Supporting Learning in Early Childhood

CHAPTER 12 COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN MIDDLE CHILDHOOD

Historical Theme

Shkelen Agimi, 11 years, Albania

This artist’s vibrant, detailed rendering of a naval battle reflects the dramatic gains in planning, memory, categorization, spatial reasoning, and problem solving of middle childhood.

Reprinted with permission from the International Museum of Children’s Art, Oslo, Norway

WHAT’S AHEAD IN CHAPTER 12

12.1 Piaget’s Theory: The Concrete Operational Stage

Attainments of the Concrete Operational Stage • Limitations of Concrete Operational Thought • Follow-Up Research on Concrete Operational Thought • Evaluation of the Concrete Operational Stage

12.2 Information Processing

Executive Function • Memory Strategies • Knowledge and Memory • Culture, Schooling, and Memory Strategies • The School-Age Child’s Theory of Mind • Cognitive Self-Regulation • Applications of Information Processing to Academic Learning

■ Biology and Environment: Children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

12.3 Individual Differences in Mental Development

Defining and Measuring Intelligence • Other Efforts to Define Intelligence • Explaining Individual and Group Differences in IQ • Reducing Cultural Bias in Testing

■ Cultural Influences: The Flynn Effect: Massive Generational Gains in IQ

12.4 Language Development

Vocabulary and Grammar • Pragmatics • Learning Two Languages

12.5 Children’s Learning in School

Educational Philosophies • Teacher–Student Interaction • Grouping Practices • Educational Screen Media • Teaching Children with Special Needs • How Well-Educated Are U.S. Children?

■ Social Issues: Education: Magnet Schools: Equal Access to High-Quality Education

“Finally!” 6-year-old Lizzie exclaimed the day Rena enrolled her in elementary school. “Now I get to go to real school, just like Joey!” Lizzie confidently walked into a combined kindergarten–first-grade class in her neighborhood school, pencils, crayons, and writing pad in hand, ready for a more disciplined approach to learning than she had experienced previously. As a preschooler, Lizzie had loved playing school, giving assignments as the “teacher” and pretending to read and write as the “student.” Now she was eager to master the tasks that had sparked her imagination as a 4- and 5-year-old.

Walking into that classroom, Lizzie entered a whole new world of challenging activities. In a single morning, she and her classmates might meet in reading groups, write in journals, work on addition and subtraction, and sort leaves gathered for a science project. As Lizzie and Joey moved through the elementary school grades, they tackled increasingly complex projects, became more accomplished at reading, writing, and math, and broadened their general knowledge of the world.

To understand the cognitive attainments of middle childhood, we turn to research inspired by Piaget’s theory and the information-processing approach. And we look at expanding definitions of intelligence that help us appreciate individual differences in mental development. We also discuss genetic and environmental contributions to IQ scores, which often influence important educational decisions. Our discussion continues with language, which blossoms further in these years. Finally, we consider the role of schools in children’s development. ■

12.1 PIAGET’S THEORY: THE CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE

12.1a Describe advances in thinking and cognitive limitations during the concrete operational stage.

12.1b Discuss follow-up research on concrete operational thought.

When Lizzie visited my child development class at age 4, Piaget’s conservation problems confused her (see page 312 in Chapter 9). For example, after water was poured from a tall, narrow container into a short, wide one, she insisted that the amount of water had changed. When Lizzie returned at age 8, she found this task easy. “Of course it’s the same!” she exclaimed. “The water’s shorter, but it’s also wider. Pour it back,” she instructed. “You’ll see, it’s the same amount!”

12.1.1 Attainments of the Concrete Operational Stage

Lizzie has entered Piaget’s concrete operational stage, which extends from about 7 to 11 years. Compared with cognition in early childhood, thinking in middle childhood is more logical, flexible, and organized.

Conservation

The ability to pass conservation tasks provides clear evidence of operations—mental actions that obey logical rules. Notice how Lizzie is capable of decentration, focusing on several aspects of a problem and relating them, rather than centering on just one. She also demonstrates reversibility, the capacity to think through a series of steps and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point. Recall from Chapter 9 that reversibility is part of every logical operation. It is solidly achieved in middle childhood.

Classification

Between ages 7 and 10, children pass Piaget’s class inclusion problem (see page 312 in Chapter 9). This indicates that they are more aware of classification hierarchies. Children of this age are better able to inhibit their habitual strategy of perceptually comparing two specific categories (blue flowers and yellow flowers) in favor of relating each specific category to its less obvious general category (flowers) (Borst et al., 2013). School-age children’s enhanced classification skills are evident in their enthusiasm for collecting treasured objects. At age 10, Joey spent hours sorting and re-sorting his baseball cards, grouping them first by league and team and then by playing position and batting average. He could separate the players into a variety of classes and subclasses and easily rearrange them.

