Lecture 11: Early and middle childhood

Question 1

what is an important thing to consider when thinking about children’s socialisation?

Answer 1

Every culture will be different in the ways it transmits cultural knowledge because cultures have different goals for the development of children and different ways of communicating knowledge to children

Question 2

what characteristics do toddlers and pre-schoolers have?

Answer 2

• language learning is very fast
• more interaction with the world, acting on the world, understanding it via language and asking questions to increase understanding
• improvement in coordination and fine motor skills, body proportions becoming more similar to adults, most 5 year olds can hop, skip, walk backwards, cut with scissors, dress themselves, eat with utensils
• toilet training: most children are dry at night by age 6
• increasing awareness of self and others, developing theory of mind, but self is defined in physical and concrete terms (hair colour, family etc)
• Temperament, differences in nature, character

Question 3

how is temperament measured?

Answer 3

measured in different ways: manageability- easy, difficult, slow to warm up, across domains

EAS: emotionality, activity, sociability and impulsivity

• it is considered to map onto personality types

Question 4

what are the characteristics of toddlers and preschoolers

social development?

Answer 4

• Gender awareness
• Begin developing emotion regulation
• sibling relationships become important
• pro-social and anti-social behaviour

Question 5

what is involved in gender awareness in toddlers and preschoolers?

Answer 5

• toddlers have an awareness of themselves as ‘girl’ or ‘boy’
• identify gender as things like hair length or types of clothes
• from about age 3, they are aware of gender role norms

Question 6

what is involved in developing emotion regulation in toddlers and preschoolers?

Answer 6

• the processes involved in initiating, maintaining and altering emotional responses
• e.g. suppressing negative emotions or maintaining positive emotions
• this is influenced by temperament and caregiver response

Question 7

what is involved in pro-social and anti-social behaviour in toddlers and preschoolers?

Answer 7

• individual differences in empathy and sympathy observed in early childhood. comparable to adults
• helping others is a feature of a ‘pro-social’ pre-schooler
• antisocial = intentional negative actions directed towards others. high levels in early childhood can be associated with conduct disorder and ODD
• children under 6 have strongest correlation between exposure to media violence and aggressive behaviour
• influenced by temperament, improved cognitive functioning, environmental factors

Question 8

what is the social learning theory?

Answer 8

Albert Bandura - key researcher/thinker

• it takes ideas from learning theory/behaviourism. Skinner thinks we learn behaviour through reinforcement and punishment

Question 9

what does bandura make of the social learning theory?

Answer 9

• reinforcement is part of learning but is not limited to the response to this individual
• social learning theory posits that people learn through observing others behaviour, attitude, and outcomes of those behaviours - cognitive learning in a social context
• relevant to behaviour modification - modelling, instruction
• can be seen in gender roles, moral and culturally appropriate behaviour

Question 10

what is the importance of play?

Answer 10

• it is crucial to development
• is how children make sense of the world
• can be functional, constructive, imaginary

Question 11

what is early childhood education like in NZ?

Answer 11

• 95% of children have has some ECE before going to school

- fees involved - can get 20 free hours

Question 12

what are the types of ECE?

Answer 12

• childcare - home-based care, childcare centres (private and community based), centres with a philosophy (montessori, steiner), home based nannies, whanau and family care
• kindergarten, Te Kohanga reo, Pasifika Education and care centres, pre-school, play centre

Question 13

how is the quality of ECE, choice and profit related?

Answer 13

• there are more profit-making ECE’s now than before
• non-profit community-based ECE’s are not part of the market as much anymore
• government has a limited role in planning and provision of services. each centre decides how they deliver the curriculum

Question 14

what is involved in a quality ECE?

Answer 14

• good ratios (1:4)
• trained staff
• small number of children
• good relationships
• consistent and responsive adults
• safe and developmentally appropriate physical environment

Question 15

which are Piaget’s stages of cognitive development are relevant for early and middle childhood?

Answer 15

• preoperational stage (2-7 years), symbolic thought via language
• concrete operations (7-11 years), mentally classify

Question 16

what are Piaget’s key concepts for these stages?

Answer 16

Schemes - actions or mental representations that organise knowledge. Patterns of knowledge that help make sense of new information

Assimilation - use existing schemes to understand new experiences

Accomodation - adapt scheme to fit new information

Organisation - grouping isolated behaviours and thought into higher order system

Equilibration - when the organisation of previous thoughts has moved beyond assimilation and accommodation and child understands at a new level

Question 17

what are the characteristics of a pre-operational stage?

Answer 17

• now have better symbolic representation: lots of imaginary play and can understand symbols in real life - photos, drawings, knows a word can apply to different versions of something (e.g. train = thomas the tank engine = train at station
• more advances knowledge of object permanence, they know its the same object even if its changed (e.g. painted car or burnt candle)

Question 18

what does Piaget consider pre-operational stage children to be?

Answer 18

• Egocentric - challenges being able to see things from anothers perspective
• Prone to centrism - concentrate on one characteristic or aspect
• Unable to mentally reverse a series of events or steps of reasoning
• Likely to attribute events or objects ‘magical’ properties or causes
• considered this a ‘pre-logical’ stage. cannot mentally manipulate nor understand logic.

