lecture 9- middle childhood Flashcards

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1
Q

Growth and Change – The Body

A

Growth averages 6 cm per year
Weight gain averages 2.25 kg per year
Muscle mass and strength gradually increase; baby fat decreases
Ossification of bones
Boys have a greater number of muscle cells and are typically stronger than girls

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2
Q

Growth and Change – The Brain

A

-Brain volume stabilizes
Significant changes in structures and regions occur, especially in the prefrontal cortex
Improved attention, reasoning, and cognitive control
Increases in cortical thickness
Activation of some brain areas increase while others decrease
Shift from larger areas to smaller, more focal areas
Due to synaptic pruning

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3
Q

Growth and Change – Motor Development

A

-Gross motor skills become smoother and more coordinated
Boys usually outperform girls on gross motor skills
-Improvement of fine motor skills during middle and late childhood
Increased myelination of the central nervous system
Girls usually outperform boys on fine motor skills

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4
Q

Exercise and Sport

A

-Exercise plays an important role in children’s growth and development
-Involvement in daily sport in schools decreased from 80% (1969) to 20% (1999)
-Likely contributors to low activity and obesity in children:
Computer/electronic games
Television
Little exercise going to/from schoo

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5
Q

Health, Illness, and Disease

A

-Middle childhood = excellent health
-Injuries are the leading cause of death during middle and late childhood
-Motor vehicle accidents are most common cause of severe injury
Cancer is the 2nd leading cause of death in children 5–14 years old
-Most common child cancer is leukemia
-Many elementary-school children already possess risk factors for cardiovascular disease

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6
Q

Obesity in Children

A

-Being overweight as a child is a risk factor for adult obesity
-Raises risks for many medical and psychological problems:
-Pulmonary problems, diabetes, high blood pressure
Low self-esteem, depression, exclusion from peer groups

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7
Q

Learning Disabilities

A

-Definition of learning disability includes three components:
Minimum IQ level
Significant difficulty in a school-related area
Exclusion of severe emotional disorders, second-language background, sensory disabilities, and/or specific neurological deficits

Boys are identified three times more frequently than girls
Most common form involves reading (i.e., dyslexia)
And now math (i.e., dyscalculia)

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8
Q

Possible Causes of Learning Disabilities

A

Genetics (many tend to run in families)
Environmental influences
Problems in integrating information from multiple brain regions
Difficulties in brain structures and functions
Intervention: e.g., improving reading ability through intensive instruction

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9
Q

Cognitive Changes

A

In the preoperational stage (2 years – 5 years) children’s thinking is limited
children have only a single focus or centre
Around 5 years, children’s thinking begins to shift to include more than one dimension

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10
Q

Nativists

A

argue that children are born with a core concept of number

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11
Q

Empiricists

A

argue that children learn about numbers through the same types of experiences and learning mechanisms that help them acquire other concepts.

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12
Q

Cognitive Changes – Concrete Operations

A
Decentration + Reversibility  Conservation!
and
Decline in egocentricism
Transformations
Classification
Seriation
Deductive reasoning
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13
Q

Transformations

A

Reasoning about transformations:

the ability to think and reason about change processes

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14
Q

Classification

A

Multiple classification:

the ability to classify objects as belonging to two or more categories at the same time

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15
Q

Deductive Reasoning

A

The ability to draw a logical inference from two or more pieces of information.

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16
Q

memory

A

Long-term memory increases with age during middle and late childhood
This increase in LTM is likely implicated in the development of expertise…

17
Q

Development of Expertise

A

-Experts have extensive (acquired) knowledge about a particular content area
Influences how they organize, represent, and interpret information
-Affects ability to remember, reason, and solve problems
Older children usually have more expertise about a subject than younger children do

18
Q

Acquisition of Academic Skills: The Case of Reading

A

Five stages of reading development
Stage 0, birth through first grade: Acquiring skills for reading, including the letters of alphabet and phonemic awareness.
Stage 1, first and second grades: Acquisition of phonological recoding skills, the ability to translate letters into sounds and to blend the sounds into words.
Stage 2, second and third grades: Gaining fluency in reading simple material.

19
Q

Acquisition of Reading

A

Five stages of reading development (continued)
Stage 3, fourth through eighth grades: Developing the ability to acquire new information from print—“reading to learn, rather than learning to read” (as in earlier grades).
Stage 4, eighth through twelfth grades: Obtaining information from reading and acquiring the ability to appreciate multiple perspectives and viewpoints.

20
Q

word idetification

A

Rapid, effortless identification of words is central to reading and the enjoyment of reading (acquire three words per day).
Words can be identified by
Phonological recoding: Converting the visual form of a word into a verbal, speech-like form
Visually based retrieval: Proceeding directly from the visual form of a word to its meaning

21
Q

Word Identification (continued)

A

Children choose between these two word identification approaches through a “strategy-choice process”. On hard words, they go with the surer strategy.
On easier words, they go on the fastest approach.

22
Q

Comprehension

A

-Comprehension is influenced by the amount of time spent reading and is aided by:
-Encoding
-Automatization
-Development of reading strategies
Metacognition

23
Q

Acquisition of Academic Skills: The Case of Writing

A

-Learning to write is more difficult than learning to read.
Writing requires simultaneous focus on multiple goals:
-Low-level goals: Forming letters, spelling words, using correct capitalization and punctuation.
-High-level goals: Making arguments comprehensible, organizing individual points into a framework, and providing background information that readers need to know to understand the writing.

24
Q

Pre-writing Skills

A

A 3-1/2-year-old’s efforts at writing show the early understanding that each word requires a separate symbol