Middle and Late Childhood

1
Lecture 6

• Middle and Late Childhood

2
Cognitive Development Concrete Operations

• Piaget believed that around the age of 7,
  children enter the concrete operational stage.
• Concrete operations new forms of reasoning
• An operation is a mental action that is
  coordinated with other mental actions as part of
  a system.
• Concrete Operations relate directly to tangible
  objects and thoughts about objects (not to
  abstract propositions or possible future states
  of affairs).
• Concrete operations transform all aspects of
  psychological functioning, according to Piaget.
  For example, children become skilled at taking
  intentions into account (morality).

3
Tasks

• A number of problem-solving tasks have been
  developed in order to diagnose presence or
  absence of concrete operational thinking.

4
Conservation tasks

• Conservation - gt understanding that some
  properties of an object or substance remain the
  same even when its appearance is altered in some
  superficial way.
• Conservation of liquid (continuous quantity)
• Experimenter "Are the amounts of liquid in the
  two glasses the same?"
• Experimenter pours the contents of one of the
  glasses into a third glass that is taller and
  thinner. The liquid rises higher in the new
  glass.
• Experimenter "Does the new glass contain more
  liquid than the old glass, does it contain the
  same amount, or does it contain less"

5
Responses

• 3- and 4-year-old children - gt the taller glass
  has more water.
• 5- to 6 year-old children - gt transitional stage.
• 8 year olds children - gt acquired the concept of
  conservation.
• Although obvious to adults, preoperational
  children lack conservation.
• A lack of conservation demonstrates an inability
  to mentally reverse actions.

6
Operations

• Identity "They were equal to start with and
  nothing was added, so they are the same.
• Compensation "The liquid is higher, but the
  glass is thinner."
• Reversibility "If you pour it back, you'll see
  that it's the same.
• Addition/Subtraction "You did not add anything.
  You did not take anything away
• These ways of understanding indicate that
  children have attained a new stage of cognitive
  development.
• Piaget They are now capable of concrete
  operations.
• Other tasksConservation of massConservation of
  numberConservation of area

7
Class inclusion

• 13 red plastic chips (ten round and three square
  chips) and 6 white plastic chips (three round and
  three square).
• Entire collection of plastic chips in disarray -
  gt ascertain child's comprehension.
• Then the child is asked to lay all the white
  chips off to the side so that only the red chips
  remain.
• Experimenter "In this arrangement are there now
  more red chips or more round chips?
• Concrete operational answer
• "There are more red ones because they are all
  red"
• There are more red ones, because the round ones
  and the square ones together are more than the
  round ones alone
• "There are more red ones, because the square
  chips are in there too"

8
Verbal classification

• Cats / animals
• Roses / flowers
• Volkswagen / cars
• Boys or girls / children
• Lego blocks / toys
• People from Toronto / people from Canada
• Investigation procedures and instructions "What
  do you think? Are there more Volkswagens or are
  there more cars?"
• How do you know that? Can you tell me how you
  know that?
• Concrete operational justification
• "There are more cars, because they are all cars."
• "There are more cars, because cars don't come
  only from Volkswagen, but from companies like
  Ford too."
• "There are more cars, because there are lots more
  cars than just Volkswagen cars."

9
Piaget and Education

• Take a constructivist approach.
• Consider the childs knowledge and level of
  thinking.
• Turn the classroom into a setting of exploration
  and discovery.

10
Criticisms of Piaget

• Stages -gt Horizontal decalage
• Estimates of childrens competence
• Culture and education

11
What Is Intelligence?

• Intelligence is verbal ability, problem-solving
  skills, and the ability to adapt to and learn
  from lifes everyday experiences.
• Intelligence cannot be directly measured.
• Normal Distribution

12
The Wechsler Scales

• David Wechsler developed tests to assess
  students intelligence
• The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of
  Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R) for ages 4-6½
• The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
  (WISC) for ages 6-16.
• The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS).
• The Wechsler scales provide an overall IQ and
  yield verbal and performance IQs.

