Lesson 9: Middle Childhood (Physical & Cognitive Devt)

• 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 more fatty tissue than boys, a characteristic that will persist through adulthood
• Tooth Development and Dental Care

  Improvements in dental care can be attributed to a variety of factors, including parental education, access to dental care, fluoridated water supplies or the use of fluoride supplements, as well as the use of adhesive sealants on rough chewing surfaces
• Nutrition

  • Nutritionists recommend a varied diet, including plenty of grains, fruits, and vegetables, and high levels of complex carbohydrates such as whole grains
  • Exposure to fast-food and soft drink advertising is associated with increased consumption of both types of products, especially in overweight or obese children
• Sleep

  • Decline from 12.5 hours a day for 3- to 5-year-olds to 10 hours a day for ages 6 to 13
  • Variety of factors influencing sleep problems, includes exposure to media screens, physical inactivity, secondhand smoke, poor housing, vandalism, and a lack of parks and playgrounds
  • Persistent snoring, at least three times a week, may indicate a child has sleep-disordered breathing (SDB), a condition that has been linked to behavioral and learning difficulties
• Brain Development

  • Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology shows us that the brain consists of both gray matter and white matter
  • Gray Matter is composed of closely packed neurons in the cerebral cortex; while White Matter is made of glial cells, which provide support for neurons, and of myelinated axons, which transmit information across neurons
  • Connections between neurons thicken and myelinate, beginning with the frontal lobes and moving toward the rear of the brain

  
• Recess

  The games children play at recess tend to be informal: Boys play more physically active games, while girls favor games that include verbal expression or counting aloud, such as hopscotch and jump rope
• Rough-And-Tumble Play


  A type of vigorous play involving wrestling, hitting, and chasing, often accompanied by laughing and screaming
• Organized Sports


  • 6 to 9 year olds need more flexible rules, shorter instruction time, and more free time for practice than older children
  • At this age, girls and boys are about equal in weight, height, endurance, and motor skill development. Older children are better able to process instruction and learn team strategies
• Obesity and Body Image

  • Boys are slightly more likely to be overweight than girls
  • Overweight – a BMI between the 85th and 95th percentile
  • Obesity – a body mass index over the 95th percentile
  • Obesity can result from an inherited tendency aggravated by too little exercise and too much or the wrong kinds of food
  • Inactivity is a major factor in the sharp rise in overweight children → 180 minutes of activity at age 9 would be reduced to 40 minutes per day to ages 15
  • Body Image – descriptive and evaluative beliefs about one's appearance; how one believes one looks
  • Obese 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
• Acute Medical Conditions


  Occasional, short term conditions, such as infections, warts, colds, flu, or viruses are typical as germs pass among children at school or at play
• Chronic Medical Conditions


  Physical, developmental, behavioral, or emotional illnesses or impairments that persist for at least 3 months or more
• Asthma


  A chronic, allergy-based 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; a common diseases in childhood
  • Type 1 Diabetes: the result of an insulin deficiency that occurs when insulin-producing cells in the pancreas are destroyed
  • Type 2 Diabetes: insulin resistance and used to be found mainly in overweight and older adults
• Hypertension


  Chronically high blood pressure; once was relatively rare in childhood, but current estimates are that 19.2 percent of boys and 12.6 percent of girls have blood pressure at or above the 90th percentile
• Piagetian Approach: The Concrete Operational Child


  Children can think logically because they can take multiple aspects of a situation into account. However, their thinking is still limited to real situations in the here and now
• Spatial Relationships


  • Children can navigate their environment better, understand maps, and grasp the concept of distance and direction
  • They can also mentally rotate objects and understand how different parts fit together
• Causality


  • Children begin to understand cause-and-effect relationships more clearly; they can predict outcomes based on their understanding of events and see the logical connection between actions and consequences
  • This ability helps them solve problems and understand the world around them
• Categorization


  • Can sort objects into groups based on shared characteristics
  • Seriation – arranging objects in a series according to one or more dimensions such as time (earliest to latest), length (shortest to longest), or color (lightest to darkest)
  • Transitive Inferences (if a < b and b < c, then a < c) – understanding the relationship between two objects by knowing the relationship of each to a third object; this ability helps them solve problems and understand the world around them
  • Class Inclusion – the ability to see the relationship between a whole and its parts
• Inductive and Deductive Reasoning

