Middle childhood

• Body Growth


  Slow, steady gains in height and weight.
• Body Structure


  No dramatic changes
• Individual Differences 


  substantial at this age. Girls aged 10-12 often taller than boys at this age. tends to mature faster than boys. tends to experience adolescents growth spurt earlier.
• Brain Development


  -increase in myelination and lateralization.

  -Affects learning; learning affects brain structures
• Gross motor skills


  Are well developed by middle childhood.
• Child brain needs?

  -It is to have a better behavior, better academic success

  -it promotes socialization with peers

  Recess
• Rough and tumble play


  Vigorous play involving wrestling, hitting, and chasing, often accompanied by laughing and screaming.
• Cognitive advances


  in the stage of concrete operations, children have better understanding than preoperational. Children also improves in spatial concepts, causality, categorization, inductive and deductive reasoning, conservation, and number.
• Spatial thinking


  Danielle can use a map to help her search for a hidden object and can give someone else directions. She can find her way to school, can estimate distances, and can judge how long it will take her to go from one place to another.
• Cause and Effect


  Douglas knows which physical attributes of objects on each side of a scale will affect the result. (i.e., number of object matter but color does not). He does not know which spatial factors make a difference.
• Categorization


  Elena sorts of objects into categories, such as shape, color, or both. She knows that a subclass (roses) has fewer members than the class of which it is a part (flowers)
• Seriation


  Catherine can arrange a group of sticks in order, from the shortest to the longest, and can insert an intermediate size stick into the proper place. She knows that if one stick is longer than a second stick, and the second stick is longer than a third, then the first stick is longer than the third.
• Inductive and deductive reasoning 


  Dominic can solve both inductive and deductive problems and knows that inductive conclusions (based on particular premises) are less certain than deductive conclusions (based on general premises)
• Conservation


  Felipe, at age 7, knows that if a clay ball is rolled into a sausage, it still contains the same amount of clay (conservation of substance) At age 9, he knows that the ball and the sausage weigh the same. Not until early adolescence will he understand that they displace the same amount of liquid.
• Number and Mathematics


  Kevin can count in his head, can add by counting up from the smaller, and can do simple story problems.
• Seriation


  Ability to order items along a dimension
• Transitive Inferences


  Understanding the relationship between two objects by knowing the relationship of the third object.
• Class inclusion (age 7 or 8)


  Understanding of the relationship between a whole and its part
• Piaget


  showed preoperational children 10 flowers-seven roses and three carnations--and asked them whether there where more roses or flowers.
• principle of identity, principle of reversibility, decentering


  Why concrete operational thinkers succeed conservation task: (3)
• Computational estimation


  ex. estimating the sum in an addition problem
• numerosity estimation


  ex. estimating the number of candies in a jar.
• Measurement estimation


  ex. estimating the length of a line
• Executive Function


  Conscious control of thoughts, emotions, and actions to accomplish goals or solve problems.
• Development of prefrontal cortex


  planning, judgement, decision making, working memory, self-regulation.
• Pruning


  ex. faster reaction time
• Selective attention 


  the ability to deliberately direct one's attention and shut out distractions-may hinge on the executive skills of inhibitory control, the voluntary suppression of unwanted responses.
• Theory of Multiple Intelligences


  Gardner's theory that each person has several distinct forms of intelligence.
• Culture-free tests


  Intelligence tests that, deal with experiences common to various cultures, in an attempt to avoid cultural biases.
• Culture-fair test


  Intelligence test that deals with experiences common to various cultures, in an attempt to avoid cultural bias.
• Linguistic


  ability to use and understand words and nuances of meaning.
• Logical-mathematical


  Ability to manipulate numbers and solve logical problems.
• spatial


  Ability to find one's way around in an environment and judge relationships between objects in space.
• Musical


  Ability to perceive and create patterns of pitch and rhythm.
• Bodily kinesthetic


  Ability to move with prescision
• Interpersonal


  Ability to understand and communicate with others.
• Intrapersonal


  Ability to understand the self.
• Naturalist


  Ability to distinguish species and their characteristics.
• Componential element 


  is the analytical aspect of intelligence; it determines how efficiently people process information. It helps people solve problems, monitor solutions, and evaluate the results. some people are more effective information processors than others.
• Experiential element 


  is insightful or creative; determines how people approach novel or familiar tasks. it enables people to compare new information with what they already know and to come up with new ways of putting facts together-in other words-to think originally.