Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle and Late Childhood

Physical and
Cognitive
Development In
Middle and Late
Childhood
Chapter 9
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Chapter Outline
• Physical changes and health
• Children with disabilities
• Cognitive changes
• Language development
9-2
Physical Changes and Health
• Body growth and change
• The brain
• Motor development
• Exercise
• Health, illness, and disease
9-3
Body Growth and Change
• Growth averages 2–3 inches per year
• Weight gain averages 5–7 pounds a year
9-4
The Brain
• Brain volume stabilizes
• Significant changes in structures and regions
occur, especially in the prefrontal cortex
• Increases in cortical thickness
• Activation of some brain areas increase while
others decrease
9-5
Motor Development
• Motor skills become smoother and more
coordinated
• Boys outperform girls in gross motor skills
involving large muscle activity
• Improvement of fine motor skills during
middle and late childhood due to increased
myelination of the central nervous system
9-6
Exercise
• Higher level of physical activity is linked to:
– Lower level of metabolic disease risk based on
measures :
• Cholesterol, waist circumference, and insulin levels
• Aerobic exercise benefits:
– Children’s attention
– Memory
– Effortful and goal-directed thinking and behavior
– Creativity
9-7
Exercise
• Ways to get children to exercise
– Offer physical activity programs school facilities
– Improve physical fitness activities in schools
– Have children plan community and school
activities
– Encourage families to focus more on physical
activity
9-8
Health, Illness, and Disease
• Middle and late childhood is a time of
excellent health
• Accidents and injuries
– Motor vehicle accidents are most common cause
of severe injury
9-9
• Overweight children
– Causes of children being overweight
• Heredity and environmental contexts
– Consequences of being overweight
• Diabetes, hypertension, and elevated blood cholesterol
levels
– Intervention programs
9 - 10
• Cardiovascular disease
– Uncommon in children but risk factors are present
• Cancer
– 2nd leading cause of death in children 5–14 years
old
– Most common child cancer is leukemia
– Children with cancer are surviving longer because
of advancements in cancer treatment
9 - 11
Figure 9.2 - Types of Cancer in
Children
9 - 12
Figure 9.3 - U.S. Children with a Disability
Who Receive Special Education Services
9 - 13
Children with Disabilities
• The scope of disabilities
• Educational issues
9 - 14
The Scope of Disabilities
• Learning disability: Difficulty in learning that
involves understanding or using spoken or
written language, and the difficulty can appear
in listening, thinking, reading, writing, and
spelling
– Dyslexia: Severe impairment in the ability to read
and spell
– Dysgraphia: Difficulty in handwriting
– Dyscalculia: Developmental arithmetic disorder
9 - 15
• The scope of disabilities
– Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD):
Characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and
impulsivity
• Number of children diagnosed has increased
substantially
• Possible causes
– Genetics
– Brain damage during prenatal or postnatal development
– Cigarette and alcohol exposure during prenatal development
– Low birth weight
9 - 16
Figure 9.5 - Regions of the Brain in Which Children with
ADHD had a Delayed Peak in the Thickness of the Cerebral
Cortex
9 - 17
• Emotional and behavioral disorders: Serious,
persistent problems that involve:
– Relationships, aggression, depression, and fears
associated with personal or school matters
– Inappropriate socioemotional characteristics
9 - 18
• Autism spectrum disorders (ASD): Range from
autistic disorder to Asperger syndrome
– Autistic disorder: Onset in the first three years of
life
• Deficiencies in social relationships, abnormalities in
communication, and restricted, repetitive, and
stereotyped patterns of behavior
– Asperger syndrome: Good verbal language skills
• Milder nonverbal language problems
• Restricted range of interests and relationships
9 - 19
Educational Issues
• Individualized Education Plan (IEP): Written
statement that is specifically tailored for the
disabled student
• Least Restrictive Environment (LRE): Setting
that is as similar as possible to the one in
which non-disabled children are educated
• Inclusion: Educating a child with special
education needs full-time in the regular
classroom
9 - 20
Figure 9.7 - Percentage of U.S. Students with Disabilities 6
to 21 Years of Age Receiving Special Services in the General
Classroom
9 - 21
Cognitive Changes
• Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory
• Information processing
• Intelligence
• Extremes of intelligence
9 - 22
Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory
• Concrete operational stage

– Ages 7 to 11
– Children can perform concrete operations and
reason logically, and are able to classify things into
different sets
– Seriation: Ability to order stimuli along a
quantitative dimension
– Transitivity: Ability to logically combine relations
to understand certain conclusions
9 - 23
• Evaluating Piaget’s concrete operational stage

