Middle Childhood

• Concrete Operational stage


  Third stage of Piaget's cognitive development stages
• Working memory


  Mental workspace
• Selective attention


  Ability to deliberately direct one's attention and shut out distractions
• Reading teaching approaches


  • Whole-language approach: exposure to text in its complete form – stories
  • Phonics approach: basic rules for translating written symbols into sounds
• Mathematics teaching


  • Basic math facts learning through frequent practice, experimentation, reasoning about number concepts, and teaching that conveys effective strategies
  • Emphasis on conceptual knowledge through active construction of meanings from word problems before computation and math facts memorization is more effective in learning math
• Culture-free tests


  Intelligence tests that, if they were possible to design, would have no culturally linked content
• Culture-fair tests


  Intelligence tests that deal with experiences common to various cultures
• Mathematics


  Basic math facts learning through frequent practice, experimentation, reasoning about number concepts, and teaching that conveys effective strategies
• Emphasis on conceptual knowledge

  Active construction of meanings from word problems before computation and math facts memorization is more effective in learning math
• Psychometric Approach


  • Intelligence Tests
  • Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences
  • Sternberg Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
• Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-V)


  Individual intelligence (IQ) test for school-age children, which yields verbal and performance scores as well as a combined score
• Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT8)


  Group intelligence test for kindergarten to 12th grade
• Culture-fair tests


  Intelligence tests that deal with experiences common to various cultures, in an attempt to avoid culture bias
• Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC-II)


  Nontraditional individual intelligence test designed to provide fair assessments of minority children and children with disabilities
• Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Tests

  • Standardized with extensive information about norms, validity, and reliability
  • Fairly good predictors of school achievement, especially for highly verbal children compared to scores in preschool
  • Influences: brain development, schooling, ethnicity/race
  • Controversial
  • Underestimate ill children's intelligence –timed
  • Not a measure of native ability
  • Single, general ability? Multiple? Other forms?
• Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences

  • Componential Element
  • Experiential Element
  • Contextual Element
• Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

  • Componential Element
  • Experiential Element
  • Contextual Element
• Vocabulary


  Significantly becomes larger especially children who are readers with being exposed to more diverse and complex vocabulary
• Grammar and Syntax


  • Understanding of syntax becomes more sophisticated
  • Sentence structure becomes more elaborate
• Pragmatics


  • Social context of language: conversational and narrative skills
  • Gender difference: apparent at 6 ½ years old and declines as they reach 9 ½ years old
  • Boys: more controlling and competitive statements and negative interruptions
  • Girls: more tentative, conciliatory, polite, and cooperative
  • Cultural influence
  • Dutch: no gender difference, equally assertive and controlling in play
  • More advanced theory of mind
  • Most 6-year-old can retell plot of stories they read, hear, or watch
  • Increase in organization, detail and expressiveness as they age
• Second-Language Learning


  • Bilingual development: 2 ways of becoming bilingual
  • Acquisition of both languages in early childhood
  • Learning a second language after acquiring a first language
  • Bilingual education: system of non-English speaking children in their native language while they learn English, and later switching to all-English instruction
  • Language immersion programs
  • Two-way (dual –language) learning
• Phonetic (code-emphasis) approach


  Approach to teaching reading that emphasizes decoding of unfamiliar words
• Decoding


  Process of which phonetic analysis by which a printed word is converted to spoken form before retrieval from long-term memory
• Whole-language approach


  Approach to teaching reading that emphasizes visual retrieval and use of contextual clues
• Visually based retrieval


  Process of retrieving the sound of a printed word when seeing the word as a whole
• Metacognitive abilities


  • Can help children develop literacy
  • Help in monitoring understanding of what they read and develop strategies to address challenges
• Traditional classroom


  • The teacher is the sole authority for knowledge, rules, and decision-making and progress is evaluated by how well they keep pace with a uniform set of standards for their grade
• Constructivist classroom


  • Encourages student to construct their own knowledge and students are evaluated by considering their progress in relation to their prior development
• Social-constructivist classroom


  • Children jointly construct understandings through a wide range of challenging activities with teachers and peers
  • Teachers and children as partners in learning
  • Experiences with many types of symbolic communication in meaningful activities
  • Teaching adapted to each child's ZPD
• Influences on School Achievement

  • Self-Efficacy Beliefs
  • Gender
  • Parenting Practices
  • SES
  • Peer Acceptance
  • Educational Methods
  • Class size
  • Alternative Educational Models
  • Media Use
• Teaching Children with Special Needs


  • Intellectual disability, learning disabilities, ADHD
  • Inclusion programs: inclusion in regular classrooms
  • SPED in the Philippines are limited
• Children with Learning Problems

  • Creativity entails divergent thinking
  • Enrichment programs: broaden and deepen knowledge and skills through extra activities, projects, field trips, or mentoring
  • Acceleration programs: moving gifted children through the curriculum at an unusually rapid pace
• The Developing Self


  • Developing Industry
  • Self-Understanding
  • Emotional Development
  • Gender Typing
• Developing Industry


  • Fourth stage of the psychosocial stages – children's view of their capacity for productive work which is a major determinant of self-esteem
  • Predominant industry: learning how to work hard to achieve goals and have competence which emphasizes the development of responsibility and motivation to succeed
  • Predominant inferiority: unable to obtain praise from adults and peers leads to lack of motivation and self-esteem that may lead to inertia where they do not venture away from home and retreat to the protective embrace of family
• Self-Concept


  • Representational systems: broad, inclusive self-concepts that integrate various aspects of the self
  • Focus is on more than one dimension of the self: good at some subjects, not as good in others (evaluative self-descriptions)
  • The changing content of the self-concept comes from the advancing cognitive capacities and feedback from others
  • Influences: parental support, social groups, culture
• Self-Esteem


  • Generally remains high in elementary school but becomes more realistic (real self vs. ideal self) and nuanced as children evaluate themselves in various areas and receive feedback from others
  • Four broad self-evaluations of children in the West: Academic competence, Social competence, Physical/athletic competence, Physical appearance (effects of media as they grow older)
  • Influences: Culture, gender, child-rearing practices, and achievement-related attributions (mastery-oriented approach vs. learned helplessness)
• Mastery-Oriented Approach to Learning


  • Select meaningful tasks that are responsive to diverse interests of students and are appropriately matched to current competence
  • Warm communication, focus on praising competent behavior, and model high effort in overcoming failure
  • Make evaluations private, avoid publicizing achievement or failure, emphasize individual progress and self-improvement, and provide constructive feedback
  • Provide cooperative learning and peer tutoring, accommodate individual and cultural differences in learning style, and emphasize that learning is for all
• Self-conscious emotions


  • Pride (new accomplishment) and guilt (transgression) are clearly governed by personal responsibility
  • Pride motivates children to take on further challenges
  • Guilt prompts children to make amends and strive for self-improvement
• Emotional understanding


  • Experience of mixed emotions (intensity)
  • Helps in realization that people's expressions may not reflect their true feelings
  • Supported by cognitive development and social experiences – empathy
• Emotional self-regulation


  Shift adaptively between two strategies: Problem-centered coping and Emotion-centered coping