WEEK 6 Flashcards
Middle childhood (33 cards)
‘Cultural models’…
=cognitive structures pertaining to common activities; for example, buying something at the market, herding cattle, taking care of an infant, making bread or delivering a message to a relative’s house.
-Children in both developed and developing countries begin formal schooling in middle childhood, which includes cultural models of ‘listen to the teacher’, ‘wait your turn’ and ‘do your homework’.
Identify the changes in physical and sensory development that take place during middle childhood…
-physical growth continues at a slow but steady pace, about 5–8 cm per year in height and about 2.5–3 kg per year in weight
-Of all age groups in the life span, 6- to 10-year-olds have the lowest body mass index
- A nationally representative study of American children and adolescents found no sex differences on measures of core, upper and lower body strength among 6- to 11-year-olds. Only after age 11 did boys grow stronger than girls
-From age 6 to 12, children lose all 20 of their ‘primary teeth’ and new, permanent teeth replace them. The two top front teeth are usually the first to go.
Myopia…
-also known as being nearsighted
-Rises sharply in childhood
The more children read, write and use computers, the more likely they are to develop myopia
Explain how motor development advances in middle childhood and how these advancements are related to new skills and participation in games and sports.
-Children advance in both gross and fine motor development during middle childhood, nearly reaching maturity in their fine motor abilities.
-Children become stronger and more agile, and as their gross motor skills develop, they spend more of their days in active play and organised sport. They also become capable of complex fine motor activities such as writing.
Myelination during middle childhood…
Increasing myelination of the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain accelerates reaction time in middle childhood for both gross motor and fine motor tasks
Executive function…
the ability to solve cognitive problems without becoming distracted and to adjust one’s strategy as the nature of a problem changes
Concrete operations (Piaget)…
-Around age 7, children make an important cognitive advance towards becoming more systematic, organised and logical thinkers.
-During this stage, children become capable of using mental operations, which allow them to organise and manipulate information mentally instead of relying on physical and sensory associations
-According to Piaget, the advances of concrete operations are evident in new abilities for performing tasks of conservation, classification and seriation.
Seriation…
the ability to arrange things in a logical order (e.g. shortest to longest, thinnest to thickest, lightest to darkest)
-by age 7, most children can accurately arrange six to eight sticks by length.
ADHD Stats…
-It is estimated that 7.4% of children and adolescents in Australia and 3–5% of school-aged children in New Zealand have ADHD
- Boys are over twice as likely as girls to have ADHD. The diagnosis is usually made by a GP or paediatrician after evaluation of the child and consultation with parents and teachers
-70% of children on medication show improvements in academic performance and peer relations
Memory development middle childhood…
-the capacity of working memory enlarges. On memory tests for sequences of numbers, the length of the sequence recalled is just 4 numbers for the typical 7-year-old, but for the typical 12-year-old it has increased to 7, equal to adults
-middle childhood is the period when children first learn to use mnemonics (memory strategies) such as rehearsal, organisation and elaboration
Rehearsal…
involves repeating the information over and over, is a simple but effective mnemonic.
Organisation…
placing things into meaningful categories—is another effective memory strategy that is used more commonly in the course of middle childhood
-numerous studies have shown that if children are given a list of items to remember, they are more likely to group them into categories—clothes, animals, sport items—in middle childhood than in early childhood
Elaboration…
-involves transforming bits of information in a way that connects them and hence makes them easier to remember
-EG. if you were going to the supermarket and wanted to remember to buy butter, lettuce, apples and milk, you could arrange the first letters of each of the items into one word, BLAM. The word BLAM serves as a retrieval cue for the items represented by each letter of the word.
Wechsler Intelligence test…
- consist of 11 subtests, of which 6 are Verbal subtests and 5 are Performance subtests.
-The results provide an overall intelligence quotient, or IQ score, which is calculated relative to the performance of other people of the same age, with 100 as the median score.
Criticisms of IQ test…
-Don’t account for forms of intelligence such as creativity
-Tend to be culturally biased
-Can put certain groups at a disadvantage
Normal distribution…
-‘Bell curve’
-most people are near the middle of the distribution and the proportions decrease at the low and high extremes
(Approximate) Genetic relationship and correlation of IQ’s…
Adopted siblings- 0.24
Parents and their biological children- 0.40
Biological siblings- 0.50
Dizygotic (Fraternal) Twins- 0.55
Monozygotic (Identical) twins raised apart- 0.75
Monozygotic twins raised together- 0.85
Flynn effect…
- median IQ score in Western countries rose dramatically in the course of the 20th century,
-The higher a country’s infectious disease burden, the lower its median IQ. Thus, the Flynn effect may have been primarily due to the elimination of major infectious diseases in developed countries
Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences…
-Linguistic Ability to use language
-Musical Ability to compose and/or perform music
-Logical–mathematical Ability to think logically and to solve mathematical problems
-Spatial Ability to understand how objects are oriented in space
-Bodily–kinaesthetic Speed, agility and gross motor control.
-Interpersonal Sensitivity to others and understanding others’ motivations
-Intrapersonal Understanding of one’s emotions and how they guide actions
-Naturalist Ability to recognise the patterns found in nature
Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence…
-includes three distinct but related forms of intelligence
-Analytical intelligence: Sternberg’s term for the kind of intelligence that IQ tests measure, which involves acquiring, storing, analysing and retrieving information
-Creative intelligence involves the ability to combine information in original ways to produce new insights, ideas and problem-solving strategies.
-Practical intelligence is the ability to apply information to the kinds of problems faced in everyday life, including the capacity to evaluate social situations.
phonics approach…
-advocates teaching children by breaking down words into their component sounds, called phonics, then putting the phonics together into words
-Reading in this approach involves learning gradually more complex units: phonics, then single words, then short sentences, then somewhat longer sentences and so on
whole-language approach…
-In this view, the emphasis should be on the meaning of written language in whole passages, rather than breaking down each word into its smallest components.
-This approach advocates teaching children to read using complete written material, such as poems, stories and lists of related items. Children are encouraged to guess at the meaning of words they do not know, based on the context of the word within the written material.
Identify the advances in vocabulary, grammar and pragmatics during middle childhood…
-Language development continues apace with massive additions to children’s vocabularies once they learn to read.
-There is a fourfold increase in children’s vocabularies between the ages of 6 and 10 or 11, and the grammar of children’s language use becomes more complex.
-Their understanding of pragmatics also grows substantially during middle childhood, which can be seen vividly in children’s use and appreciation of humour.
Summarise the variations worldwide in school enrolment, socialisation practices and academic achievement during middle childhood…
-Attending school is a relatively recent historical development in children’s lives, and even today 18% of children in developing countries do not attend primary school.
-School has important influences on children’s social development because it separates children from the world of adults and places them among same-age peers.
-It also makes them less of an economic asset to their parents. Schools vary widely around the world depending on cultural beliefs about how children should learn, but it is economic development, not school philosophy, that mainly determines children’s performance on international tests of academic performance.
