Middle Childhood: Physical and Cognitive Development

1
CHAPTER 9

• Middle Childhood Physical and Cognitive
  Development

2
Growth Patterns
3
Growth Patterns

• Middle childhood growth
• Defined from ages 6 to 12
• Childs body weight doubles
• Middle childhood nutrition
• 4- to 6-year-olds need 1,400 to 1,800 calories
  per day
• Healthful to eat fruits, vegetables, fish,
  poultry, and whole grains
• Limit intake of fats, sugar, and starches

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Fig. 9-1, p. 178
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Gender Similarities and Differences in Physical
Growth

• Boys
• Slightly heavier and taller than girls through
  the age of 9 or 10
• Develop more muscle
• Spurt and grow taller and heavier than girls
  after about 13 or 14
• Girls
• Have adolescent growth spurt and surpass boys in
  height and weight until about 13 or 14
• Develop more fat

6
Overweight in Children

• Between 16 and 25 of children and adolescents
  in the United States are overweight or obese.
• Most overweight children become overweight
  adults.
• Overweight children rejected by peers, poor at
  sports, and less likely to be seen as attractive
  in adolescence
• At greater risk of health problems throughout life

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Fig. 9-2, p. 179
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Causes of Being Overweight

• Heredity contributes to being overweight.
• Overweight parents may have poor exercise habits,
  encourage overeating, and keep unhealthful food
  in the home.
• Children who watch TV extensively burn fewer
  calories and are more likely to be overweight
  adolescents.

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Motor Development
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Gross Motor Skills

• Age 6 or 7, children
• hop, jump, climb, pedal, and balance bicycle
• Age 8 to 10, children
• develop balance, coordination, and strength,
  which allows them to engage in gymnastics and
  team sports
• Myelination
• Neural pathways that connect the cerebellum to
  the cortex are more myelinated
• Reaction time
• Improves (decreases) from early childhood to
  about age 18, but there are individual differences

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Fine Motor Skills

• At 6 to 7 years, children can tie shoelaces and
  hold pencils like adults do.
• At 6 to 7 years, children can fasten buttons, zip
  zippers, brush teeth, wash themselves, coordinate
  a knife and fork, and use chopsticks.
• Fine motor skills improve throughout childhood.

12
Gender Differences

• Boys
• More forearm strength, which is good for swinging
  a bat or throwing a ball
• At puberty, sex differences favoring boys
  increases
• Girls
• Greater limb coordination and overall flexibility
  aiding them in dancing, gymnastics, and balancing
• Between middle childhood and adolescence
• Physical activities become increasingly
  stereotyped by children as being masculine or
  feminine

13
Exercise and Fitness

• Physically active adolescents have better
  self-image and coping skills than those who are
  inactive.
• Cardiac and muscular fitness is developed by
  participating in running, walking quickly,
  swimming laps, bicycling, or jumping rope for
  several minutes at a time.
• Schools and parents tend to focus on sports such
  as baseball and football, which are less apt to
  promote fitness.

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Children with Disabilities
15
Children with Disabilities

• Children with disabilities identified during
  middle childhood years when child enters school
• Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
• Child shows excessive inattention, impulsivity,
  and hyperactivity
• The degree of hyperactivity is crucial
• Typically occurs by age 7
• Impairs ability to function at school
• Sometimes overdiagnosed to encourage better
  behavior at school

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Causes of ADHD

• Genetic component to ADHD involving the brain
  chemical dopamine
• Brain imaging has shown differences in the brain
  chemistry of children with ADHD.
• ADHD may be due to lack of executive control of
  the brain over motor and more primitive
  functions.
• Stimulants are effective with ADHD because they
  promote the activity of the brain chemicals
  dopamine and noradrenaline, stimulating the
  executive center of the brain to control more
  primitive areas of the brain.

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Learning Disabilities

• Some children who are intelligent and provided
  with enriched home environments cannot learn how
  to read (dyslexia) or do simple math problems.
• Children are diagnosed with a learning disability
  when performing below the level expected for
  their age and intelligence, and when there is no
  evidence of other handicaps such as vision or
  hearing problems, retardation, or socioeconomic
  disadvantage.
• The younger the child when remediation occurs,
  the better the chances of compensating for the
  disability.

