improve their ability to sustain and control attention.
• Ø  LONG-TERM MEMORY - a relatively permanent and unlimited type of memory, increases with age during middle and late childhood.
• Ø  WORKING MEMORY - as a kind of mental “work-bench” where individuals manipulate and assemble information when they make decisions, solve problems, and comprehend written and spoken language.
• Ø  AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY - memory of significant events and experiences in one’s life, broaden and become more elaborated.
• Ø  STRATEGIES - deliberate mental activities to improve the processing of information.
• Ø  ELABORATION - is an important strategy that involves engaging in more extensive processing of information.

   
• • Ø  FUZZY TRACE THEORY states that memory is best understood by considering two types of memory representations: (1) verbatim memory trace, and (2) gist.
• -          VERBATIM MEMORY - trace consists of the precise details of the information.
• -           GIST - refers to the central idea of the information.

   
• • Ø  THINKING Three important aspects of thinking are executive function, critical thinking, and creative thinking.