  • 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


  • Children realize that quantity does not change even when its shape or appearance does
  • Three primary achievements allow them to do this: First, they understand the principle of identity
  • Second, they understand the principle of reversibility
  • Third, children at this stage can decenter
• Number and Mathematics


  Children can perform arithmetic operations, understand the concept of reversibility (e.g., addition and subtraction are inverse operations)
• The Development of Executive Functioning

  • Children's more sophisticated cognitive abilities allowed them to control their behaviors in ways that were previously hard for them
  • Executive Function – the conscious control of thoughts, emotions, and actions to accomplish goals or solve problems
  • An aspect of executive function involves the development of self-regulatory capacity, including the ability to regulate attention, inhibit responses, and monitor errors
• Selective Attention


  • 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 growth in 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]
• 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 [how quickly information is processed] and storage capacity [how many things can be simultaneously held in working memory]
• The Development of Memory Strategies

  • Mnemonic Device – a strategy to aid memory (e.g., "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" = PEMDAS)
  • External Memory Aids – mnemonic strategies using something outside the person (e.g., writing down a telephone number, making a list, and setting a timer)
  • Rehearsal – mnemonic strategy to keep an item in working memory through conscious repetition (e.g., saying something over and over so as to not forget it)
  • Organization – mnemonic strategy of categorizing material to be remembered (e.g., chunking ideas into categories)
  • Elaboration – mnemonic strategy of making mental associations involving items to be remembered (e.g., relate something to own experience or any analogy)
  • Metamemory – knowledge of and reflection about memory processes; people remember better if they study longer, that people forget things with time, and that relearning something is easier than learning it for the first time
• Psychometric Approach: Assessment of Intelligence

  • Psychometrics is a branch of psychology involved in the quantitative measurement of psychological variables
  • Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV) – individual test for ages 6 through 16 that measures verbal and performance abilities, yielding separate scores for each as well as a total score
  • Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT8) – a group intelligence test for kindergarten through 12th grade; children are asked to classify items, show an understanding of verbal and numerical concepts, display general information, and follow directions; has separate scores for verbal comprehension, verbal reasoning, pictorial reasoning, figural reasoning, and quantitative reasoning can identify specific strengths and weaknesses
• Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT8)


  A group intelligence test for kindergarten through 12th grade; children are asked to classify items, show an understanding of verbal and numerical concepts, display general information, and follow directions; has separate scores for verbal comprehension, verbal reasoning, pictorial reasoning, figural reasoning, and quantitative reasoning can identify specific strengths and weaknesses
• Influences on Intelligence (IQ)

  • Brain Development
  • Schooling
  • Race/Ethnicity and SES
• Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences


  Each person has several distinct forms of intelligence; Howard Gardner identified eight independent kinds of intelligence → conventional intelligence tests tap only three "intelligences": linguistic, logical-mathematical, and, to some extent, spatial. The other five, which are not reflected in IQ scores, are musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist

  
• Eight Intelligences by Gardner

  • Linguistic
  • Logical-mathematical
  • Spatial
  • Musical
  • Bodily-kinesthetic
  • Interpersonal
  • Intrapersonal
  • Naturalist
• 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, in an attempt to avoid cultural bias
• Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence


  Focuses on the processes involved in intelligent behavior; Robert Sternberg proposed that everyone has three abilities to a greater or lesser extent

  
• Three Elements by Sternberg

  • Componential Element (the analytics aspect of intelligence; determines how efficiently people process information)
  • Experiential Element (the insightful or creative aspect; it determines how people approach novel or familiar tasks)
  • Contextual Element (the practical aspect; it helps people deal with their environment or size up the situation and decide what to do)
• In the real world, book knowledge may not always be helpful. For example, children in many cultures have to learn practical skills not formally taught or openly expressed, known as tacit knowledge, in order to succeed
• Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC-II)


  A nontraditional individual test for ages 3 to 18, is 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 emphasize potential rather than present achievement
• Pragmatics: Knowledge about Communication


  The major area of linguistic growth during the school years is in pragmatics: the social context of language. Pragmatics includes both conversational and narrative skills
• Second-Language Learning


  • English-immersion Approach (also called ESL or English as a Second Language)
  • Bilingual (someone fluent in two languages)
  • Bilingual Education (system of teaching non-English-speaking children in their native language while they learn English, and later switching to all-English instruction)
  • Two-Way (Dual-Language) Learning (approach in which English-speaking and foreign-speaking children learn together in their own and each other's languages)
• Decoding


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