Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle and Late Childhood

1
Chapter 7

• Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle and
  Late Childhood
• PowerPoints developed by Nicholas Greco IV,
  College of Lake County, Grayslake, IL

2
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

3
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

4
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

5
Motor Development

• Childrens 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

6
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

7
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

9
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

• 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 Piagets 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 childrens thinking
  requires attention to childrens 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 ones 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 lifes
  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 individuals 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 persons 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   

• Sternbergs 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 5570 (89)
• Live independently as adults, work
• Moderate IQ of 4054 (6)
• Attain second grade level of skills, structured
  work setting
• Severe IQ of 2539 (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 050
• Cultural-familial retardation is a mental deficit
  in which no evidence of organic brain damage can
  be found
• IQ ranges from 5070

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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 childrens 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 childrens 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