lecture 9- middle childhood Flashcards
Growth and Change – The Body
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
Growth and Change – The Brain
-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
Growth and Change – Motor Development
-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
Exercise and Sport
-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
Health, Illness, and Disease
-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
Obesity in Children
-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
Learning Disabilities
-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)
Possible Causes of Learning Disabilities
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
Cognitive Changes
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
Nativists
argue that children are born with a core concept of number
Empiricists
argue that children learn about numbers through the same types of experiences and learning mechanisms that help them acquire other concepts.
Cognitive Changes – Concrete Operations
Decentration + Reversibility Conservation! and Decline in egocentricism Transformations Classification Seriation Deductive reasoning
Transformations
Reasoning about transformations:
the ability to think and reason about change processes
Classification
Multiple classification:
the ability to classify objects as belonging to two or more categories at the same time
Deductive Reasoning
The ability to draw a logical inference from two or more pieces of information.
memory
Long-term memory increases with age during middle and late childhood
This increase in LTM is likely implicated in the development of expertise…
Development of Expertise
-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
Acquisition of Academic Skills: The Case of Reading
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.
Acquisition of Reading
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.
word idetification
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
Word Identification (continued)
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.
Comprehension
-Comprehension is influenced by the amount of time spent reading and is aided by:
-Encoding
-Automatization
-Development of reading strategies
Metacognition
Acquisition of Academic Skills: The Case of Writing
-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.
Pre-writing Skills
A 3-1/2-year-old’s efforts at writing show the early understanding that each word requires a separate symbol