Seriation

The ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight, is called seriation. To test for it, Piaget asked children to arrange sticks of different lengths from shortest to longest. Older preschoolers can put the sticks in a row to create the series, but they do so haphazardly, making many errors. In contrast, 6- to 7-year-olds create the series efficiently, moving in an orderly sequence from the shortest stick to the longest.

The concrete operational child can also seriate mentally, an ability called transitive inference. In a well-known transitive inference problem, Piaget showed children pairings of sticks of different colors. From observing that stick A is longer than stick B and that stick B is longer than stick C, children must infer that A is longer than C and, also, that A is the longest of the three sticks. Like Piaget’s class inclusion task, transitive inference requires children to integrate three relations at once—in this instance, A–B, B–C, and A–C. As long as they receive help in remembering the premises (A–B and B–C), 7- to 8-year-olds can grasp transitive inference (Wright, 2006). And when the task is made relevant to children’s everyday experiences—for example, based on winners of races between pairs of cartoon characters—6-year-olds perform well, though not on a par with older children (Wright, Robertson, & Hadfield, 2011; Wright & Smailes, 2015).

Spatial Reasoning

Piaget found that school-age children’s understanding of space is more accurate than that of preschoolers. To illustrate, let’s consider children’s cognitive maps—their mental representations of spaces, such as a classroom, school, or neighborhood. Drawing or reading a map of a large-scale space (school or neighborhood) requires considerable perspective-taking skill. Because the entire space cannot be seen at once, children must infer its overall layout by relating its separate parts.

An improved ability to categorize underlies children’s interest in collecting objects during middle childhood. This 10-year-old sorts and organizes his extensive rock and mineral collection.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Preschoolers and young school-age children include landmarks on maps they draw of a single room, but their arrangement is not always accurate. They do better when asked to place stickers showing the location of furniture and people on a map of the room. But if the map is rotated to a position other than the room’s orientation, they have difficulty (Liben & Downs, 1993). However, giving 7-year-olds the opportunity to walk through the room ahead of time improves their ability to locate landmarks on a rotated map (Lehnung et al., 2003). Actively exploring the room permits them to experience landmarks from different vantage points, which fosters a more flexible mental representation.

With respect to large-scale outdoor environments, not until age 9 can many children accurately place stickers on a map to indicate the location of landmarks. Children who spontaneously use strategies that help them align the map with their current location in the space—rotating the map or tracing their route on it—show better performance (Liben et al., 2013). Around this age, the maps children draw of large-scale spaces become better organized, showing landmarks along an organized route of travel. Around age 10, children become less dependent on landmarks to learn a route of travel (Lingwood et al., 2015). Most can give directions for getting from one place to another using only left-turn, right-turn, and straight-ahead directions.

At the end of middle childhood, most children can integrate two or more routes, enabling them to form an integrative, overall view of a large-scale space. And they readily draw and read maps, even when the orientation of the map and the space it represents do not match (Liben, 2009; Nazareth et al., 2018). Ten- to 12-year-olds also grasp the notion of scale—the proportional relation between a space and its map representation (Liben, 2006). And they appreciate that in interpreting map symbols, a mapmaker’s assigned meaning supersedes physical resemblance—for example, that green dots (not red dots) may indicate where red fire trucks are located (Myers & Liben, 2008).

Throughout the school years, substantial individual differences exist in children’s cognitive maps, influenced by perspective-taking and mental rotation skills and ability to integrate various sources of information. Map-related experiences enhance children’s map skills. When teachers asked fourth graders to write down the clues they used to decide where stickers (signifying landmark locations) should go on a map of an outdoor space, children’s performance improved (Kastens & Liben, 2007). Such self-generated explanations seem to induce learners to reflect on and revise their own thinking, sparking gains in many types of problem solving from elementary school through college. And a computer-based curriculum called Where Are We, consisting of 12 map-reading and map-making lessons, led to substantial improvements in second to fourth graders’ performance on diverse mapping tasks (Liben, Kastens, & Stevenson, 2002).

Cultural contexts influence children’s map making. In many non-Western communities, people rarely use maps to find their way but rely on information from neighbors, street vendors, and shopkeepers. Also, compared to their Western agemates, non-Western children less often ride in cars and more often walk, which results in intimate neighborhood knowledge. When a researcher had 12-year-olds in small cities in India and in the United States draw maps of their neighborhoods, the Indian children represented a rich array of landmarks and aspects of social life, such as people and vehicles, in a small area surrounding their home. The U.S. children, in contrast, drew a more formal, extended space, highlighting main streets and key directions (north–south, east–west) but including few landmarks (see Figure 12.1) (Parameswaran, 2003). Although the U.S. children’s maps scored higher in cognitive maturity, this difference reflected cultural interpretations of the task: When asked to create a map to “help people find their way,” the Indian children drew spaces as far-reaching and organized as the U.S. children’s.