13
Gardners Eight Frames of Mind

• Verbal skills
• Mathematical skills
• Spatial skills
• Bodily-kinesthetic skills
• Musical skills
• Interpersonal skills
• Intrapersonal skills
• Naturalist skills

14
Conclusions (not shared by all psychologists)

• 1. Human intelligent life is too multifaceted to
  be represented by a single number. IQ is an
  artificial psychological-mathematical
  abstraction.
• 2. Intelligence can be conceptualized in many
  different ways.
• 3. IQ is not a constant (Flynn effect).
• 4. Some part of individual differences in
  performance on IQ tests can be attributed to
  heritability (as statistically conceptualized).
• 5. Significant differences between the average IQ
  scores of "African Americans" and "white
  Americans" cannot be attributed to inherited
  differences.

15
Conclusions

• 6. IQ tests measure only a small part of what is
  significant in mental life.
• 7. IQ tests are not culture-fair.
• 8. IQ tests may help when it comes to extremes
  and as a practical device.
• 9. If you use IQ tests do so in order to help and
  not in order to sort and label.
• 10. Psychologists must move to something more
  essential.

16
Giftedness Creativity

• People who are gifted have above-average
  intelligence (an IQ of 120 or higher) and/or
  superior talent for something.
• Creativity is the ability to think about
  something in novel and unusual ways and to come
  up with unique solutions to problems.

17
Achievment Motivation School

• 10000-15000 hours in classrooms by graduation.
• Children entering 1st grade take up a new role,
  interact and develop relationships with new
  significant others, adopt new reference groups,
  and develop new standards for judging themselves.
• School provides children with a rich source of
  new ideas to shape their sense of self.
• There is emerging concern about new evidence
  showing that early schooling proceeds mainly on
  the basis of negative feedback.

18
Weiner's Attribution Theory

• Four possible causes of success or failure
• Ability (or thereof) (internal locus of control)
• Effort (internal locus of control)
• Task difficulty (external locus of control)
• Luck (either good or bad) (external locus of
  control)
• Children with an internal locus of control assume
  that they are personally responsible for what
  happens to them.
• Children with an external locus of control
  believe that their outcomes depend more on luck,
  fate, or the actions of others.
• Children with an internal locus of control earn
  higher grades and scores on academic achievement
  tests than children with an external locus of
  control do.

19
Add Stability
Locus
Internal External
Stability Stable Ability Task difficulty
Unstable Effort Luck
20
Consequences

• It is not always adaptive to attribute what
  happens to internal causes.
• Is it healthy to conclude from a failure that a
  child is seriously lacking in ability?
• Before age 7 Children tend to be unrealistic
  optimists who think that they have the ability to
  succeed in almost any novel task.
• Age 8 to 12 Children begin to distinguish effort
  from ability. Teachers place more and more
  emphasis on ability appraisals. Children use
  social comparison to appraise their outcomes - gt
  students begin to distinguish effort from ability
  and to make causal attributions for their
  successes and failures.

21
Dweck's Learned-Helplessness Theory

• Carol Dweck and her colleagues find that
  middle-school children clearly differ in the
  attributions they offer for their achievement
  outcomes, particularly for their failures.
• Mastery oriented Children attribute their
  successes to their high ability but tend to
  externalize the blame for their failures ("That
  test was ambiguous and unfair") or to attribute
  them to unstable causes that they can easily
  overcome ("I'll do better if I try harder").
• Learned helplessness orientation Children
  attribute their successes to the unstable factors
  of hard work or luck. Yet they attribute their
  failures to a stable and internal factor (lack of
  ability - gt low expectations - gt give up).
• Children who display this learned helplessness
  syndrome might be highly talented students.
  Learned helplessness may persist over time and
  undermine the child's academic performance.

22
How does learned helplessness develop?

• Parents and teachers - gt helpless achievement
  orientation Praising the child for being neat or
  for working hard when child succeeds but
  criticizing lack of ability when child fails.
• 4-6-year-olds can begin to develop a helpless
  orientation.
• Parents and teachers praise the child's abilities
  when she succeeds but emphasize lack of effort
  when she fails - gt the child may conclude that
  she is certainly smart enough and would do even
  better if she tried harder - gt mastery-orientation
  .
• Experiment strikingly different attributional
  styles were created in less than one hour.