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Origins of Dyslexia

• Dyslexic individuals
• Sensory and neurological problems may contribute
  to reading problems.
• Genetic factors may give rise to neurological
  problems or circulation problems in the left
  hemisphere of the brain.
• Problems in the angular gyrus may give rise to
  reading problems.
• Dyslexic statistics
• 25 to 65 of children who have one dyslexic
  parent are dyslexic themselves.
• About 40 of the siblings of children with
  dyslexia are dyslexic.

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Fig. 9-3, p. 167
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Educating Children with Disabilities

• Treatment for dyslexia focuses on remediation.
• Given highly structured exercises to help them
  become aware of how to blend sounds to form words
• Evidence is mixed on whether placing disabled
  children in separate classes can also stigmatize
  them and segregate them from other children.
• Mainstreaming disabled children are placed in
  regular classrooms that have been adapted to
  their needs

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Cognitive Development
22
Cognitive Development

• Children make enormous strides in their cognitive
  development during middle childhood as their
  thought processes and language become more
  logical and complex.

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Piaget The Concrete-Operational Stage

• Child enters concrete-operational stage around
  age 7
• Concrete-operational thought is reversible and
  flexible
• Children can reverse mathematical operations
  (e.g., 2 3 5 can be reversed to 5 3 2)
• Children less egocentric and are able to engage
  in decentration (focus on multiple parts of a
  problem at once)
• At age 7, children understand law of conservation

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Piaget The Concrete-Operational Stage (contd)

• Transitivity
• If A exceeds B in some property and B exceeds C,
  then A must also exceed C
• Seriation
• Ability to place objects in a series by age,
  height, weight
• Children can seriate two dimensions at once

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Fig. 9-4, p. 185
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Piaget The Concrete-Operational Stage (contd)

• Class inclusion
• Focusing on two subclasses and larger subclass at
  the same time
• Concrete-operational children understand class
  inclusion.
• Piagets theory applied to education
• Learning involves active discovery.
• Instruction should be geared to the childs level
  of development.
• Learning to take into account the perspectives of
  others to develop cognition and morality

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Moral Development The Child as Judge
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Moral Development The Child as a Judge

• On a cognitive level, moral development concerns
  the basis on which children make judgments that
  an act is right or wrong.
• May be influenced by the values of the cultural
  settings in which they are reared, but also
  reflect the orderly unfolding of cognitive
  processes
• Moral reasoning is related to the childs overall
  cognitive development.

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Piagets Theory of Moral Development

• Piaget believed childrens moral judgments
  develop in two overlapping stages moral realism
  and autonomous morality.
• Moral realism
• Behavior is considered to be correct when it
  conforms to authority or to the rules of the game
• Immanent justice or automatic retribution
• Thinking that negative experiences are punishment
  for prior misdeeds, even when realistic causal
  links are absent
• Ages 9 to 11, children show autonomous morality
• Moral judgments become self-governed

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Kohlbergs Theory of Moral Development

• Preconventional level
• Children base moral judgments on the consequences
  of their behavior
• Stage 1 toward being obedient and punishment
• Stage 2 good behavior allows people to satisfy
  their own needs and the needs of others
• Conventional level
• Right and wrong are judged by conformity to
  conventional standards of right and wrong
• Stage 3 focuses on being a good boy or girl in
  order to meet the needs and expectations of
  others
• Stage 4 focuses on moral judgments met to keep
  social order
• Stages 3 and 4 emerge during middle childhood

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Kohlbergs Theory of Moral Development (contd)

• Postconventional level
• Moral reasoning is based on persons own moral
  standards
• Adolescents and adults participate in moral
  reasoning at this level

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Information Processing Learning, Remembering,
Problem Solving
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Information Processing Learning, Remembering,
Problem Solving

• Development of selective attention
• Development of the capacity of memory and of
  childrens understanding of the processes of
  memory
• Development of the ability to solve problems as,
  for example, by finding the correct formula and
  applying it

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Development of Selective Attention

