Essay

10/1/18

1

Chapter Six

Off to School: Cognitive and Physical Development in Middle

Childhood

More Sophisticated Thinking: Piaget’s Version

• Concrete-operational period (7-11 years) – Can perform mental operations – actions that can be

performed on objects or ideas that yield a consistent result • Conservation

– Decentration – Reversibility

• Classification • Seriation

– Mental operations are limited to concrete problems in the here and now

• Cannot deal effectively with abstract or hypothetical problems

Formal-Operational Period

• Formal-operational period (11 years to adult) – Can reason abstractly and hypothetically

• Understand that a hypothetical problem need not correspond to the real world

– Use deductive reasoning to draw logical conclusions from the facts

– Engage in combinatorial reasoning — generating all the different ways a given number of items can be arranged

10/1/18

2

Physical Development

Growth

• Boys and girls are about the same size during the elementary-school years

• Girls are more likely to enter puberty toward the end of the elementary-school years

• At ages 11-12, the average girl is about ½ inch taller than the average boy

• The average 7- to 10-year-old needs a well- balanced diet of 2,400 calories/day

Development of Motor Skills

• Children at 11 can throw a ball three times farther than at 3, and jump twice as far

• Fine motor skill improvement is obvious in handwriting

10/1/18

3

Physical Fitness

• Physical activities promote health • < 50% of U.S. elementary school children

meet national fitness standards • Obesity is epidemic in U.S. children and

adolescents • Multiple risk factors for obesity

– Little physical education class time and its poor use

– Too much time spent in sedentary activities

Participating in Sports

• Sports involvement promotes social skills and self-esteem; helps children learn initiative

• Children playing sports use cognitive skills to devise new game strategies

• Engaging in well-supervised sports plus other adult-led activities is beneficial

• Children lose interest in sports if these are too stressful and when adults overemphasize competition instead of skill development