Transcript PowerPoint Presentation for Ch. 10

Life-Span Development
Twelfth Edition
Chapter 9:
Physical and Cognitive Development
in Middle and Late Childhood
©2009 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
BODY GROWTH AND CHANGE
• Body Growth and Change:
• Growth averages 2–3 inches per year
• Weight gain averages 5–7 lbs. each year
• Muscle mass and strength gradually increase; baby fat
decreases
• Ossification of bones
• Boys have a greater number of muscle cells and are
typically stronger than girls
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BODY GROWTH AND CHANGE
• The Brain:
• Brain volume stabilizes
• Significant changes in structures and regions occur,
especially in the prefrontal cortex
• Improved attention, reasoning, and cognitive control
• Increases in cortical thickness
• Activation of some brain areas increase while others
decrease
• Shift from larger areas to smaller, more focal areas
• Due to synaptic pruning
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BODY GROWTH AND CHANGE
• Motor Development:
• Gross motor skills become smoother and more
coordinated
• Boys usually outperform girls on gross motor skills
• Improvement of fine motor skills during middle and
late childhood
• Increased myelination of the central nervous system
• Girls usually outperform boys on fine motor skills
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EXERCISE
• Exercise plays an important role in children’s
growth and development
• Percentage of children involved in daily P.E.
programs in schools decreased from 80% (1969)
to 20% (1999)
• Television watching is linked with low activity
and obesity in children
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EXERCISE
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HEALTH, ILLNESS, AND DISEASE
• Middle and late childhood is usually a time of
excellent health
• Injuries are the leading cause of death during middle
and late childhood
• Motor vehicle accidents are most common cause of severe
injury
• Cancer is the 2nd leading cause of death in children 5–
14 years old
• Most common child cancer is leukemia
• Many elementary-school children already possess risk
factors for cardiovascular disease
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HEALTH, ILLNESS, AND DISEASE
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HEALTH, ILLNESS, AND DISEASE
• Overweight Children:
• Being overweight as a child is a risk factor for being
obese as an adult
• Girls are more likely than boys to be overweight
• Changes in diet and total caloric intake may be one
reason for increasing obesity rates
• Raises risks for many medical and psychological
problems
• Pulmonary problems, diabetes, high blood pressure
• Low self-esteem, depression, exclusion from peer groups
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LEARNING DISABILITIES
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LEARNING DISABILITIES
• Definition of learning disability includes three
components:
• Minimum IQ level
• Significant difficulty in a school-related area
• Exclusion of severe emotional disorders, second-language
background, sensory disabilities, and/or specific
neurological deficits
• Boys are identified three times more frequently
than girls
• Most common form involves reading (i.e., dyslexia)
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LEARNING DISABILITIES
• Possible Causes:
• Genetics (many tend to run in families)
• Environmental influences
• Problems in integrating information from multiple
brain regions
• Difficulties in brain structures and functions
• Intervention:
• Improving reading ability through intensive instruction
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LEARNING DISABILITIES
• ADHD
• Characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity
• Number of children diagnosed has increased substantially
• Possible Causes:
• Genetics
• Brain damage during prenatal or postnatal development
• Cigarette and alcohol exposure during prenatal
development
• Later peak for cerebral cortex thickening
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LEARNING DISABILITIES
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LEARNING DISABILITIES
• ADHD Treatment:
• Stimulant medication (Ritalin or Adderall) is helpful
• Combination of medication and behavior management
seems to work best
• Exercise may reduce ADHD symptoms
• Critics argue that physicians are too quick to
prescribe medications
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LEARNING DISABILITIES
• Educational Issues:
• 1975: laws passed requiring all public schools to serve
disabled children
• Law requires disability students to receive:
• IEP (Individualized Education Plan): written statement that
is specifically tailored for the disabled student
• LRE (Least Restrictive Environment): a setting that is as
similar as possible to that of non-disabled children
• Inclusion: educating a child with special education needs in
the regular classroom
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COGNITIVE CHANGES
• Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage:
• Ages 7 to 11
• Children can perform concrete operations and reason
logically
• Reasoning can only be applied to specific, concrete examples
• Ability to classify things into different sets and consider
their interrelationships
• Seriation: the ability to order stimuli along a quantitative
dimension
• Transitivity: the ability to logically combine relations to
understand certain conclusions
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COGNITIVE CHANGES
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COGNITIVE CHANGES
• Evaluating Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage:
• Piaget proposed that various aspects of a stage should
emerge together