This young sightseer consults a map of Amsterdam’s city center to locate herself in relation to major landmarks. Development of map-related skills reflects school-age children’s advancing mental representations of large-scale spaces.

© Sash Alexander/Alamy Stock Photo

Look and Listen

Ask a 6- to 8-year-old and a 9- to 12-year-old to draw a neighborhood map showing important landmarks, such as the school, a friend’s house, or a shopping area. In what ways do the children’s maps differ?

Figure 12.1 Maps drawn by older school-age children from India and the United States. (a) The Indian child depicted many landmarks and features of social life in a small area near her home. (b) The U.S. child drew a more extended space and highlighted main streets and key directions. (From G. Parameswaran, 2003, “Experimenter Instructions as a Mediator in the Effects of Culture on Mapping One’s Neighborhood,” Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23, pp. 415–416. Copyright © 2003, reprinted with permission from Elsevier, Ltd., conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.)

12.1.2 Limitations of Concrete Operational Thought

As the name of this stage suggests, concrete operational thinking suffers from one important limitation: Children think in an organized, logical fashion only when dealing with concrete information they can perceive directly. Their mental operations work poorly with abstract ideas—ones not apparent in the real world. Consider children’s solutions to transitive inference problems. When shown pairs of sticks of unequal length, Lizzie easily engaged in transitive inference. But she had great difficulty with a hypothetical version of this task: “Susan is taller than Sally, and Sally is taller than Mary. Who is the tallest?” Not until age 11 or 12 can children typically solve this problem.

That logical thought is at first tied to immediate situations helps account for a special feature of concrete operational reasoning. Children master concrete operational tasks step by step, not all at once. For example, they usually grasp conservation of number first, followed by length, liquid, and mass, and then weight. This continuum of acquisition (or gradual mastery) of logical concepts is another indication of the limitations of concrete operational thinking (Fischer & Bidell, 1991). Rather than coming up with general logical principles that they apply to all relevant situations, children seem to work out the logic of each problem separately.

12.1.3 Follow-Up Research on Concrete Operational Thought

According to Piaget, brain development combined with experience in a rich and varied external world should lead children everywhere to reach the concrete operational stage. Yet research indicates that cultural and school practices are influential (Rogoff, 2003). And information-processing research helps explain the gradual mastery of logical concepts in middle childhood.

The Impact of Culture and Schooling

The very experience of going to school seems to promote mastery of certain Piagetian tasks. For example, when children of the same age are tested, those who have been in school longer do better on transitive inference problems (Artman & Cahan, 1993). Opportunities to seriate objects, to learn about order relations, and to remember the parts of complex problems are probably responsible. Yet certain informal, nonschool experiences can also foster operational thought. Around age 7 to 8, Zinacanteco Indian girls of southern Mexico, who learn to weave elaborately designed fabrics as an alternative to schooling, engage in mental transformations to figure out how a warp strung on a loom will turn out as woven cloth—reasoning expected at the concrete operational stage (Maynard & Greenfield, 2003). North American children of the same age, who do much better than Zinacanteco children on Piagetian spatial tasks requiring mental transformations, have great difficulty with these weaving problems.

On the basis of such findings, some investigators have concluded that the forms of logic required by Piagetian tasks do not emerge spontaneously in children but, rather, are heavily influenced by training, context, and cultural conditions. Does this view remind you of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, which we discussed in earlier chapters?

A Zinacanteco Indian girl of southern Mexico learns the centuries-old practice of backstrap weaving. Although Zinacanteco children might do poorly on Piaget’s tasks, they are adept at the complex mental transformations involved in converting warp strung on a loom into woven cloth.

© LAUREN GREENFIELD/INSTITUTE for Artist Management

An Information-Processing View of Concrete Operational Thought

The gradual mastery of logical concepts in middle childhood raises a familiar question about Piaget’s theory: Is an abrupt stagewise transition to logical thought the best way to describe cognitive development in middle childhood?

Some neo-Piagetian theorists argue that the development of operational thinking can best be understood in terms of expansion of information-processing capacity rather than a sudden shift to a new stage. For example, Robbie Case (1996, 1998) proposed that with brain development and practice, cognitive schemes demand less attention and are applied more rapidly, becoming automatic. This frees up space in working memory (see page 211 in Chapter 6) so children can focus on combining old schemes and generating new ones. For instance, as children’s understanding that the height of a liquid changes after it is poured into a differently shaped container becomes routine, they notice that the width of the liquid changes as well. Soon they coordinate these observations, and they grasp conservation of liquid. Then, as this logical idea becomes well-practiced, children transfer it to more demanding situations, such as conservation of weight.

Once the schemes of a Piagetian stage are sufficiently automatic, enough working memory is available to integrate them into an improved, broadly applicable representation. As a result, children transition from concrete operations to the complex, systematic reasoning of formal operational thought, which characterizes adolescence.

