Professional Documents
Culture Documents
• Age 6 or 7, children
– hop, jump, climb, pedal, and balance bicycle
• Age 8 to 10, children
– develop balance, coordination, and strength, which
allows them to engage in gymnastics and team sports
• Myelination
– Neural pathways that connect the cerebellum to the
cortex are more myelinated
• Reaction time
– Improves (decreases) from early childhood to about
age 18, but there are individual differences
Fine Motor Skills
• Boys
– More forearm strength, which is good for swinging a
bat or throwing a ball
– At puberty, sex differences favoring boys increases
• Girls
– Greater limb coordination and overall flexibility aiding
them in dancing, gymnastics, and balancing
• Between middle childhood and adolescence
– Physical activities become increasingly stereotyped
by children as being masculine or feminine
Exercise and Fitness
• Dyslexic individuals
– Sensory and neurological problems may contribute to reading
problems.
– Genetic factors may give rise to neurological problems or
circulation problems in the left hemisphere of the brain.
– Problems in the angular gyrus may give rise to reading
problems.
• Dyslexic statistics
– 25% to 65% of children who have one dyslexic parent are
dyslexic themselves.
– About 40% of the siblings of children with dyslexia are dyslexic.
Fig. 9-3, p. 167
Educating Children with Disabilities
• Transitivity
– If A exceeds B in some property and B exceeds C,
then A must also exceed C
• Seriation
– Ability to place objects in a series by age, height,
weight
– Children can seriate two dimensions at once
Fig. 9-4, p. 185
Piaget: The Concrete-Operational Stage
(cont’d)
• Class inclusion
– Focusing on two subclasses and larger subclass at
the same time
– Concrete-operational children understand class
inclusion.
• Piaget’s theory applied to education
– Learning involves active discovery.
– Instruction should be geared to the child’s level of
development.
– Learning to take into account the perspectives of
others to develop cognition and morality
Moral Development: The Child as Judge
Moral Development: The Child as a Judge
• Preoperational children
– Engaged in problem solving
– Tend to focus their attention on one element of the problem at a
time
• Major reason they lack conservation
• Concrete-operational children
– Attend to multiple aspects of the problem at once
• Permits them to conserve number and volume
Developments in The Storage and Retrieval of
Information
• Sensory memory
– Visual impression of an object lasting for a fraction of
a second
Working Memory (Short-Term Memory)
• Focus on a stimulus in the sensory register
– Tends to be retained in working memory for up to 30 seconds
after the trace of the stimulus decays
• Memory function in middle childhood
– Similar to adult-like organization and strategies
– Quantitative improvement through adolescence
• Auditory stimuli can be maintained longer in short-term
memory than can visual stimuli
• Promoting memory
– Encode visual stimuli as sounds
– Rehearsing sounds that can be repeated out loud or mentally
Fig. 9-6, p. 190
Long-Term Memory
• Achievement
– Child’s acquired competencies or performance
• Spearman
– Intelligence has a common underlying factor, “g”
(general intelligence), which represents broad
reasoning and problem-solving abilities.
• Thurstone
– Intelligence consists of several specific factors or
primary mental abilities, such as the ability to learn
the meaning of words and visual-spatial abilities.
Theories of Intelligence (cont’d)
• Sternberg
– Constructed a three-part, or “triarchic,” theory of
intelligence
– Part 1: analytical intelligence
• Academic ability
– Part 2: creative intelligence
• Ability to cope with novel situations and to profit from
experience
– Part 3: practical intelligence
• Adapt to the demands of their environment, including the
social environment
Fig. 9-8, p. 193
Theories of Intelligence (cont’d)
• Gardner
– Believed intelligence reflects more than academic
ability
• Binet-Simon scale
– Yields a score called a mental age (MA)
– MA shows the intellectual level at which a child is
functioning
• Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale
– Yields an intelligence quotient, or IQ
– IQ states the relationship between a child’s mental
age and his/her actual or chronological age (CA)
– IQ equals MA divided by CA times 100
• IQ today is compared to those performances of
other people of the same age
Table 9-2, p. 195
Measurement of Intellectual Development
(cont’d)
• Wechsler scales
– Developed for use with school-aged children (WISC),
younger children (WPPSI), and adults (WAIS)
• Cultural bias
– Scoring well on intelligence test requires a certain
type of cultural experience
• Culture-free
– Evaluates reasoning ability through the child’s
comprehension of the rules that govern a progression
of geometric designs
– Middle-class children still outperform lower-class
children
– Tests do not predict academic success as well as
other tests
Fig. 9-12, p. 198
Patterns of Intellectual Development
• Word-recognition method
– Associates visual stimuli with the sound combinations
that produce spoken words
• Phonetic method
– Children first learn to associate written letters and
letter combinations with the sounds they indicate
– Helps with decoding
• Sight vocabulary
– Recognizing useful words such as one’s name, and
such signs as danger, stop, and poison
Bilingualism: Linguistic Perspectives on the
World
• Approximately 50 million of Americans speak a
different language than English at home.
• Bilingual children not cognitively delayed
• Half of Spanish-speaking children at home are
proficient in both languages
• Bilingualism contributes to the complexity of the
child’s cognitive processes.
• Bilingual children understand symbols used in
language are arbitrary