• Ability to focus ones attention and screen out
  distractions advances steadily
• Preoperational children
• Engaged in problem solving
• Tend to focus their attention on one element of
  the problem at a time
• Major reason they lack conservation
• Concrete-operational children
• Attend to multiple aspects of the problem at once
• Permits them to conserve number and volume

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Developments in The Storage and Retrieval of
Information

• Sensory memory
• Visual impression of an object lasting for a
  fraction of a second

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Working Memory (Short-Term Memory)

• Focus on a stimulus in the sensory register
• Tends to be retained in working memory for up to
  30 seconds after the trace of the stimulus decays
• Memory function in middle childhood
• Similar to adult-like organization and strategies
• Quantitative improvement through adolescence
• Auditory stimuli can be maintained longer in
  short-term memory than can visual stimuli
• Promoting memory
• Encode visual stimuli as sounds
• Rehearsing sounds that can be repeated out loud
  or mentally

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Fig. 9-6, p. 190
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Long-Term Memory

• Vast storehouse of information containing names,
  dates, places
• May last days, years, or a lifetime
• No known limit to the amount of information that
  can be stored in long-term memory
• Older children more likely than younger children
  to use rote rehearsal, or repetition, to remember
• Elaborative strategy
• Relating new material to known material

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Organization in Long-Term Memory

• Knowledge of concepts advances
• Storehouse of long-term memory becomes organized
  according to categories
• Preschoolers tend to organize their memories by
  grouping objects that share the same function.
• Children are more likely to recall accurate
  information.
• Knowledge in a particular area increases the
  capacity to store and retrieve related
  information.

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Development of Recall Memory

• Memory ability good indicator of childs
  cognitive ability
• 4th graders more likely to categorize and recall
  pictures than 2nd graders

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Development of Metacognition and Metamemory

• Metacognition
• Childrens knowledge and control of their
  cognitive abilities
• Shown by ability to formulate problems, awareness
  of the processes required to solve a problem,
  activation of cognitive strategies, maintaining
  focus on the problem, and checking answers
• Metamemory
• Aspect of metacognition that refers to childrens
  awareness of the functioning of their memory
• Store and retrieve information more effectively
• Show more knowledge of strategies that can be
  used to facilitate memory

42
Intellectual Development, Creativity, and
Achievement
43
Intellectual Development, Creativity, and
Achievement

• Intelligence
• Childs underlying competence or learning ability
• Achievement
• Childs acquired competencies or performance
• Competencies underlying intelligence manifest
  themselves during middle childhood when children
  are exposed to formal schooling.

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Theories of Intelligence

• Spearman
• Intelligence has a common underlying factor, g
  (general intelligence), which represents broad
  reasoning and problem-solving abilities.
• Thurstone
• Intelligence consists of several specific factors
  or primary mental abilities, such as the ability
  to learn the meaning of words and visual-spatial
  abilities.

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Theories of Intelligence (contd)

• Sternberg
• Constructed a three-part, or triarchic, theory
  of intelligence
• Part 1 analytical intelligence
• Academic ability
• Part 2 creative intelligence
• Ability to cope with novel situations and to
  profit from experience
• Part 3 practical intelligence
• Adapt to the demands of their environment,
  including the social environment

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Fig. 9-8, p. 193
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Theories of Intelligence (contd)

• Gardner
• Believed intelligence reflects more than academic
  ability
• Theory based on multiple intelligences
• Multiple intelligences can include verbal
  ability, logical-mathematical reasoning, spatial
  intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic, musical,
  interpersonal, and personal knowledge.

