Chapter 12: Middle Childhood- Cognitive Development Flashcards
Concrete Operational Thought
Piaget’s term for the ability to reason about direct experiences and perceptions. Children can logically think about something that is reality.
Classification
Things can be organized into groups according to characteristics they have in common. By age 8, they can classify.
Transitive Inference
Understanding the unspoken link between one fact and another.
Seriation
Things can be arranged in a logical series, such as the alphabet.
Piaget’s Significance of Findings
Accepted: Children can use mental categories, understand reversibility, and think more advanced.
Disputed: No shifts between preoperational and concrete operational logic.
Vygotsky: Rule of Instruction
- Education is not limited to school, but occurs everywhere.
- Children are apprentices in learning through proximal development.
Social Context Learning
- We learn what our culture considers important.
- Culture affects method of learning.
- Parallels Gardner’s theory of learning.
Information Processing
- Human thinking is just like the thinking of a computer.
- Cognition occurs in a day to day process continuously.
Sensory Memory (Sensory Register)
Along with information processing system where stimulus is stored for a second for it to be processed.
Short-Term Memory (Working Memory)
Component of formation processing system where current mental activity occurs, information is stored for 20-30 seconds.
Long-Term Memory (Storage)
Component of information processing system where limitless amounts of information can be stored indefinitely.
Role of Memory in Information Processing
- As prefrontal cortex matures: short-term memory improves steadily, children are able to use strategies to learn, and long-term storage expands.
- End of childhood: long-term memory is almost limitless.
Help Children Remember
- Provide a good knowledge base.
- Help with motivation using self-reference and retrieval cues.
- Make known importance of attention.
Knowledge Base
Body of knowledge in an area that makes it easier to master information in that area.
Control Processes
Mechanisms that put memory, processing speed, and knowledge together.
Metacognition
Thinking about thinking and understanding how to learn. How to conquer what you are learning and monitor how well someone performed the task.
Language Advancement
- Children know most of their first language and are working on even a second and third language.
Executive Function
Organize and prioritize many thoughts that arise from parts of the brain allowing someone to prioritize behavior.
English Language Learners
Children who’s English is low, usually ones who did not grow up in an English home.
Pragmatics
Adjust your conversation to whom you are speaking to or around. Speaking one way to children and another to adults is an example.
Immersion
Where instruction occurs in all school subjects occurring in child’s second language learning.
Bilingual Schooling
School subjects are taught in both the learners original language and the second language.
English as a Second Language
Teaching English where all non-English speakers together and they learn English. The goal is to use English, so they do not use their native language.
Hidden Curriculum
The unstated rules that influence the academic curriculum and every other aspect of learning.
