lifespan/discussion lesson 5
LIFE-SPAN DEVELOPMENT 17e
John W. Santrock
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Chapter 9
Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle and Late Childhood
©McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. Authorized only for instructor use in the classroom. No reproduction or further distribution permitted without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Chapter Outline
Physical Changes and Health
Children with Disabilities
Cognitive Changes
Language Development
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Physical Changes and Health
Body growth and change
The brain
Motor development
Exercise
Health, illness, and disease
©Chris Windsor/Digital Vision/Getty Images
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Body Growth and Change
Growth averages 2–3 inches/year
Weight gain averages 5–7 pounds/year
Head circumference and waist circumference decrease in relation to body height in middle and late childhood.
Bones continue to ossify during middle and late childhood but yield to pressure and pull more than mature bones.
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The Brain
Brain volume stabilizes.
Significant changes in structures and regions occur, especially in the prefrontal cortex.
Cortical thickness increases.
Activation of some brain areas increases while others decrease.
Brain pathways and circuitry involving the prefrontal cortex, the highest level in the brain, continue to increase
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Motor Development
Motor skills become smoother and more coordinated.
Girls outperform boys in their use of fine motor skills.
Improvement of fine motor skills during middle and late childhood results from increased myelination of central nervous system.
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Exercise (1 of 2)
Higher level of physical activity is linked to lower level of metabolic disease risk based on the following measures:
Cholesterol, waist circumference, and insulin levels.
Aerobic exercise benefits
Lower incidence of obesity
Children’s attention and memory, cognitive inhibitory control
Effortful and goal-directed thinking and behavior
Creativity
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Exercise (2 of 2)
Ways to get children to exercise
Offer physical activity programs at school facilities
Improve physical fitness activities in schools
Have children plan community and school activities
Encourage families to focus more on physical activity
©Randy Pench/Zuma Press/Newscom
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Health, Illness, and Disease (1 of 3)
Middle and late childhood is a time of excellent health.
Accidents and injuries
Motor vehicle accidents are most common cause of severe injury.
Overweight children
Causes: heredity and environmental contexts
Irregular mealtimes, too much family screen time
Consequences: diabetes, hypertension, elevated blood cholesterol levels, low self-esteem
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Health, Illness, and Disease (2 of 3)
Intervention programs
Emphasize getting parents to engage in healthier lifestyles themselves
Feed children healthier food and get them to exercise more
Cardiovascular disease
Uncommon in children but risk factors are present
Adult coronary disease linked to childhood elevated blood pressure and high body fat levels
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Health, Illness, and Disease (3 of 3)
Cancer
Second 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.
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Types of Cancer in Children
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Children with Disabilities
The scope of disabilities
Educational issues
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The Scope of Disabilities (1 of 6)
12.9 percent of 3- to 21-year-olds in the United States receive special education-related services in 2012–2013, an increase of 3 percent from 1980 to 1981.
The U.S. Department of Education includes students with a learning disability and students with ADHD in the category of “Learning Disability.”
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The Scope of Disabilities (2 of 6)
Learning disability: difficulty in learning involving understanding or using spoken or written language. The difficulty can appear in listening, thinking, reading, writing, or spelling.
Dyslexia: severe impairment in the ability to read and spell
Dysgraphia: difficulty in handwriting
Dyscalculia: developmental arithmetic disorder
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The Scope of Disabilities (3 of 6)
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity
Boys are twice as likely to receive ADHD diagnosis
Possible causes
Genetics
Brain damage during prenatal or postnatal development
Cigarette and alcohol exposure during prenatal development
High maternal stress during prenatal development
Low birth weight
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The Scope of Disabilities (4 of 6)
Challenges for children with ADHD
Adjustment and optimal development
Increased risk of lower academic achievement
Problematic peer relations
School dropout
Becoming parents as adolescents
Substance use problems, mental health issues
Antisocial behavior
Additional challenges for girls with ADHD
Friendship
Peer interaction
Social skills
Peer victimization
Pregnancy
Long-term challenges
Underachievement in math and reading, criminal activity, and unemployment
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The Scope of Disabilities (5 of 6)
Emotional and behavioral disorders: serious, persistent problems that involve
Relationships, aggression, depression, and fears associated with personal or school matters
Inappropriate socioemotional characteristics
Boys three times as likely as girls to have these disorders
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The Scope of Disabilities (6 of 6)
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD): range from autistic disorder to Asperger syndrome and may have genetic basis
Autistic disorder: onset in the first 3 years of life
Deficiencies in social relationships, abnormalities in communication, and restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior
Have deficits in cognitive processing of information
Is identified five times more often in boys than girls
Asperger syndrome: good verbal language skills
Milder nonverbal language problems
Restricted range of interests and relationships
Engage in obsessive, repetitive routines and preoccupations with a particular subject
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U.S. Children with a Disability Receiving Special Education Services: 2012–2013 School Year
| Disability | Percentage of All Children in Public Schools |
| Learning disabilities | 4.6 |
| Speech or hearing impairments | 2.7 |
| Autism | 1.0 |
| Intellectual disabilities | 0.9 |
| Emotional disturbance | 0.7 |
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Regions of the Brain in Which Children with ADHD Had a Delayed Peak in the Thickness of the Cerebral Cortex
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Educational Issues
Individualized education plan (IEP): written statement specifically tailored for the disabled student
Least restrictive environment (LRE): setting as similar as possible to the one in which nondisabled children are educated
Inclusion: educating a child with special education needs full-time in the regular classroom
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Cognitive Changes
Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory
Information processing
Intelligence
Extremes of intelligence
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Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory (1 of 3)
Concrete operational stage
Ages 7–11
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
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Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory (2 of 3)
Evaluating Piaget’s concrete operational stage
Concrete operational abilities do not appear in synchrony.
