Chapter 6 Flashcards
Body and Growth 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 (hardening) of bones
- Boys have a greater number of muscle cells and are typically stronger than girls
Motor development improves greatly over the preschool years
- 6 years: most children can ride a bike, skate, climb trees, and jump rope with ease
- Boys usually outperform girls on gross motor skills
- 8-9 years: most children have mastered the fine motor coordination needed to write, draw, and use tools.
- Increased myelination of the central nervous system
- Girls usually outperform boys on fine motor skills
- Eye hand coordination also improves
Brain Change
- Brain volume stabilizes
- Improvements in coordination
- Due to the maturing corpus callosum (motor learning)
- Significant changes in structures and regions occur, especially in the prefrontal cortex
- Improved attention, concentration, and planning abilities
- Activation of some brain areas increase while others decrease
- Shift from larger areas to smaller, more focal areas
- Due to synaptic pruning
- Affects flexibility and control in attention, reducing interfering thoughts, inhibiting motor actions, and switching between competing choices
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
- Cluster of symptoms problematic for school: poor attentional control, restlessness or hyperactivity, impulsivity
- 5–10% of school-age children diagnosed
- Researchers beginning to identify neurological differences that align with behavioral differences
- Longitudinal research indicates the “difference” is often a delay; about half of ADHD cases remit
- There is a significant amount of normal variation, uneven brain development in middle childhood
Concrete operational stage
- Piaget
- Ages 6-12 (originally proposed by Piaget as 7-11)
- Children can perform concrete operations & reason logically as long as reasoning can only be applied to specific, concrete examples
- Ability to coordinate more than 1 dimension, classify things into different sets, & consider their interrelationships; recognize reversible relationships
- Universally, adults seem to recognize that somewhere between ages 5-7 children become more sensible, reliable problem solvers
Egocentrism
*a failure to recognize one’s own subjectivity. One fails to see things realistically because one is, in a sense, trapped on one’s own perspective
Reversible relationship
- Logic is dependent on being able to see and understand the relationship between length and width changes- that one perfectly compensates for th other
- Compensatory relationship
- One change reverses the effects of the other change
- Pieget-> important for solving many kinds of logical problems, allowing children a deeper understanding of the world around them
Formal operational thought
- Although elementary-school-aged children can think scientifically sometimes, identifying simple theories and checking them against evidence, they make a muddle of it if they already believe a certain theory
- logical thought about abstract contents
- Move into adolescence
Domain of knowledge
*Amount of prior experience a child has had with the specific domain of knowledge: a particular subject matter or content area that he is thinking about
The Information Processing Approach
- No qualitative, stage-like changes characterize a child’s thinking or processing
- Information Processing researchers focus heavily on what children do with information of particular kinds:
- What they pay most attention to
- How they encode it
- What and how much information they store
- What other information they link it with
- How they retrieve it
Neo-Piagetians
- argue that Piaget got some things right, but that theory needs considerable revision
- More emphasis on attention, memory, and strategy used and how, & how quickly they process information
Memory
long-term memory increases with age during middle & late childhood; aided by knowledge & increased use of strategies
Sensory memory
refers to a brief retention of sensory experience
*Capacity does not seem to change much with age
Long-term memory
an almost unlimited mental store of knowledge
Working memory
limited capacity, material is lost from working memory in 15-30 seconds unless we engage in rehearsal
Rehearsal
we actually keep working with it, making an effort to pay attention
Retrieval
- remembering, getting information about of storage so we can use it
Recognition
- When the information to be remembered is immediately available to your sense
- Seems to be present from birth
- Children have great visual-spatial recognition skills
Recall
*“to-be-remembered” information is not present, and somehow it must be drawn out of long-term memory to represent it to (e.g., answering a question on an exam)
Declarative knowledge
knowledge about facts & events
Semantic
factual information (“the earth is round”), rules (“red lights mean stop”), and concepts (“an elephant is a large, gray animal”)
Episodic
- knowledge of events experienced (e.g., recalling a doctor’s visit or supervisor asking someone to recall a counseling session)
- Organized around space & time – what happened in order, where and when; becomes as “script”
Nondeclarative knowledge/Procedural knowledge
knowledge that cannot adequately put into words & may not even enter our awareness
Script
Form a schematic representaiton of the typical features of such an event and the order in which they happen
Digit Span Tests
- provide demonstration of change in working memory capacity
- 2 years: produce a two-digit string
- 7 years: product 5-digit string
- Adults: average is 7 digit string
Working Memory- Processing Speed
- Children making simple responses (e.g., pushing a button) to a stimulus, increases from early to middle childhood and continues to improve until about age 15
- Processing speed can increase with physical maturation
- As children get older they can do more with more information at one time
Increased knowledge base with development
- As children get older, their knowledge about many things increases
- But, prior knowledge can lead to false memories
- Signorella & Liben (1984), strong stereotyped beliefs are more likely than children with less stereotyped beliefs to misremember
- Experts have acquired extensive knowledge about a particular content area
- Influences what they notice & how they organize, represent, and interpret information which…
- -Affects ability to remember, reason, & solve problems
- Older children usually have more expertise about a subject than younger children do
- Another advantage of a rich web of knowledge is that it allows chunking of information together in a meaningful unit
Improvements in Development- Logical Thinking Skills