Question 19

what was found from the experiments on children for classification, egocentrism and conservation?

Answer 19

classification: children at the preoperational stage will group things figurally or thematically rather than based on taxonomic categorisation

Egocentrism: confuse own point of view with that of another person

Conservation: the understanding that the essential characteristics of things (e.g. mass, number, quantity, volume) doesn’t change despite their outward appearance

Question 20

what are some common challenges parents face in young children?

Answer 20

• eating
• tantrums
• sleeping
• ill children
• toilet training

Question 21

what are the characteristics of middle childhood?

Answer 21

• growth slows
• eruption of first molars
• increasing BMI
• brain volume nearly at adult rate
• fine tuning of gross motor skills, still requires interaction with environment, children need to practise
• improvement in attention, memory, less distractible
• changes in play
• development in sense of self: - they can describe self in terms of personality characteristics, e.g. funny, smart,
• begin to use comparisons e.g. fastest runner
• identifies as part of social grouping e.g. school, sports team etc
• go to school, language learning now includes written language

Question 22

what is schooling like in NZ?

Answer 22

• children must attend a school, kura or be home-schooled
• most children start on or just after 5th birthday, but not compulsory to start until you turn 6
• there are state, private, kura kaupapa maori, home schooling and state integrated schools
• state schools are “free”, but still have to pay school fees, uniforms, stationary, trips etc. government pays $150 per student

Question 23

what are the changes and reforms being made to NZ education?

Answer 23

• NZ curriculum is being refreshed - bilingual, inclusive, user-friendly. Aotearoa history from 2022. other curriculum areas to follow
• increasing attention to obligations under te Tirity o Waitangi
• school boards of trustees role change, new enrolment scheme, new funding systems - intended to reduce inequity, encourage more inclusiveness
• changing thinking on testing - national standards gone but standardised testing might come back?

Question 24

what is Piaget’s concrete operational stage?

Answer 24

• Understand conservation: easier with number than volume or weight
• Can make complex categorisations: sub-categories, inclusion in multiple categories
• Can understand relations between two things: seriation, comparison, transitivity (comparing things via characteristic e.g. size)
• can understand reversals
• can consider multiple aspects of a situation (decentring)

Question 25

what are the characteristics of Piaget’s concrete operational stage?

Answer 25

• takes place around 7-11 years (primary school age)
• much more able to see perspective of others (less egocentric)
• develop a concrete logical way of understanding the world:
  
  • can use inductive reasoning but struggle with deductive thought
  • children become much more logical and sophisticated with their thinking. an important transition between earlier stages of development and the coming stage where they will learn how to think more abstractly and hypothetically
• marked by concrete as distinct from abstract thinking. still have difficulty with abstractions and hypothetical situations

Question 26

how are cognitive skills measured?

Answer 26

through intelligence tests.

Question 27

what are some things to consider about intelligence tests?

Answer 27

• are they measuring intelligence? or perhaps compliance or motivation?
• administered aurally and responses orally
• reward convergent answers
• culturally and class biased
• test skills are valued at school and are correlated with school performance

Question 28

what are some other types of intelligence?

Answer 28

Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence:

• componential/analytical intelligence: processing and analysing information
• experimental/creative intelligence: the way a person approaches new information or a new task. ability to generate new solutions to problems, generate new ideas
• practical intelligence: how people react to the environment and the ability to adapt to it or change it to suit their needs

Question 29

what is Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences?

Answer 29

• people possess different kinds of minds and therefore learn, remember, perform and understand in different ways. Reflect the influence of culture and society - we all possess these intelligences but they vary in the depth and breadth by individual

1. linguistics/language
2. musical
3. logico-mathematical
4. spatial
5. bodily/kinaesthetic.
6. interpersonal
7. intrapersonal
8. naturalistic
9. existential

Question 30

what is socialisation like in middle childhood?

Answer 30

• going to school provides the first real opportunity for unmediated peer interaction with a large number of peers
• socialising practice and development is important for moving past ‘egocentrism’
• popularity- attractiveness, academic achievement, social competence is correlated with peer status.
• sociometry is used to investigate peer relationships

Question 31

what are some gender differences in middle childhood?

Answer 31

• peak of gender segregation - peer groups formed around shared activities and play preferences
• at this age, “border work” maintains and strengthens gender segregation - organised separation, contests, chasing, rituals of ‘pollution’, invasions
• boys tend to hold more stereotypical views and are more harshly judged for violating traditional roles and appearance
• girls and boys mostly have a greater preference for toys stereotypes as own-gender rather than for cross-gender-types or gender neutral toys and this increases with age
• girls and boys experience different activities so they get different domains and this reinforces their views of themselves
• issues with the gender binary

Question 32

what is the possible impact of covid on children?

Answer 32

• anxiety and fear (children and caregivers)
• social impact
• educational impact
• technology use
• positives for children?
• what are the long term effects?