– Concrete operational abilities do not appear in
synchrony
– Education and culture exert strong influences on
children’s development
9 - 24
• Neo-Piagetians: Argue that Piaget got some

things right but that his theory needs
considerable revision
– Elaborated on Piaget’s theory, giving more
emphasis to:
• Information processing, strategies, and precise
cognitive steps
9 - 25
Figure 9.9 - Working Memory
9 - 26
Information Processing
• Long-term memory: Increases with age during
middle and late childhood
– Knowledge and expertise
• Experts have acquired extensive knowledge about a
particular content area
9 - 27
• Strategies: Deliberate mental activities that
improve the processing of information
– Elaboration
– Engage in mental imagery
– Understanding the material
– Repeat with variation
– Embed memory-relevant language
9 - 28
• Fuzzy trace theory: Considering two types of
memory representations:
– Verbatim memory trace
– Gist
• Thinking
– Critical thinking: Reflectively and productively,
and evaluating evidence
• Mindfulness: Being alert, mentally present, and
cognitively flexible
9 - 29
• Creative thinking: Ability to think in novel and
unusual ways
– Come up with unique solutions to problems
– Convergent thinking: Produces one correct
answer
• Kind of thinking tested by standardized intelligence
tests
9 - 30
– Divergent thinking: Produces many answers to the
same question
• Creativity
• Scientific thinking
– Asking fundamental and identifying causal
relations questions about reality
9 - 31
• Metacognition: Cognition about cognition
– Metamemory - Knowledge about memory
• Executive functioning
– Self-control/inhibition
– Working memory
– Flexibility
9 - 32
Intelligence
• Ability to solve problems and to adapt and
learn from experiences
– Individual differences: Stable, consistent ways in
which people differ from each other
– Binet tests
• Mental age (MA): Individual’s level of mental
development relative to others
9 - 33
Intelligence
• Intelligence quotient (IQ): Person’s mental age divided
by chronological age, multiplied by 100
• Normal distribution: Symmetrical distribution
– Most scores falling in the middle of the possible range of
scores
– Few scores appearing toward the extremes of the range
– Wechsler Scales
9 - 34
Figure 9.11 - The Normal Curve and
Stanford-Binet IQ Scores
9 - 35
Figure 9.12 - Sample Subscales of the Wechsler
Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition (wisc-iv)
9 - 36
Intelligence
• Types of intelligence
– Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence
• Analytical intelligence
• Creative intelligence
• Practical intelligence
9 - 37
Intelligence
– Gardner’s eight frames of mind:
• Verbal
• Mathematical
• Spatial
• Bodily-Kinesthetic
• Musical
• Interpersonal
• Intrapersonal
• Naturalist
– Evaluating multiple-intelligence approaches
9 - 38
Intelligence
• Culture and intelligence
• Interpreting differences in IQ scores
– Influences of genetics
– Environmental influences
– Group differences
– Culture-fair tests: Designed to be free of cultural bias
9 - 39
Figure 9.13 - Correlation Between
Intelligence Test Scores and Twin Status
9 - 40
Figure 9.15 - Sample Item from the
Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test
9 - 41
Intelligence
• Using intelligence tests
– Avoid stereotyping and expectations
– Know that IQ is not the sole indicator of
competence
– Use caution in interpreting an overall IQ score
9 - 42
Extremes of Intelligence
• Mental retardation: Limited mental ability in
which an individual has a low IQ and has
difficulty adapting to everyday life
– Organic retardation: Caused by a genetic disorder
or brain damage
– Cultural-familial retardation: No evidence of
organic brain damage
• IQ is generally between 50 and 70
9 - 43
Extremes of Intelligence
• Gifted: Above-average intelligence (an IQ of
130 or higher) and/or superior talent for
something
– Three criteria
• Precocity
• Marching to their own drummer
• A passion to master
– Nature-nurture
– Domain-specific giftedness and development
– Education of children who are gifted 9 - 44
Language Development
• Vocabulary, grammar, and metalinguistic
awareness
• Reading
• Writing
• Bilingualism and second-language learning
9 - 45
Vocabulary, Grammar, and Metalinguistic
Awareness
• Middle and late childhood
– Changes occur in the way children’s mental
vocabulary is organized
• Similar advances in grammar skills
• Metalinguistic awareness: Knowledge about
language
– Understanding what a preposition is
– Being able to discuss the sounds of a language
9 - 46
Reading
• Whole-language approach: Reading
instruction should parallel children’s natural
language learning
• Phonics approach: Reading instruction should
teach basic rules for translating written
symbols into sounds
9 - 47
Writing
• Parents and teachers should encourage
children’s early writing
– Not be concerned with the formation of letters or
spelling
9 - 48
Bilingualism and Second-Language
Learning
• Second-language learning
– Bilingualism has a positive effect on children’s
cognitive development
• Subtractive bilingualism
• Bilingual education
– Research supports bilingual education
9 - 49

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Physical and

• Concrete operational stage

• Evaluating Piaget’s concrete operational stage

• Neo-Piagetians: Argue that Piaget got some

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