Education and culture exert strong influences on children’s development.
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Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory (3 of 3)
Neo-Piagetians: argue Piaget was partially correct but his theory needs considerable revision
Elaborated on Piaget’s theory, increasing emphasis to
Information processing, strategies, and precise cognitive steps
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Information Processing (1 of 7)
During during middle and late childhood, most children dramatically improve ability to sustain and control attention.
Pay more attention to task-relevant stimuli
Changes in memory, thinking, metacognition, executive function
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Information Processing (2 of 7)
Long-term memory: increases with age during middle and late childhood
Knowledge and expertise
Experts have acquired extensive knowledge about a particular content area.
For example, 10- and 11-year-olds expert chess players remember more about location of chess pieces on a board than either college students who were not chess players or novices
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Information Processing (3 of 7)
Working memory is a passive storehouse to keep information until moved to long-term memory.
Considered to be a mental workbench
Key component is the central executive.
Children’s verbal working memory linked to morphology, syntax, and grammar.
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Information Processing (4 of 7)
Autobiographical memory: memory of significant events and experiences in one’s life
Strategies: deliberate mental activities that improve processing of information
Elaboration: involves engaging in more extensive processing of information; child forms personal associations to increase meaningfulness
Engage in mental imagery
Understanding material, rather than just repeating it
Repeat with variation on materials to increase number of associations
Embed memory-relevant language
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Information Processing (5 of 7)
Fuzzy trace theory: memory is best understood by considering verbatim memory trace and gist
Thinking
Executive functioning: dimensions of executive function are the most important for cognitive development and school success
Self-control/inhibition
Working memory
Flexibility
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Information Processing (6 of 7)
Critical thinking: thinking reflectively and productively, and evaluating evidence
Mindfulness: being alert, mentally present, and cognitively flexible
Mindfulness training improves children’s attention self-regulation.
Creative thinking: ability to think in novel and unusual ways
Come up with unique solutions to problems
Convergent thinking: produces one correct answer and is characteristic of kind of thinking tested by standardized intelligence tests
Divergent thinking: produces many answers to the same question and is characteristic of creativity
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Information Processing (7 of 7)
Metacognition: cognition about cognition
Metamemory: knowledge about memory
Brainstorming: individuals come up with creative ideas in a group and play off each other’s ideas
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Working Memory
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Intelligence (1 of 6)
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, obtains general composite score
Stanford-Binet 5 test
Revisions to original test to analyze five content areas
Fluid reasoning
Knowledge
Quantitative reasoning,
Visual-spatial reasoning
Working memory
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Intelligence (2 of 6)
William Stern Intelligence Quotient (IQ): person’s mental age divided by chronological age, multiplied by 100
Normal distribution: symmetrical distribution
Most scores fall in middle of possible range of scores
Few scores appear toward the extremes of the range
Wechsler Scales (WISC-V) for ages 6–16 provide an overall IQ score and yields five composite scores
Verbal Comprehension Index
Working Memory Index
Processing Speed Index
Fluid Reasoning
Visual Spatial
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Intelligence (3 of 6)
Types of intelligence
Sternberg’s Triarchic theory of intelligence: intelligence comes in following forms:
Analytical intelligence: evaluate, compare, and contrast
Creative intelligence: invent, originate, and imagine
Practical intelligence: ability to implement, and put ideas into practice
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Intelligence (4 of 6)
Gardner’s eight frames of mind
Verbal
Mathematical
Spatial
Bodily-Kinesthetic
Musical
Interpersonal
Intrapersonal
Naturalist
Everyone has all of these intelligences to varying degrees.
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Intelligence (5 of 6)
Evaluating multiple-intelligence approaches
Has broadened concepts of intelligence, teaching, and how children learn
Some feel multiple-intelligence views have taken concept too far.
