Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

1. Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood Chapter 13

2. Guideposts for Study • 1. How do school-age children's thinking and moral reasoning differ from those of younger children? • 2. What advances in memory and other information-processing skills occur during middle childhood?

3. Guideposts for Study • 3. How do communicative abilities and literacy expand during middle childhood? • 4. What influences school achievement? • 5. How do schools meet the needs of children and those with learning problems? • 6. Understanding giftedness

4. Piaget: The Concrete Operational Child • Cognitive Advances • Understanding of spatial relationships better- good judge of distance and able to understand a map • They understand ___________can arrange objects in a series based on one or more dimensions, such as weight (lightest to heaviest) or color • ________________: They understand the relationship between a whole and its parts- 7roses &3 tulips - ? Are there more roses or flowers. The child is able to answer flowers.

5. ___________________: They can draw conclusions based on their observations- my dog barks so all dogs bark. • They understand the principle of identity____________. They are able to comprehend that a ball of clay remains constant even if it rolled into a_____________________

6. Piaget: The Concrete Operational Child • Influences of ___________Development • Children achieving conservation showed different __________patterns from those who had not yet achieved it, suggesting that they were using different brain regions for the task

7. Moral Reasoning • Moral development is linked to _____________________Immature moral judgments, Piaget concluded, that children of this age center only on the degree of offense; more mature judgments consider_______________ • Children make sounder moral judgments when they can look at things from more than one perspective-ability to cognitively weight out more that one side of an issue.

8. Moral Reasoning • Two stages: • First stage ( up to age 7)=morality of _________: rules cannot be bent or changed, behavior is right or wrong, any offense deserves punishment, regardless of intent • Second stage ( 7 yrs & up)=morality of _________: children discard the idea there is a single, absolute standard of right and wrong, and begin to formulate their own moral code

9. Can you… Describe Piaget’s two stages of moral development and explain their link to cognitive maturation?

10. Information Processing • Basic Processes and Capacities • Efficiency of mental operations: : encoding,storage, and_______________ • How much information children can handle at a given time • How quickly and accurately they can process • Metamemory=understanding the___________________________

11. Did you Know ! • Children can be taught to focus on relevant, resist irrelevant • They can process more information as they mature. Memory influences ___________________ • Children don’t use their memory systems as efficiently as adults due to mental capacity, strategies of memory use, or a combination • Capacity increases or ________________strategies improve

12. Information Processing • Mnemonics: Strategies for Remembering • Rehearsal=repetition • Organization=mentally placing information into categories • ________________________=associate items with something else

13. Information Processing • Selective Attention=focus on needed information while screening out irrelevant information • One of the reasons memory functioning improves during middle childhood • Ability to control the intrusion of older thoughts and associations and redirect attention to current, relevant ones is believed to be due to___________________________

14. Information Processing • Information Processing and Piagetian Tasks • As a child's application of a concept or scheme becomes more automatic, it frees space in working memory to deal with ____________________ • Young children's working memory is so limited that, even if they could master the concept of conservation, they may not be able to remember all the relevant information

15. Psychometric Assessment of Intelligence • Traditional Individual Tests • Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III) • The IQ Controversy • IQ scores during middle childhood are fairly good predictors of school achievement • They can help in selecting students for advanced or slow-paced classes

16. Psychometric Assessment of Intelligence • Is there more than one intelligence? • Gardner (1993) says people have at least seven separate kinds of intelligence: • linguistic, logical-mathematical • spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic • interpersonal, and intrapersonal. • naturalist intelligence (added in 1998)

18. Which of Gardner’s “intelligences” are you strongest in? Did your education include a focus on any of these?

19. Language and Literacy • Vocabulary, Grammar, and Syntax • As vocabulary grows during the school years, children use increasingly precise verbs to describe an action, i.e.hitting, slapping • Pragmatics: Knowledge about _____________________ Practical use of language to communicate including conversational and____________________________

20. Language and Literacy • Literacy=Learning to_______________ • Most children learn to read phonetically by ___________________out words • The whole-language approach: children can learn to read and write naturally • Most effective way to teach reading, (National Reading Panel), is to develop strong phonetic skills plus improving fluency and_________________________

21. Comprehension: Children need to develop the ability to not only read but __________________what was read. • ____________: is an awareness of what is going on in a child’s mind and it helps them to monitor their understanding of what they read.

22. To be or not to be….. • The acquisition of writing skills is closely linked to________________. • Young children have difficulty separating what they know and what others know about something (__________thinking) and therefore see no problem with their writing • Older children have gain the ability to take more than one perspective into consideration when writing which allows their writing to be understood.

23. The Child in School • Entering First Grade • First grade experience lays the foundation for a child's entire school career • Children who had attended full-day kindergarten did better on achievement tests and got higher marks in reading and math early in first grade than those who had attended kindergarten half days or not at all

24. The Child in School • Environmental Influences on School __________________ • Children's own characteristics, the context of their lives, the immediate family, the classroom, messages they receive from the larger culture all influence how well they do in school • _____________can also have a direct affect on school achievement- motivation, support, and interest • Research has determined that parents educational background and socioeconomic status has a direct affect on_________________

25. The Child in School • Children with Learning Problems • Mental retardation=significantly subnormal __________________functioning • ________=developmental reading disorder in which reading achievement is substantially below the level predicted by IQ or age. • Learning disabilities=disorders that interfere with school _______________performance substantially lower than expected

26. The Child in School • Children with Learning Problems • Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with or without hyperactivity • ADHD has a substantial genetic basis, with heritability approaching 80 percent • ADHD is generally treated with drugs, sometimes combined with behavioral therapy, counseling, training in social skills, and special classroom placement

27. The Child in School • Gifted Children: • The traditional criterion of giftedness is high ______________intelligence, as shown by an IQ score of 130 or higher • A classic longitudinal study of gifted children began in 1921, by Lewis M. Terman: • these children were taller, healthier, better coordinated, better adjusted, and more popular than the average child

28. A Gifted child is • A child who scores among the top 5% of children on a suitably standardised IQ test; that is, above the 95th percentile, which means that the child scores higher on an IQ test than 95 out of 100 children in the population would do • Gifted children need to: • ____________regularly with other children of comparable intelligence to themselves.  • be able to work in school at a level which _________their intelligence.  • Minimize the amount of time in school which they have to spend being___________________

29. Can you… Discuss the relationships between giftedness and life achievements, and between IQ and creativity? Describe two approaches to education of gifted children?

30. Would you favor strengthening, cutting back, or eliminating special education programs for gifted students?