Transcript Chapter 7 Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle and Late Childhood

Chapter 7
Physical and Cognitive Development in
Middle and Late Childhood
PowerPoints developed by Nicholas Greco IV, College of Lake
County, Grayslake, IL
(c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Body Growth and Change
 Middle and late childhood -- slow, consistent
growth
 Children grow an average of 2 to 3 inches a year
until the age of 11
 During the middle and late childhood years, they
gain about 5 to 7 pounds a year due to
increases in the size of the skeletal and
muscular systems and size of body organs
 Decreases in baby fat and increases in muscle
mass and strength
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The Brain
 Total brain volume stabilizes by
the end of middle and late
childhood
 Significant changes in various
structures and regions of the
brain continue to occur
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The Brain
 Synaptic pruning -- areas of the brain not
being used lose synaptic connections and
those being used show an increase in
connections
 Cognitive control -- which involves flexible
and effective control in a number of areas
 These areas include controlling attention,
reducing interfering thoughts, inhibiting
motor actions, and being cognitively
flexible in switching between competing
choices
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Motor Development
 Children’s motor skills become much
smoother and more coordinated than they
were in early childhood
 In gross motor skills involving large
activity, boys usually outperform same-age
girls
 Increased myelination of the central
nervous system is shown in improvement
of fine motor skills
Fine motor coordination develops so that
children can write rather than print words
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Exercise
 Children are more fatigued by long periods
of sitting than by running, jumping, or
bicycling
 Practical ways to get children to exercise
Improve physical fitness activities in schools
Offer more physical activity programs run by
volunteers at school facilities
Have children plan community and school
activities that really interest them
Encourage families to focus more on physical
activity and encourage parents to exercise
more
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Overweight Children
 The percentage of U.S. children who
are at risk for being overweight has
doubled from 15 percent in the 1970s
to almost 30 percent today
 Girls are more likely than boys to be
overweight
 African-American and Latino children
were more likely to be overweight or
obese than non-Latino White children
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Risks Caused by Overweight
 Being overweight raises the risk for many
medical and psychological problems
 Overweight children can develop lung
problems and hip problems
 Other problems include high blood
pressure, elevated blood cholesterol
levels, and type 2 diabetes
 Low self-esteem, depression, and
problems in peer relations are common
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Cancer
 Second-leading cause of death in U.S. children 5
to 14 years of age
 Incidence of cancer in children has slightly
increased
 1 in 330 children develops cancer before the age of 19
 Child cancers mainly attack the white blood cells
(leukemia), brain, bone, lymph system, muscles,
kidneys, and nervous system
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Children with Disabilities
 14% of children in the United States
receive special education or related
services
5.4 percent have a learning disability or
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
3.0 percent have speech or language
impairments
1.1 percent have mental retardation
0.9 percent have an emotional
disturbance
(National Center for Education Statistics, 2008)
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Children with Disabilities
 A child with a learning disability (LD) has
difficulty in learning that involves
understanding or using spoken or written
language, and the difficulty can appear in
listening, thinking, reading, writing, and
spelling
 Three times as many boys than girls are classified
with a learning disability
 Approximately 80 percent of children with a LD have
a reading problem
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Learning Disabilities
 Dyslexia -- category of individuals who have a
severe impairment in their ability to read and
spell
 Dysgraphia is a learning disability that involves
difficulty in handwriting
 Dyscalculia is a learning disability that involves
difficulty in math computation
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Causes of Learning Disability
 It is unlikely learning disabilities reside in a
single, specific brain location
 More likely due to problems in integrating
information from multiple brain regions or
subtle difficulties in brain structures and
functions
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Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD)
 Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD) -- a disability showing these
characteristics over a period of time:
inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity
 They may get bored with a task after only
a few minutes -- or even seconds
 They may be impulsive and have difficulty
curbing their reactions
 They do not do a good job of thinking
before they act
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Diagnosis and Causes of ADHD
 There is controversy about the
increased diagnosis of ADHD
 Some experts attribute the increase
to heightened awareness of the
disorder
 Many children may be incorrectly
diagnosed
 Definitive causes of ADHD have not
been found
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Treatment of ADHD
 Researchers have found that a
combination of stimulant
medication such as Ritalin or
Adderall and behavior
management improves the
behavior of children with ADHD
better than medication alone or
behavior management alone
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Autism Spectrum Disorders
 Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)
 Also called pervasive developmental disorders
 Characterized by problems in social interaction,
problems in verbal and nonverbal communication,
and repetitive behaviors
 Occur in 1 in 150 individuals
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Autism Spectrum Disorders
 Autistic Disorder
 Severe developmental autism disorder that has its
onset in the first three years of life
 Characterized by deficiencies in social relationships;
abnormalities in communication; and restricted,
repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior
 Asperger Syndrome
 Mild autism spectrum disorder
 Child has relatively good verbal language, milder
nonverbal language problems, and a restricted range
of interests and relationships
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Educational Issues
 Until the 1970s children with disabilities were
refused enrollment and/or inadequately served
1975 -- Public Law 94-142 -- all students with
disabilities must be given a free, appropriate
public education
1990 -- Individuals with Disabilities Education
Act (IDEA)
Amended in 1997
2004 -- Individuals with Disabilities Education
Improvement Act
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IDEA Mandates Services
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Evaluation and eligibility determination
Appropriate education
Individualized education plan (IEP)
Education in the least restrictive environment
(LRE)
Inclusion describes educating a child with
special education needs full-time in the
regular classroom
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IEP and LRE
 Individualized education plan (IEP) -written statement that spells out a
program that is specifically tailored for
the student with a disability
 Least restrictive environment (LRE) -a setting that is as similar as possible
to the one in which children who do
not have a disability are educated
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The Concrete Operational Stage
 Concrete operational stage lasts from
approximately 7 to 11 years of age
 Children can perform concrete operations
and they can reason logically when it can
be applied to specific or concrete
examples
 Operations -- mental actions that are
reversible
 Concrete operations -- operations that
apply to real, concrete objects
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Recognizing Concrete
Operational Thought
 Conservation tasks
 Classify or divide things into different sets
or subsets, and consider their
interrelationships
 Seriation -- the ability to order stimuli along
a quantitative dimension (such as length)
 Another aspect is transitivity -- the ability
to logically combine relations to
understand certain conclusions
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Evaluating Piaget’s Concrete
Operational Stage
 Neo-Piagetians argue that Piaget got
some things right but that his theory needs
considerable revision
They give more emphasis to how children use
attention, memory, and strategies to process
information
A more accurate portrayal of children’s
thinking requires attention to children’s
strategies, the speed at which they process
information, the task involved, and the division
of problems into smaller, more precise steps
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Information Processing
 Information-processing approach focuses
on how children process information about
their world, including learning tasks
 During middle childhood, most children
dramatically improve their ability to sustain
and control attention
 Other changes involve memory, thinking,
and metacognition
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Memory
 After age 7, short-term memory does not
show as much increase as it did in the
preschool period
 Long-term memory -- relatively permanent
and unlimited type of memory
 Improvements in memory reflect increased
knowledge and increased use of memory
strategies
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Memory Strategies
 Strategies -- deliberate mental activities to
improve the processing of information
Elaboration involves more extensive
processing of the information
thinking of examples
relating the information to one’s own life
elaboration makes the information more
meaningful
Mental imagery can help to remember
pictures
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Memory Strategies
 Fuzzy trace theory states that memory is
best understood by considering two types
of memory representations:
Verbatim memory trace
Precise details of the information
Gist
Central idea of the information
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Thinking
 Critical thinking involves thinking
reflectively and productively, as well as
evaluating the evidence
 Creative thinking -- ability to think in novel
and unusual ways and to come up with
unique solutions to problems
 Guilford (1967) distinguished between
convergent thinking, which produces one correct
answer
divergent thinking, which produces many different
answers to the same question and characterizes
creativity
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Metacognition
 Metacognition -- cognition about cognition,
or knowing about knowing
studies of metacognition have focused
on metamemory -- knowledge about
memory
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Intelligence
 Intelligence -- problem-solving skills and
the ability to learn from and adapt to life’s
everyday experiences
 Interest in intelligence has often focused
on individual differences and assessment
Individual differences -- the stable, consistent
ways in which people are different from each
other
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The Binet Tests
 Binet and Simon, in France in 1904,
developed an intelligence test to meet
the need to devise a method of
identifying children who were unable
to learn in school
 Binet developed the concept of
mental age (MA) -- an individual’s
level of mental development relative
to others
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The Binet Tests