Older children may have a better understanding of their experiences, which helps them to remember more about the experience later
Improvements in Development- Language Skills
Improvements in narrative skill (the ability to tell a coherent story)
Memory strategies
- strategies are “potentially conscious activities a person may voluntarily carry out” to remember something
- Retrieval following some plan
- Younger children use less selective attention to help them with their memory, but can show some “pre-strategic” skills
Organizational strategy
sorting items on some meaningful basis
Elaboration
finding or creating some kind of meaningful link between items
Production deficiency
failing to use a strategy in situations when its helpful
Utilization deficiency
use a strategy, but does not boost memory
Metacognition
cognition about cognition
- thinking about and awareness of mental processes
- Includes knowledge about strategies
- Routine use of strategies
- Effective planning to solve problems
- Knowing when & where to use strategies
Metamemory
- knowledge about memory
- Children have some knowledge of metamemory by 5-6 yrs
Self-instruction/self-monitoring
- clinical practices in which the goal is to effect some behavior change by attending to regulating & sometimes changing cognitions
- Teaching children to keep track of what they have learned seems to be an important element in teaching
them how to learn
Counting all strategy
informal arithmetic skills such as adding and subtracting small numbers by using counting strategies
Counting on
starting with the first number and ocunting four more numbers from there
Retrieval Strategy
pulling the answer automatically from memory after being repeatedly exposed
Critical Thinking
*thinking reflectively and productively, and evaluating evidence -Brooks & Brooks (2001): few schools really teach critical thinking; encourage students to re-think old ideas or expand their thinking (new ideas)
Creative Thinking
the ability to think in novel & unusual ways, & to come up with unique solutions to problems
Convergent thinking
produces one correct answer
Divergent thinking
produces many different answers to the same question
Strategies for Fostering Creativity
- 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
Scientific Thinking
- Children tend to:
- Ask fundamental questions about reality & seeks answers to problems that may seem trivial
- 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
Children’s Eyewitness Testimony
*Witness’s memory for observed events may
be incomplete, distorted or wrong at any age
– Preschoolers have greater difficulty with reality
monitoring, distinguishing fantasy from reality
– School-aged children generally less suggestible,
but not immune to influence
Guidelines for better eyewitness interviews
Avoid leading questions – Keep repetition to a minimum – Use emotionally neutral tone – Avoid stereotype induction – Do not use inducements
Intelligence
the ability to problem solve and 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: 2-6 to 7-3, & 6 to 16 & 17 to adult
Three categories of effective educational
factors
-Quantity, instruction and practice
– Stimulation, engaging environments and content
– Valuing, for learning and the learner
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
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 (farming, ecology)
Metalinguistic Awareness
*knowledge about language
¢ Improves significantly during elementary school years
Two approaches to teaching reading
- Whole-language approach
* Phonics approach
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
Cooperative learning environments
*a classroom, or
other organization that encourages children to work in
pairs or in groups to solve academic problems and to
improve their understanding of concepts or skills
Peer collaborations
*most effective when the decision
making is shared
-Children need support in learning to collaborate effectively
-Difficulty in coordinating attention, communicating
effectively, and behaving contingently (adjust their bx to be
flexible to the needs of their partner)
Social cognition
*a person’s mental processing (thoughts,
beliefs, etc.) of information about other people and their
reasoning about social relationships
-By the 5th birthday most children realize that others often have
different thoughts and beliefs from their own
Perspective Taking and Social Relationships
¢ Social relationships are necessary for the child to gain
experience in learning about others’ points of view
-They contribute to the child’s sense of security & connectedness
-Foster the development of the self concept
¢ Perspective taking: consideration of the viewpoints of
others
-Develops gradually as the child matures
¢ The child in school environments is “forced” to clarify his
thoughts & adopt better communication skills in order to
be accepted
-Conflicts in social relationships are viewed as essential to a
developing awareness of perspectives other than one’s own
Perspective Taking and Friendships
¢ Sullivan (1953): children need interpersonal contact in
order to reduce egocentrism and promote altruism
-Age 8, children’s needs for increased interpersonal intimacy
are met though the establishment of an intense, focused
interest in same-sex age-mates
-Seeing oneself self reflected back from the friendship
promotes validation of one’s thoughts, feelings, & beliefs as
well as a more realistic appraisal
Selman’s Stages of
Friendship Development, Perspective Taking
– Stage 0 (3–6 yrs): Undifferentiated/Egocentric
– Stage 1 (5–9 yrs): Differentiated/Subjective
– Stage 2 (8–12 yrs): Reciprocal/Self-Reflective
– Stage 3 (10–15 yrs): Mutual/Third-Person
– Stage 4 (Late teen+): Intimate/In-Depth/
Societal
¢ Increasing ability to balance needs for
intimacy and autonomy while preserving
friendship
Psychosocial development
the internal psychological processes of interpersonal understanding, skills, and values that comprise an individual’s capacity for interpersonal relationships
Friendship understanding
a child’s changing knowledge of what friendship implies
Friendship skills
behavioral skills and conflict resolution that maintain and enhance friendships
Friendship valuing
emotional attachment or investment that the child makes in a friendship
Interpersonal orientation
- the way the child characteristically interacts on a social level
- Linking the child’s psychosocial competencies to his interpersonal performance
Other-transforming style
- Characteristically tries to dominate or coerce a friend into meeting his needs
- Change or transform the other and can be bulling, aggressive, or manipulative.
Self-transforming
- Gives in to reduce the level of tension
* Changes his own behaviors or feelings to conform
