Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

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Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle
Childhood

• Chapter 9
• Robert S. Feldman

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See How We Grow!

• Slow but steady
• Height changes
• Weight changes
• Only time in lifespan when on average girls
  taller than boys
• Variation in heights up to 6 inches not unusual

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Cultural Patterns of Growth

• Sufficient or insufficient __________
• Disease
• Genetic inheritance
• Familial stress

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Artificial Hormones

• Currently taken by thousands of children with
  insufficient natural growth hormones
• Costly
• Some side effects
• Long-term studies of usage not available

Points to consider
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Consequences of Inadequate Nutrition

• Undernutrition is implicated in _________
  __________of all child deaths worldwide
• Undernourished children
• Lowered resistance to infection
• More likely to die from common childhood ailments
  and respiratory infections
• Frequent illness that impacts growth

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Benefits of Adequate Nutrition

• Relationship to social and emotional functioning
• More peer involvement
• More positive emotions
• Less anxiety
• More eagerness to explore new environments
• More persistent in frustrating situations
• Generally higher energy levels
• (See Guatemalan study, Barrett Frank, 1987)

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Obesity

• Most common causes
• Only in rare cases is being overweight caused by
  a medical condition such as a hormonal problem

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Do boys and girls differ in motor skills?

• Gender differences in gross motor skills became
  increasingly pronounced during middle childhood,
• Boys outperform girls
• Little or no difference when equal participation
  in exercise/activities
• Influenced by societal expectations

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Fine Motor Development

• Necessary for wide range of school-related tasks
• Influenced by increase in amount of myelin
  ?speeds up electrical impulses between neurons

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Health and School-agers

• Middle childhood is period of robust health
• ______________________have produced considerably
  lower incidence of life-threatening illnesses
• More than 90 percent of children in middle
  childhood have at least one serious medical
  condition but most are short term illnesses

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Asthma

• 15 million US children
• Periodic attacks of wheezing, coughing, shortness
  of breath
• Theories about increase
• Increased air pollution
• More accurate diagnosis
• Exposure to asthma triggers
• Poverty

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Identifying the Problem

• Psychological disorders in children overlooked
  for years
• Incidence
• Symptoms inconsistent from those of adults
• Antidepressant drugs used for treatment have
  never been approved by governmental regulators
  for use with children

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Drugs As Treatment

• FOR
• Depression and other psychological disorders
  treated successfully using drug
• More traditional nondrug therapies that largely
  employ verbal methods simply are ineffective

• AGAINST
• Long-term effectiveness of antidepressants with
  children not known
• Use of antidepressants on developing brains and
  long-term consequences more generally not known
• Correct dosages for children of given ages or
  sizes not known

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Children with Special Needs

• Visual impairments
• Auditory impairments
• Speech impairments
• Learning disabilities

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Do you see what I see?

• Difficulties in seeing
• Blindness (20/200 after correction)
• Partial sightedness (20/70 after correction)

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Say what?

• Loss of hearing or some aspect of hearing
• Affects ___ percent of school-age children
• Varies across number of dimensions

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Children who do not hear

• Children with speech-language impairment have an
  impairment of their speech and/or language
  structures and functions
• Parts of the body used in speaking and
  understanding - the brain, nerves, mouth and
  throat - may be damaged or not developing or
  working properly
• Level of speech-language impairment can range
  from mild to severe
• Impairment may be obvious before school or not
  show itself until the child has difficulty
  learning at school

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I am talking to YOU!

