Download Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

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Cognitive Development
in Middle Childhood
Chapter 13
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Guideposts for Study
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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?
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Guideposts for Study
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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
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Piaget: The Concrete Operational
Child
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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.
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___________________: They can draw
conclusions based on their observationsmy 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_____________________
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Piaget: The Concrete Operational
Child
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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
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Moral Reasoning
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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.
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Moral Reasoning
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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
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Can you…
Describe Piaget’s two stages of moral
development and explain their link to
cognitive maturation?
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Information Processing
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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___________________________
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Did you Know !
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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
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Information Processing
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Mnemonics: Strategies for Remembering
• Rehearsal=repetition
• Organization=mentally placing information
•
into categories
________________________=associate
items with something else
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Information Processing
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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___________________________
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Information Processing
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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
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Psychometric Assessment of
Intelligence
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Traditional Individual Tests
• Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
(WISC-III)
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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
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Psychometric Assessment of
Intelligence
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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)
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
Which of Gardner’s “intelligences” are
you strongest in? Did your education
include a focus on any of these?
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Language and Literacy
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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____________________________
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Language and Literacy
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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_________________________
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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.
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To be or not to be…..
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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.
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The Child in School
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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
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The Child in School
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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_________________
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The Child in School
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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
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The Child in School
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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
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The Child in School
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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
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A Gifted child is
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2.
3.
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___________________
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Can you…
Discuss the relationships between
giftedness and life achievements, and
between IQ and creativity?
Describe two approaches to education
of gifted children?
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Would you favor strengthening, cutting
back, or eliminating special education
programs for gifted students?