23
Therapy Attribution Retraining.

• Dweck - gt children who had become helpless after
  failing a series of tough math problems - gt two
  "therapies."
• (a) A success-only therapy - gt worked problems
  they could solve - gt tokens for successes.
• (b) Attribution retraining. Were also told after
  each of several prearranged failures that they
  had not worked hard enough and should have tried
  harder - gt failures - gt lack of effort rather
  than a lack of ability.
• Results Helpless children in the
  attribution-retraining condition now performed
  much better on the tough math problems they had
  initially failed. Attributed their outcome to a
  lack of effort and tried harder.
• Children in the success-only condition showed no
  such improvements, giving up once again after
  failing the original problems. So merely showing
  helpless children that they are capable of
  succeeding is not enough.
• Recommendations Parents and teachers should
  praise the child's abilities when child succeeds.
  Not suggesting that failures reflect a lack of
  ability. Authoritative parenting.

24
Students from Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds

• Many children in poverty face problems at home
  and at school that present barriers to their
  learning.
• Many schools of children from impoverished
  backgrounds attend have fewer resources than do
  the schools in higher-income neighborhoods.
• Schools in low-income areas are more likely to
  encourage rote learning rather than thinking
  skills.
• Many of these schools provide students with
  sub-standard learning environments.

25
Ethnicity in Schools (USA)

• The school experiences of students from different
  ethnic groups vary considerably.
• School segregation is still a factor in the
  education of children of color in the U.S.
• John Ogbu proposed the view that ethnic minority
  students are placed in a position of
  subordination and exploitation in the American
  educational system.
• He believes students of color have inferior
  educational opportunities, are exposed to
  educators who have low academic expectations of
  them, and encounter negative stereotypes.

26
Ethnic Differences in Academic Achievement

• Why do differences exist?
• Parental attitudes and involvement.
• Minority parents may value education or encourage
  school achievement as much as other parents do.
• However, minority parents are often less
  knowledgeable about the school system and less
  involved in many school activities.

27
Ethnic Differences in Academic Achievement

• Patterns of parenting and peer influences.
• Positive influence on academic achievement is
  often undermined by peers.
• Teacher expectancies
• In USA Asian Americans are expected to be bright
  and hardworking, whereas African-American and
  Latino students from low-income neighborhoods are
  expected to perform poorly in school.

28
Teachers are not immune to stereotypes!

• Pygmalion effect Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968)

29
Strategies for Improving Relations Between
Ethnically Diverse Students

• Encourage students to have positive personal
  contact with diverse other students.
• Encourage students to engage in perspective
  taking.
• Help students think critically and be emotionally
  intelligent when cultural issues are involved.
• Reduce bias.
• View the school and community as a team to help
  support teaching efforts.

30
Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Achievement

• In a cross-national comparison of 9- to
  13-year-old students, the U.S. finished 13th out
  of 15 in science, and 15th out of 16 in math
  achievement.
• In this study, Korean and Taiwanese students
  finished first and second, respectively.
• Studies have shown Asian students consistently
  outperform American students.

31
Reasons for Cross-Cultural Differences

• Research found Asian teachers spent more of their
  time teaching math than did American teachers.
• Asian students were in school an average of 240
  days a year, compared with 178 days in the U.S.
• American parents had much lower expectations for
  their childrens education than Asian parents.
• American parents were more likely to believe that
  their childrens achievement was due to innate
  ability, and they were less likely to help them
  with their homework.

32
Reading

• Education and language experts continue to debate
  how children should be taught to read.
• The whole-language approach stresses that reading
  instruction should parallel childrens natural
  language learning, and that reading materials
  should be whole and meaningful.
• The basic-skills-and-phonetics approach
  emphasizes that reading instruction should teach
  phonetics and its basic rules for translating
  written symbols into sounds, and early reading
  instruction should involve simplified materials.

33
Findings on Bilingual Education

• Researchers have found that bilingualism does not
  interfere with performance in either language.
• Children who are fluent in two languages perform
  better on tests of attentional control, concept
  formation, analytical reasoning, cognitive
  flexibility, and cognitive complexity.
• Bilingual children are also more conscious of
  spoken and written language structure, and are
  better at noticing errors of grammar and meaning.
• Bilingual children in a number of countries have
  been found to perform better on intelligence
  tests.