• Definition of ______________________
• Impairment of speech articulation, voice,
  fluency, or the impairment or deviant development
  of language comprehension and/or expression
• Impairment of use of spoken or other symbol
  system that adversely affects educational
  performance

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Stuttering

• Substantial disruption in _____________
  ______________ of speech
• Most common speech impairment 20 percent of all
  children go through stage
• No clear-cut answers to the causes of stuttering

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Learning Disabilities Discrepancies Between
Achievement and Capacity to Learn

• Difficulties in acquisition and use of listening,
  speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, or
  mathematical abilities
• 2.8 million children in US
• Dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia
• ADD/ADHD

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The Basic Definition in Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)

• Learning disability umbrella term
• IN GENERAL
• disorder is found in one or more of basic
  psychological processes involved in understanding
  or using language, spoken or written
• disorder may manifest itself in imperfect ability
  to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or
  do mathematical calculations

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Developmental Reading Disability

• Dylexia affects 2 to 8 percent of elementary
  school children
• Reading difficulties
• Inability to separate sounds in words
• Problems sounding out words

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Developmental Writing Disabilities

• Writing involves several brain areas and
  functions (____________)
• Brain networks for vocabulary, grammar, hand
  movement, and memory must all be in good working
  order
• Developmental writing disorder may result from
  problems in any of these areas

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Developmental Arithmetic Disability

• Arithmetic involves recognizing numbers and
  symbols, memorizing facts, aligning numbers, and
  understanding abstract concepts like place value
  and fractions
• Any of these may be difficult for children with
  developmental arithmetic disorders, also called
  ______________

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What are the most common signs of ADHD?

• Persistent difficulty in finishing tasks,
  following instructions, and organizing work
• Inability to watch an entire television program
• Frequent interruption of others or excessive
  talking
• Tendency to jump into a task before hearing all
  the instructions.
• Difficulty in waiting or remaining seated
• Fidgeting, squirming

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Diagnostic Criteria

• Behaviors must
• Be excessive, long-term, and pervasive
• Appear before age 7, and continue for at least 6
  months
• Create a real handicap in at least two areas of a
  person's life, such as school, home, work, or
  social settings
• Different than "normal" distractibility or
  overstressed lifestyle prevalent in our society

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ADHD Treatment Controversy

• Ritalin or Dexadrine reduce activity levels in
  hyperactive children and are routinely prescribe
• Effective in increasing attention span and
  compliance BUT side effects considerable and
  long-term health consequences unclear
• Help scholastic performance in short run BUT
  long-term evidence for continuing improvement is
  mixed

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Are there other treatments for ADD/ADHD?

• Behavioral therapy
• Diet

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What are advances and limitations, in thinking
during childhood?

• Approaches
• Piaget
• Information-processing
• Vygotsky

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Intellectual Development Piaget

• Concrete operational stage
• 7 and 12 years
• Characterized by active and appropriate use of
  logic
• Logical operations applied to concrete problems
• Conservation problems reversibility time and
  speed, decentering

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How slow can you go?
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How does preoperational thought emerge?

• Shift from preoperational thought to concrete
  operational thought does not happen overnight
• Children shift back and forth between
  preoperational and concrete operational thinking
• Once concrete operational thinking is fully
  engaged, children show several cognitive advances

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Piaget Was RightPiaget Was Wrong

• Right
• Virtuoso observer of children
• Powerful theoretical, educational implications
• Wrong
• Underestimate of childrens capabilities, in part
  because of the limited nature of mini-experiments
  conducted
• Misjudged age at which childrens cognitive
  abilities emerge
• Neglected cross-cultural differences

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Information Processing

• Increasing ability to handle information
• Memory improvement
• Short-term memory capacity improvement

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Thinking about Memory _____________________

• Understanding about processes that underlie
  memory
• Improves during school age years
• Helps children use control strategies (conscious,
  intentional tactics to improve functioning)

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Vygotskys Approach

• Cognitive advances occur through exposure to
  information within _________ ________________
  (ZPD)
• Influential in development of classroom practices
• Cooperative learning
• Reciprocal teaching

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Mastering the Mechanics of Language in Middle
Childhood

• Vocabulary continues to increase
• Mastery of grammar improves
• Understanding of syntax grows
• Certain phonemes remain troublesome
• Decoding difficulties when dependent on
  intonation
• More competence in pragmatics
• Increase in meta-linguistic awareness

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Metalinguistic Awareness

• One of most significant developments in middle
  childhood is childrens increasing understanding
  of their own use of language
• By age 5 or 6,
• Understand language is governed by set of rules
• By age 7 or 8,
• Realize that miscommunication be due to factors
  attributable not only to themselves, but to
  person communicating with them

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How does language promote self-control?