• Some concrete abilities do not appear at the same time
• Education and culture exert stronger influences on
children’s development than Piaget believed
• Neo-Piagetians: argue that Piaget got some things
right, but that theory needs considerable revision
• More emphasis on attention, memory, and strategy use
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MEMORY
• Memory: long-term memory increases with age
during middle and late childhood
• Experts have acquired extensive knowledge about
a particular content area
• Influences how they organize, represent, and interpret
information
• Affects ability to remember, reason, and solve
problems
• Older children usually have more expertise about a
subject than younger children do
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MEMORY
• Two important strategies: creating mental images and
elaborating on information
• Elaboration: engaging in more extensive processing of information
• Fuzzy Trace Theory: two types of memory
representations:
• Verbatim memory trace: precise details of information
• Gist: central idea of information
• Older children begin to use gist more; contributes to fuzzy traces
• Fuzzy traces are more enduring than verbatim traces
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THINKING
• Critical Thinking: thinking reflectively and
productively, and evaluating evidence
• Few schools really teach critical thinking
• Creative Thinking: the ability to think in novel
and unusual ways, and to come up with unique
solutions to problems
• Convergent thinking: produces one correct answer
• Divergent thinking: produces many different answers
to the same question
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THINKING
• Strategies for Fostering Creativity:
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Encourage brainstorming
Provide environments that stimulate creativity
Don’t overcontrol students
Encourage internal motivation
Build children’s confidence
Guide children to be persistent and delay gratification
Encourage children to take intellectual risks
Introduce children to creative people
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THINKING
• Scientific Thinking:
• Children tend to:
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Ask fundamental questions about reality
Place a great deal of emphasis on causal mechanisms
Be more influenced by chance events than by overall patterns
Maintain old theories regardless of evidence
• Tools of scientific thought are not routinely taught in
schools
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THINKING
• Metacognition: cognition about cognition
• Metamemory: knowledge about memory
• Children have some knowledge of metamemory by 5–6 years
of age
• They do not understand certain components
• Knowledge about strategies
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INTELLIGENCE
• Intelligence: problem-solving skills and the ability to learn from and
adapt to life’s everyday experiences
• Individual Differences: stable, consistent ways in which people are
different from each other
• Intelligence Tests:
• Binet Tests: designed to identify children with difficulty learning in school
• Mental age (MA): an individual’s level of mental development relative to others
• Intelligence quotient (IQ): a person’s mental age divided by chronological age,
multiplied by 100
• Stanford-Binet Tests: revised version of the Binet test
• Scores approximate a normal distribution—a bell-shaped curve
• Wechsler Scales: give scores on several composite indices
• Three versions for different age groups
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INTELLIGENCE
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INTELLIGENCE
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INTELLIGENCE
• Types of Intelligence:
• Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence:
intelligence comes in three forms:
• Analytical intelligence: ability to analyze, judge, evaluate,
compare, and contrast
• Creative intelligence: ability to create, design, invent,
originate, and imagine
• Practical intelligence: ability to use, apply, implement, and
put ideas into practice
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INTELLIGENCE
• Types of Intelligence (continued):
• Gardner’s Eight Frames of Mind:
• Verbal: ability to think in words and use language to express
meaning
• Mathematical: ability to carry out mathematical operations
• Spatial: ability to think three-dimensionally
• Bodily-Kinesthetic: ability to manipulate objects and be physically
adept
• Musical: sensitivity to pitch, melody, rhythm, and tone
• Interpersonal: ability to understand and interact effectively with
others
• Intrapersonal: ability to understand oneself
• Naturalist: ability to observe patterns in nature and understand
natural and human-made systems
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INTELLIGENCE
• Controversies and issues in intelligence:
• Heredity and genetics versus environment (increasingly
higher scores suggest role of education)
• Flynn effect
• Bell curve: U.S. is developing large underclass of
intellectually deprived
• Racial and cultural bias
• Use and misuse of IQ tests
• Classifying types of mental retardation
• Classification as being gifted
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INTELLIGENCE
• Evaluating Multiple-Intelligence Approaches:
• Pros:
• Stimulated teachers to think more broadly about children’s
competencies
• Motivated educators to develop programs that instruct students in
multiple domains
• Contributed to interest in assessing intelligence and classroom
learning
• Cons:
• Multiple-intelligence views may have taken the concept of specific
intelligences too far
• Research has not yet supported the different types
• Are there other types of intelligences?