 In 1912, William Stern created the concept of
intelligence quotient (IQ) -- a person’s mental
age divided by his/her chronological age (CA),
multiplied by 100
 IQ = MA/CA × 100
 Revisions to the Binet test are called the
Stanford-Binet tests because revisions were
made at Stanford University
 A normal distribution shows a symmetrical curve, with
a majority of the scores falling in the middle of the
possible range of scores and fewer and fewer scores
in the extremes of the range
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The Wechsler Scales
 Another set of widely used tests is called the
Wechsler scales, developed by David Wechsler
 WPPSI-III to test children 2 years 6 months to 7 years
3 months of age
 WISC-IV Integrated for children and adolescents 6 to
16 years of age
 WAIS-IV for adults
 Wechsler scales provide more than an overall IQ
 They also yield subscales for verbal and performance
IQs
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Types of Intelligence:
Sternberg
 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 -- the ability to use,
apply, implement, and put ideas into practice
(Sternberg, 1986, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011)
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Types of Intelligence: Gardner
Howard Gardner suggests there are eight
types of intelligence, or “frames of mind”
verbal
mathematical
spatial
bodily-kinesthetic
musical
interpersonal
intrapersonal
naturalist
Everyone has all of these intelligences to varying
degrees
(Gardner, 1983, 1993, 2002)
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Interpreting Differences in IQ
Scores
 Heritability -- the fraction of the variance in
a population that is attributed to genetics
most research on heredity and environment
does not include environments that differ
radically
most researchers agree that genetics and
environment interact to influence intelligence
 Schooling is one environmental influence
on intelligence
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Group Differences
 On average, African-American children in
the United States score 10 to 15 points
lower on standardized intelligence tests
than non-Latino White American
schoolchildren do
 Children from Latino families also score
lower than non-Latino White children
 Group differences in average IQ scores
may be due in part to biased tests or
cultural differences
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Creating Culture-Fair Tests
 Culture-fair tests -- tests of intelligence
that are intended to be free of cultural bias
 Two types have been devised
one includes items that are familiar to children
from all socioeconomic and ethnic
backgrounds or items that at least are familiar
to the children taking the test
second type of culture-fair test has no verbal
questions
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Extremes of Intelligence
 Mental retardation -- a condition of limited mental ability in which an
individual has a low IQ, usually below 70 on a traditional intelligence
test, and has difficulty adapting to everyday life
 Mild – IQ of 55–70 (89%)
 Live independently as adults, work
 Moderate – IQ of 40–54 (6%)
 Attain second grade level of skills, structured work setting
 Severe – IQ of 25–39 (3.5%)
 Learn to talk and accomplish very simple tasks, require
constant supervision
 Profound – IQ below 25 (less than 1%)
 Need constant supervision, long-term care
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Extremes of Intelligence
 Organic retardation is caused by a
genetic disorder or brain damage
IQ ranges from 0–50
 Cultural-familial retardation is a
mental deficit in which no evidence of
organic brain damage can be found
IQ ranges from 50–70
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Extremes of Intelligence
 Giftedness -- above-average intelligence (an IQ
of 130 or higher) and/or superior talent for
something
 Tend to be more mature, have fewer emotional problems, and
grow up in a positive family culture
 Ellen Winner described three criteria:
Precocity
Marching to a different drummer
A passion to master
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Language Development
 Children acquire new skills that make it
possible to learn to read and write:
increased use of language to talk about things
that are not physically present
learning what a word is
learning how to recognize and talk about
sounds
 They also learn the alphabetic principle -that the letters of the alphabet represent
sounds of the language
(Berko Gleason, 2003)
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Vocabulary, Grammar, and
Metalinguistic Awareness
 Changes occur in the way children’s
mental vocabulary is organized
 Metalinguistic awareness -- knowledge
about language
Metalinguistic awareness allows children “to
think about their language, understand what
words are, and even define them”
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Approaches to Teaching Reading
 Whole-language approach stresses that
reading instruction should parallel
children’s natural language learning
 Phonics approach emphasizes that
reading instruction should teach basic
rules for translating written symbols into
sounds
 Research suggests that children can
benefit from both approaches
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Bilingualism and Second
Language Learning
 Learning a second language is more
readily accomplished by children than
adolescents or adults
 Bilingualism -- the ability to speak two
languages
Subtractive bilingualism -- going from being
monolingual in their home language to
bilingual in that language and in English, only
to end up monolingual as speakers of English
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Bilingual Education
 Involves teaching academic subjects to
immigrant children in their native language
while slowly teaching them English
 Most immigrant children take
approximately three to five years to
develop speaking proficiency and seven
years to develop reading proficiency in
English
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