Interpreting differences in IQ scores
Influences of genetics: comparing identical and fraternal twin IQs
Environmental influences: communicative, middle-SES parents
Group differences: children deprived of formal education
Culture-fair tests: designed to be free of cultural bias
The Flynn Effect: rapid increase in IQ scores worldwide
May be due to
Higher levels of education attained by larger percent of world’s population.
Explosion of information now available
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Intelligence (6 of 6)
Using intelligence tests
Avoid stereotyping and expectations
Know IQ is not the sole indicator of competence
Use caution when interpreting an overall IQ score
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Culture and Culture-Fair Tests
What is viewed as intelligence varies from culture to culture.
Culture-fair tests are intended to be free of cultural bias.
Two types of tests
Include items familiar to children from all socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds
Test without verbal questions
Culture-fair tests hard to create
Tests reflect what the dominant culture values.
There are no culture-fair tests, only culture-reduced tests.
What is measured as important is too vastly varied around the world.
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Ethnic Variations
Standardized Intelligence Test Scores
African American and Latino children score lower than white children, but gap is narrowing.
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales
Recently found no differences in overall intellectual ability between non-Latino white and African American preschool children
Societal Impact on Ethnic Variations
Fewer African Americans in science, technology, engineering, and math because practitioners’ expect they have less innate talent.
African Americans experience stereotype threat and fear of evaluation during standardized tests.
Negative influence on performance, increase anxiety, produce worry that results may confirm a negative stereotype.
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The Normal Curve and Stanford-Binet IQ Scores
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Sample Subscales of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition (WISC-IV) (1 of 2)
Verbal Subscales
Similarities
Child must think logically and abstractly to answer questions about how objects might be similar. For example, "In what way are a lion and a tiger alike?”
Comprehension
Subscale designed to measure an individual's judgment and common sense. For example, "What is the advantage of keeping money in a bank?"
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition (WISC-V), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc., 2014.
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Sample Subscales of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition (WISC-IV) (2 of 2)
Nonverbal Subscales
Block design: child must assemble set of multicolored blocks to match designs shown by examiner. Visual-motor coordination, perceptual organization, and ability to visualize spatially assessed. For example, "Use the four blocks on the left to make the pattern on the right.”
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition (WISC-V), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc., 2014.
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Correlation between Intelligence Test Scores and Twin Status
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Increasing IQ Scores from 1932 to 1997
Copyright by The Estate of Ulric Neisser. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
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Extremes of Intelligence (1 of 2)
Intellectual disability: limited mental ability in which individual has low IQ and difficulty adapting to everyday life
Organic intellectual disability: caused by genetic disorder or brain damage
Cultural–familial retardation: no evidence of organic brain damage
IQ is generally between 50 and 70
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Extremes of Intelligence (2 of 2)
Gifted: above-average intelligence (IQ of 130 or higher) and/or superior talent or aptitude
Three criteria
Precocity
Marching to their own drummer
A passion to master
Nature-nurture
Domain-specific giftedness and development: self-directed
Education of children who are gifted: can be underchallenged, smarter than teachers, encouraged to take higher-level classes
African American, Latino, and Native American children are underrepresented in gifted programs.
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Language Development
Vocabulary, grammar, and metalinguistic awareness
Reading
Writing
Bilingualism and second-language learning
©Elizabeth Crews
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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
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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
©Gideon Mendel/Corbis/Getty Images
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Writing
Parents and teachers should encourage children’s early writing.
Do not be concerned with letter formation or spelling.
Give children writing opportunities.
Writing skills improve with as language and cognitive skills improve.
Writing uses organization and logical reasoning.
Being a competent writer is linked to being a competent reader.
Children learn planning, drafting, revising, and editing as metacognitive awareness and writing competence improves.
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Second-Language Learning and Bilingual Education
Second-language learning
Bilingualism has a positive effect on children’s cognitive development (e.g., attention control, concept formation, analytical reasoning, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, complexity, and monitoring).
Subtractive bilingualism: when immigrant children speak their native language at home, become bilingual at school, then speak only English, their bilingualism has a negative effect.
Bilingual education
Research supports bilingual education for academic achievement.
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Accessibility Content: Text Alternatives for Images
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Working Memory Text Alternative
In Baddeley’s working memory model, working memory is like a mental workbench where a great deal of information processing is carried out. Working memory consists of three main components, with the phonological loop and visuospatial working memory helping the central executive do its work. Input from sensory memory goes to the phonological loop, where information about speech is stored and rehearsal takes place, and visuospatial working memory, where visual and spatial information, including imagery, are stored. Working memory is a limited-capacity system, and information is stored there for only a brief time. Working memory interacts with long-term memory, using information from long-term memory in its work and transmitting information to long-term memory for longer storage.
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