Chapter 12 Flashcards
Concrete operational stage
7 to 11 years; thinking is more logical, flexible, and organized
Decentration
Ability to focus on several aspects of a problem
Reversibility
Thinking through a series of steps and the returning to the starting point
Seriation
Ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight
Transitive inference
Ability to seriate mentally
Cognitive maps
Mental representations of spaces
Spatial reasoning
Ability to locate landmarks on maps improves; 10 to 12 year old increasingly grasp scale; substantial individual differences exist, influenced by cultural contexts
Continuum of acquisition
Children master concrete operational tasks step by step, not all at once; gradual mastery of logical concepts indicates the limitations of concrete operational thinking
Executive function
Supports gains in planning, strategic thinking, and self-monitoring; influenced by combination of heredity and environmental factors; can be improved with direct and indirect training (including mindfulness training)
Inhibition and flexible shifting of attention
Inhibition improves sharply between 6 and 10; “Dimensional Change Card Sort” is used to assess children’s ability to switch rules in sorting; flexible shifting benefits from gains in inhibition
ADHD symptoms
Inability to stay focused when mental effort is required for more than a few minutes; often ignore social rules and lash out when frustrated
ADHD origins
Highly heritable, but also related to environmental factors such as a stressful home life
ADHD treatment
Best treated with medication combined with interventions that model and reinforce appropriate behavior
Rehearsal
Repeating items to oneself
Organization
Grouping related items together
Elaboration
Creating a relationship between pieces of information from different categories
Semantic memory
Children’s general knowledge base
Mental inferences
Enable knowledge of false belief and second-order false beliefs
Recursive thought
Ability to view a situation from at least two perspectives
Cognitive self-regulation
Continuously monitoring progress toward a goal; checking outcomes; redirecting unsuccessful efforts
Whole-language approach
Way of teaching children to read by presenting texts in their complete form
Phonics approach
Way of teaching children to read by first teaching basic rules for translating written symbols into sounds
IQ tests
Provide an overall score representing general intelligence and separate scores measuring specific mental abilities; do not measure all aspects of intelligence
Factor analysis
Used to identify abilities measured by intelligence tests