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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
• Influences of Genetics:
• Heritability: the variance in a population that is
attributed to genetics
• Heritability of intelligence is about .75
• Problems:
• Heritability index is only as good as the data entered into the analysis
• Assumes we can treat genetic and environmental influences as separate
• One strategy is to compare the IQs of identical and fraternal
twins
• Most researchers agree that genetics and environment interact
to influence intelligence
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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
• Environmental Influences:
• Communication of parents
• Schooling
• Flynn Effect: rapidly increasing IQ test scores around
the world
• Increasing levels of education attained by more people
• Explosion of available information
• Interventions designed to help children at risk for
impoverished intelligence
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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
• Group Differences:
• On average, African American schoolchildren score 10
to 15 points lower on IQ tests than White American
schoolchildren
• Gap has begun to narrow as African Americans have gained
social, economic, and educational opportunities
• Culture-Fair Tests: tests that are intended to be
free of cultural bias
• Items that are familiar to children from all backgrounds
• Nonverbal intelligence tests
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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
• Using Intelligence Tests:
• Avoid stereotyping and expectations
• Know that IQ is not the sole indicator of competence
• Use caution in interpreting an overall IQ score
• Extremes of Intelligence:
• Mental Retardation: a condition of limited mental ability
in which an individual has a low IQ (typically below 70)
and has difficulty adapting to everyday life
• Can be mild, moderate, or severe
• Can have an organic cause, or it can be social and cultural in origin
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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
• Extremes of Intelligence (continued):
• Giftedness: people who have 130 IQ or higher and/or
superior talent for something
• Three criteria:
• Precocity
• Marching to their own drummer
• A passion to master
• Giftedness is likely a product of both heredity and
environment
• Many experts argue that education programs for gifted
children need a significant overhaul
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LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
• During middle and late childhood:
• Changes occur in the way children’s mental vocabulary
is organized
• Rapid increase in vocabulary and grammar skills
• Improved logical reasoning/analytical skills
• Metalinguistic Awareness: knowledge about language
• Improves significantly during elementary school years
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LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
• Reading:
• Children with a large vocabulary have an advantage in
learning to read
• Two approaches to teaching reading:
• Whole-language approach: reading instruction should parallel
children’s natural language learning
• Recognize whole words; use context to guess at meaning
• Reading is connected with listening and writing skills
• Phonics approach: reading instruction should teach basic
rules for translating written symbols into sounds
• Research suggests that instruction in phonics should be emphasized,
although both methods can be beneficial
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LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
• Bilingualism:
• Learning a second language is easiest for children
• U.S. students are far behind other countries in learning
multiple languages
• Ability to speak two languages has a positive effect on
child’s cognitive development
• Bilingual children perform better on tests of:
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Control of attention (focus)
Concept formation
Analytic reasoning
Cognitive flexibility
Cognitive complexity
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