• Helps school-age children control and regulate
  behavior
• ________ used to help regulate behavior
• Effectiveness of self-control grows as linguistic
  capabilities increased

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Immigrants in the United States

• Are monolingual speakers of their native language
• Develop bilingualism as they acquire English
• Establish English-speaking households
• Raise their children as English-speaking
  monolinguals (Pease-Alveraz, 1993)

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Long-term Bilingualism

• According to survey data, even Spanish, a
  language thought to be particularly enduring in
  the United States, seldom lasts beyond the second
  or third generation (Pease-Alveraz, 1993)
• Why do you think this occurs?

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Cognitive Advantages of Bilingualism

• Greater cognitive flexibility
• Higher ________________-
• Greater meta-linguistic awareness
• Potential improved _________________

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Schooling Around the World and Across Genders
Who Gets Educated?

• Primary school education ?universal right and
  legal requirement?
• Children in developing countries may have less
  access
• Females in these countries receive less formal
  education than males

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Reading Learning to Decode Meaning Behind Words

• No other task that is more fundamental to
  schooling than learning to read
• Reading involves significant number of skills

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Educational Trends in the Next Millennium

• U.S. schools are experiencing return to
  educational fundamentals embodied in traditional
  three Rs
• Elementary school classrooms today stress
  individual accountability, both for teachers and
  students

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Are We Pushing Too Hard?

• From Research to Practice
• No Child Left Behind Act
• Outcomes
• Frequent testing becoming commonplace
• Student scores related to federal funding
• Reading instruction sometimes replaces recess and
  other activities
• Increase in amount of homework
• Some children burn out

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But is extra homework worth the cost?

• Time spent on homework is associated with greater
  academic achievement in secondary school
• Relationship gets less strong for the lower
  grades below grade 5, the relationship
  disappears
• For older children more homework is not
  necessarily better
• Some research indicates that benefits of homework
  may reach plateau beyond which additional time
  spent on homework produces no further benefits

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Cultural Assimilation or Pluralistic Society?

• Cultural assimilation model
• Pluralistic society model

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Intelligence Benchmarks

• Binets Test
• Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition
  (SB5)
• Wechsler Intelligence Scale for ChildrenFourth
  Edition (WISC-IV)
• Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, 2nd
  Edition (KABC-II)

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Alternative Conceptions of Intelligence

• Spearmans g
• Catell fluid and crystallize intelligence
• Gardner 8 intelligences
• Vygotsky dynamic assessment
• Sternberg triarchic theory of intelligence

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Group Differences in IQ

• Previous experiences of test-takers may have a
  substantial effect on their ability to answer
  questions
• Cultural background and experience have the
  potential to affect intelligence test scores

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Racial Differences in IQ

• Nature or Nurture?
• Mean score of African Americans tends to be about
  15 IQ points lower than the mean score of
  whitesalthough the measured difference varies a
  great deal depending on the particular IQ test
  employed
• Evidence points to nurture

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Below Intelligence Norms

• Mental Retardation
• Public Law 94-142, the Education for All
  Handicapped Children Act
• Least restrictive environment
• Mainstreaming
• Full inclusion

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Benefits of Mainstreaming

• Ensure that all persons, regardless of ability or
  disability, have access to full range of
  educational opportunities, and fair share of
  lifes rewards

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How is mental retardation identified?

• American Association on Mental Retardation
  definition
• Familial retardation
• Levels
• Mild
• Moderate
• Severe
• Profound

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Above Intelligence Norms

• Gifted
• Federal government guideline (P.L. 97-35 Sec 582)
• Research suggests that highly intelligent people
  tend to be outgoing, well adjusted, and popular

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Educating Gifted and Talented Children

• Acceleration
• Enrichment

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