Middle and Late 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
  • Girls retain somewhat more fatty tissue than boys
• Dental Health


  • Globally, about 560 million children have untreated tooth decay in their permanent teeth
  • Untreated dental caries can result in pain, difficulties chewing food, missed school, problems with concentration, and discomfort with appearance
• Nutrition


  • The recommended calories per day for schoolchildren 9 to 13 years of age range from 1,400 to 2,600, depending on gender and activity level
• Sleep


  • Sleep needs decline from 10 to 13 hours a day for 3- to 5-year-olds to 9 to 11 hours a day for ages 6 to 13
  • Failure to get adequate sleep is also associated with a variety of adjustment problems
  • Sleep quality, sleep duration, and daytime sleepiness have all been found to affect academic performance and seem to affect younger children, particularly boys, to a greater degree
  • Short sleep duration in children is associated with later risk of obesity
• Brain Development


  • The overall volume of gray matter (neurons without myelin sheath) increases rapidly after birth, peaking in childhood. Then, in late childhood, it begins to decline and stabilizes at some point in the third decade
  • Losses in gray matter density reflect maturation of various regions of the cortex, permitting more efficient functioning
  • The loss in density of gray matter with age is balanced by another change: a steady increase in white matter
  • Changes in the density of the white matter in the corpus callosum may also underlie the advances seen in fine motor control in late childhood
• Motor Development and Physical Activity

  • The decreases in physical activity are likely to result in weight gain and declines in health, and are likely to more severely impact urban children without access to safe outdoor spaces
  • Children with access to outdoor spaces such as a yard were more likely to engage in physical activity and less likely to show signs of depression or anxiety or fight with their family members
• Overweight and Obesity


  • Children are more likely to be overweight if they have overweight parents or other relatives, or are inactive
  • Obese and overweight children commonly have medical problems, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and high insulin levels, or they may develop such diseases at a younger age
• Asthma


  • A chronic respiratory disease characterized by sudden attacks of coughing, wheezing, and difficulty in breathing
• Diabetes


  • Characterized by high levels of glucose in the blood as a result of defective insulin production, ineffective insulin action, or both
  • Disease in which the body does not produce or properly use insulin
• Childhood Hypertension


  • Chronically high blood pressure
  • Risk factors include obesity or overweight, salt intake, sedentary lifestyle, poor sleep quality, and race
• Concrete Operations (~7 – 12 years old)


  • Children develop logical but not abstract thinking
• 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


  • Children are better at causal reasoning when they have the opportunity to explain and collaborate with others
• Seriation


  • Arranging objects in a series according to one or more dimensions (time, length, or color)
• Transitive Inferences


  • Understanding the relationship between two objects by knowing the relationship of each to a third object
  • If a < b and b < c, then a < c
• Class Inclusion


  • Ability to see the relationship between a whole and its parts, and to understand the categories within a whole
• Inductive Reasoning


  • Type of logical reasoning that moves from particular or specific 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 or specific member or members of the class
• Conservation

  • Children are focused on appearances and have difficulty with abstract concepts
  • Horizontal Decalage: Inability to transfer learning about one type of problem to other types of problems sharing the same conceptual underpinnings
• Number and Mathematics


  • By age 6 or 7, many children can count in their heads
  • By age 9, most children can count up and down
  • The ability to estimate progresses with age
• Executive Function


  • Conscious control of thoughts, emotions, and actions to accomplish goals or solve problems
  • The prefrontal cortex, the region that enables planning, judgment, and decision making, shows significant development during this period
  • Involves the development of self-regulatory capacity, including the ability to regulate attention, inhibit responses, and monitor errors
• Selective Attention


  • It is the ability to deliberately direct one's attention and shut out distractions
  • School-age children can concentrate longer than younger children and can focus on the information they need and want while screening out irrelevant information
  • The increasing capacity for selective attention is believed to be due to neurological maturation and is one of the reasons memory improves during middle childhood
• Working Memory


  • Involves the short-term storage of information that is being actively processed, like a mental workspace
  • Between the ages of 6 and 10, there are improvements in processing speed and storage capacity
• External Memory Aids


  • Mnemonic strategies using something outside the person
  • Writing down a telephone number
  • Making a list
  • Setting a timer
• Rehearsal


  • Mnemonic strategy to keep an item in working memory through conscious repetition
  • Saying a telephone number over and over after looking it up
• Organization


  • Mentally placing information into categories to make it easier to recall
• Elaboration


  • Mnemonic strategy of making mental associations involving items to be remembered
• Metamemory


  • Understanding of processes of memory
  • Children's metamemory abilities continue to progress through adolescence and quite possibly longer

  
• Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV)


  • Most widely used individual test
  • For ages 6 – 16
  • Measures verbal and performance abilities, yielding separate scores for each as well as a total score
• Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale


  • Measures both verbal and nonverbal abilities
  • Consists of five subtests: fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working memory
• Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT8)


  • Has levels for kindergarten through 12th grade
  • Group test
  • Children are asked to classify items, show an understanding of verbal and numerical concepts, display general information, and follow directions
  • Separate scores for verbal comprehension, verbal reasoning, pictorial reasoning, figural reasoning, and quantitative reasoning can identify specific strengths and weaknesses
• Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC-II)


  • Individual test
  • For ages 3 – 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


  • Tests based on Vygotsky's theory that emphasize potential rather than past learning
• Influences on Intelligence


  • Intelligence is highly heritable
  • Intelligence is highest in those children whose cortex thins most quickly or whose white matter develops most rapidly
  • The efficiency and integration of brain processes, both at the global and specific levels, are key to intelligence
• Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC-II)


  • Individual test
  • For ages 3 – 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


  Tests based on Vygotsky's theory that emphasize potential rather than past learning
• Intelligence


  • Highly heritable
  • Highest in those children whose cortex thins most quickly or whose white matter develops most rapidly
  • The efficiency and integration of brain processes, both at the global and specific level, are associated with intellectual functioning
• IQ scores


  Drop during summer vacation and rise again during the academic year
• Scores attained on various educational assessment tests


  Strongly correlated with IQ
• Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligence


  • Each person has several distinct forms of intelligence
  • High intelligence in one area does not necessarily accompany high intelligence in any of the others