34
Amount of Television Watching by Children

• Children not only learn in school but also from
  TV.
• In the 1990s, children averaged 11-28 hours of
  television per week, which is more than for any
  other activity except sleep.
• Considerably more children in the North-America
  than their counterparts in other developed
  countries watch television for long periods.
• A special concern is the extent to which children
  are exposed to violence and aggression on
  television, even in cartoons.

35
How do children learn by observation?

• Bandura observational learning and instruction
  vicarious reinforcement vicarious punishment
  imitation selective imitation counterimitation
  abstract modeling.

36
Experiment

• 1. Children saw in the model-rewarded condition
  an adult give the aggressive model some candy and
  a soft drink for a championship performance.
• 2. Children in the model-punished condition saw a
  second adult scold and spank the model for
  beating up on Bobo.
• 3. Children in the no-consequence condition
  simply saw the model behave aggressively.
• Children in the model-rewarded and no-consequence
  conditions imitated more of the model's
  aggressive acts than children who saw the model
  punished. Children have learned novel aggressive
  responses without being reinforced.

37
Effects of Television on Childrens Aggression

• Several studies have demonstrated the
  relationships between the amount of violence
  viewed on television and subsequent aggressive
  and violent behavior.
• These studies are correlational, thus the only
  conclusion can be that television violence is
  associated with aggressive behavior, not that it
  causes aggressive behavior.
• Many experts argue that TV violence can induce
  aggressive or antisocial behavior in children.

38
Other Effects

• Reciprocal link Viewing TV violence increases
  children's aggressive tendencies, which
  stimulates interest in violent programming, which
  promotes further aggression.
• Mean-world beliefs Tendency to view the world as
  a violent place inhabited by people who typically
  rely on aggressive solutions to their
  interpersonal problems.
• Desensitize children to violence Make them less
  emotionally upset by violent acts and more
  willing to tolerate them in real life.

39
Effects of Television on Childrens Prosocial
Behavior

• Television can teach children that it is better
  to behave in positive, prosocial ways than in
  negative, antisocial ways.
• Children who watched episodes of Sesame Street
  that reflected positive social interchanges
  copied the behaviors and, in later social
  situations, applied the prosocial lessons they
  had learned.

40
Television and Cognitive Development

• Positive influences presenting motivating
  educational programs, increasing information
  about the world beyond childrens immediate
  environment, and providing models of prosocial
  behavior.
• Regular television is negatively related to
  childrens creativity, however, educational
  programming may promote creativity and
  imagination due to its slower pace and
  coordination of video and audio input.

41
Children's Reactions to Commercial Messages

• Young children do rarely understand manipulative
  (selling) intent of ads.
• By ages 9-11, most children realize that ads are
  designed to persuade and sell, and by 13-14, they
  have acquired a healthy skepticism about product
  claims and advertising in general.
• Nevertheless, adolescents and adults are often
  persuaded by the ads they see.

42
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

• ADHD is a disability in which children
  consistently show one or more of the following
  characteristics over a period of time
• inattention
• Impulsivity
• hyperactivity
• The disorder occurs as much as 4-9 times as much
  in boys as in girls.
• Students with ADHD have a failure rate in school
  that is 2-3 times that of other students.

43
Causes of ADHD

• Definitive causes of ADHD have not been found.
• Pre- and postnatal abnormalities may be a cause.
• Possible low levels of certain neurotransmitters
  have been proposed.
• Heredity is considered a contributor, as 30-50
  of children with the disorder have a sibling or
  parent who has it.
• Environmental toxins such as lead could
  contribute to ADHD.
• Family factors?

44
Treatment of ADHD

• Many experts recommend a combination of academic,
  behavioral, and medical interventions to help
  ADHD students better learn and adapt.
• The intervention requires cooperation and effort
  on the part of the parents, school personnel, and
  health-care professionals.
• Ritalin is a controversial stimulant given to
  control behavior.
• In many children, Ritalin actually slows down the
  nervous system and behavior.