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Fig. 9-9, p. 194
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Measurement of Intellectual Development

• Binet-Simon scale
• Yields a score called a mental age (MA)
• MA shows the intellectual level at which a child
  is functioning
• Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale
• Yields an intelligence quotient, or IQ
• IQ states the relationship between a childs
  mental age and his/her actual or chronological
  age (CA)
• IQ equals MA divided by CA times 100
• IQ today is compared to those performances of
  other people of the same age

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Table 9-2, p. 195
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Measurement of Intellectual Development(contd)

• Wechsler scales
• Developed for use with school-aged children
  (WISC), younger children (WPPSI), and adults
  (WAIS)
• Groups test questions in subtests that measure
  different intellectual tasks
• Suggests childrens strengths and weakness as
  well as provide overall measures of intellectual
  functioning

52
The Testing Controversy

• Cultural bias
• Scoring well on intelligence test requires a
  certain type of cultural experience
• Culture-free
• Evaluates reasoning ability through the childs
  comprehension of the rules that govern a
  progression of geometric designs
• Middle-class children still outperform
  lower-class children
• Tests do not predict academic success as well as
  other tests

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Fig. 9-12, p. 198
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Patterns of Intellectual Development

• School may help crystallize intellectual
  functioning around age 6.
• Middle childhood
• Undergo more stable patterns of gains in
  intellectual functioning
• Intelligence tests gain greater predictive power
• Individual differences still exist
• Changes in the home, socioeconomic circumstances,
  and education influence changes in IQ scores.

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Intellectual Disability

• Mental retardation (MR)
• Disability characterized by significant
  limitations both in intellectual functioning and
  in adaptive behavior as expressed in conceptual,
  social, and practical adaptive skills
• Involves IQ score of no more than 70 to 75
• Down syndrome children
• More likely to be moderately retarded
• Can learn to speak, dress, feed, clean
  themselves, and eventually engage in useful work
• Cultural-familial retardation
• Biologically normal children that do not develop
  normally due to impoverished home environment

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Giftedness

• Involves more than excellence on the tasks
  provided by standard intelligence tests
• Educators criteria for intelligence
• Outstanding abilities
• Capable of high performance in a specific
  academic area, such as language or mathematics
• Show creativity, leadership, distinction in the
  visual or performing arts, or bodily talents, as
  in gymnastics and dancing

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Socioeconomic and Ethnic Differences in IQ

• Lower-class African-American children obtain IQ
  scores between 10 and 15 points lower than those
  obtained by middle- and upper-class children.
• African-American, Latino- and Latina-American,
  and Native-American children all tend to score
  below the norms for European Americans.
• Youths of Asian descent frequently outscore
  youths of European backgrounds on achievement
  tests in math and science, including the math
  portion of the SAT.

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Creativity and Intellectual Development

• Creativity
• Ability to do things that are novel and useful
• Creative children and adults solve problems where
  there is no tried and true solution.
• Take chances and appreciate art and music
• Challenge social norms
• Moderate relationship between IQ score and
  creativity
• Convergent thinking
• Process children use to answer questions on an IQ
  test
• Divergent thinking
• Child associates freely to the elements of the
  problem more creative

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Determinants of Intellectual Development

• MZ twins have a high concordance rate on IQ
  scores (0.85)
• MZ twins reared apart still show 0.67
  correlation
• Correlation between children and natural parents
  vary from about 0.40 to 0.59
• Heritability between 40 and 60
• Stronger correlation of adoptive parents and
  adopted children when IQ of adoptive parents was
  similar to IQ of natural parents
• Environmental stimulation increases IQ whether
  child is adopted, biological, or low SES.

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Language Development and Literacy
61
Vocabulary and Grammar

• By age 6, vocabulary at 10,000 words
• Semantic sophistication by 7 to 9 years old
• Subtle advances made in articulation during
  middle childhood
• Children use connectives (conjunctions) and can
  form indirect object-direct object constructions

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Methods of Teaching Reading

• Word-recognition method
• Associates visual stimuli with the sound
  combinations that produce spoken words
• Phonetic method
• Children first learn to associate written letters
  and letter combinations with the sounds they
  indicate
• Helps with decoding
• Sight vocabulary
• Recognizing useful words such as ones name, and
  such signs as danger, stop, and poison

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Bilingualism Linguistic Perspectives on the World

• Approximately 50 million of Americans speak a
  different language than English at home.
• Bilingual children not cognitively delayed
• Half of Spanish-speaking children at home are
  proficient in both languages
• Bilingualism contributes to the complexity of the
  childs cognitive processes.
• Bilingual children understand symbols used in
  language are arbitrary