PAGE 3 : MIDDLE CHILDHOOD

• Height and weight


  Children grow about 2 to 3 inches each year between ages 6 and 11 and approximately double their weight during that period
• Sleep

  • needs from 10 to 13 hours a day for 3-5 Y.O
  • 9 to 11 hours a day for ages 6 to 13
  • Many children do not get enough sleep
• Medical conditions

  • Acute
  • Chronic
• Acute medical conditions


  Occasional, short-term conditions
• Chronic medical conditions


  • Physical, developmental, behavioral, or emotional conditions that persist for 3 months or more
  • Examples: Asthma, Diabetes
• Concrete operations


  Third stage of Piagetian cognitive development (approximately ages 7 to 12), during which children develop logical but not abstract thinking
• Concrete operations


  • Children can use mental operations, such as reasoning, to solve concrete problems
  • Children can think logically because they can take multiple aspects of a situation into account
  • Their thinking is still limited to real situations in the here and now
• Spatial relationships


  Children are more easily able to navigate a physical environment with which they have experience, and training can help improve spatial skills as well
• Causality


  Key development during middle childhood involves the ability to make judgments about cause and effect
• Cognitive advances


  • Spatial relationships
  • Causality
  • Categorization
  • Seriation
  • Transitive inferences
  • Class inclusion
  • Inductive and deductive reasoning
  • Conservation
• Seriation


  Ability to order items along a dimension
• Transitive inferences


  Understanding the relationship between two objects by knowing the relationship of each to a third object
• Class inclusion


  Understanding of the relationship between a whole and its parts
• Inductive reasoning


  Type of logical reasoning that moves from particular observations about members of a class to a general conclusion about that class
• Deductive reasoning


  Type of logical reasoning that moves from a general premise about a class to a conclusion about a particular member or members of the class
• Conservation


  In the preoperational stage of development, children are focused on appearances and have difficulty with abstract concepts
• Executive functioning


  Conscious control of thoughts, emotions, and actions to accomplish goals or solve problems
• Working memory


  Involves the short-term storage of information that is being actively processed, like a mental workspace
• Selective attention


  The ability to deliberately direct one's attention and shut out distractions—may hinge on the executive skill of inhibitory control, the voluntary suppression of unwanted responses
• Mnemonics


  • External memory aids
  • Rehearsal
  • Organization
  • Elaboration
• External memory aids


  Using something outside the person
• Rehearsal


  Conscious repetition
• Organization


  Mentally placing information into categories
• Elaboration


  Associating items with something else, such as an imagined scene or story
• Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV)


  Test for ages 6 through 16 that measures verbal and performance abilities, yielding separate scores for each as well as a total score
• Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale


  Individual intelligence tests for ages 2 and up used to measure fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working memory
• Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT8)


  Children are asked to classify items, show an understanding of verbal and numerical concepts, display general information, and follow directions
• Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC-II)


  An individual test for ages 3 to 18, designed to evaluate cognitive abilities in children with diverse needs (such as autism, hearing impairments, and language disorders) and from varying cultural and linguistic backgrounds
• Dynamic tests


  Based on Vygotsky's theories, focus on the child's zone of proximal development (ZPD)