Case’s theory, along with other similar neo-Piagetian perspectives, helps explain why many understandings appear in specific situations at different times rather than being mastered all at once (Barrouillet & Gaillard, 2011a). First, different forms of the same logical insight, such as the various conservation tasks, vary in their processing demands, with those mastered later requiring more space in working memory. Second, children’s experiences with different types of tasks vary widely, affecting their performance. Compared with Piaget’s theory, neo-Piagetian approaches better account for unevenness in cognitive development (Andrews & Halford, 2011). When tasks make similar processing demands, such as Piaget’s class inclusion and transitive inference problems (each of which requires children to consider three relations at once), children with relevant experiences master those tasks at about the same time.

In a practical application of conservation of liquid, a 6-year-old pours milk from a jar into a pitcher. With repeated experience, children notice how a poured liquid changes in height and width. Eventually they coordinate these observations and grasp conservation of liquid.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

12.1.4 Evaluation of the Concrete Operational Stage

Piaget was correct that school-age children approach many problems in more organized, rational ways than preschoolers. But as our discussion of the neo-Piagetian approach to development of concrete operational thought suggests, disagreement continues over whether this difference reflects a continuous improvement in logical skills or a discontinuous restructuring of children’s thinking (as Piaget’s stage idea assumes). Many researchers think that both types of change may be involved (Andrews & Halford, 2011; Barrouillet & Gaillard, 2011b; Case, 1998; Mascolo & Fischer, 2015).

During the school years, children apply logical schemes to many more tasks. In the process, their thought seems to change qualitatively—toward a more comprehensive grasp of the underlying principles of logical thought. Piaget himself recognized this possibility in evidence for gradual mastery of conservation and other tasks. So perhaps some blend of Piagetian and information-processing ideas holds the greatest promise for explaining cognitive development in middle childhood.

Ask Yourself

Connect ■ Explain how advances in perspective taking contribute to school-age children’s improved ability to draw and use maps.

Apply ■ Nine-year-old Adrienne spends many hours helping her father build furniture in his woodworking shop. How might this experience facilitate Adrienne’s advanced performance on Piagetian seriation problems?

Reflect ■ Which aspects of Piaget’s description of the concrete operational child do you accept? Which do you doubt? Explain, citing research evidence.

12.2 INFORMATION PROCESSING

12.2a Describe gains in executive function and memory in middle childhood, along with factors that influence children’s progress.

12.2b Describe the school-age child’s theory of mind and capacity to engage in self-regulation.

12.2c Describe applications of the information-processing approach to children’s learning of reading and mathematics.

In contrast to Piaget’s focus on overall cognitive change, the information-processing perspective examines separate aspects of thinking. As noted in our discussion of Case’s theory, capacity of working memory continues to increase in middle childhood, as does speed of thinking. And school-age children make strides in other facets of executive function, including control of attention and planning. Dramatic gains also occur in acquisition of memory strategies and in self-regulation. Each contributes vitally to academic learning.

12.2.1 Executive Function

As noted in Chapter 11, the school years are a time of continued development of the prefrontal cortex and its connections to other brain areas, yielding more coordinated functioning of neural networks. Consequently, executive function undergoes marked improvement (Xu et al., 2013). Children handle increasingly difficult tasks that require the integration of working memory, inhibition, and flexible thinking, which, in turn, support gains in planning, strategic thinking, and self-monitoring and self-correction of behavior.

Heritability evidence suggests substantial genetic influence on executive function (Polderman et al., 2009; Young et al., 2009). And molecular genetic analyses are identifying specific genes related to severely deficient executive-function components, such as inhibition and flexible thinking, which (as we will soon see) contribute to learning and behavior disorders, including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (refer to the Biology and Environment box on the following page).

But in both typically and atypically developing children, heredity combines with environmental factors to influence executive function. In Chapter 3, we reviewed evidence indicating that prenatal teratogens can impair impulse control, attention, planning, and other executive processes. And as we saw in Chapter 9, poverty—through stressful living conditions and maladaptive parenting practices—can undermine executive function, with powerfully negative consequences for academic achievement and social competence (Blair & Raver, 2012). As we turn now to an array of executive processes, our discussion will confirm once more that supportive home and school experiences are essential for their optimal development.

School-age children gain markedly in executive function. They can perform increasingly complex tasks—such as this science project on how flood plains form—that require the integration of working memory, inhibition, and flexible shifting of attention.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Inhibition and Flexible Shifting of Attention

School-age children become better at deliberately attending to relevant aspects of a task and inhibiting irrelevant responses. One way researchers study this increasing selectivity of attention is by introducing irrelevant stimuli into a task to see how well children attend to its central elements. For example, they might present a series of pictures of animals, each of which is either congruent with the animal’s real size (a large dinosaur, a small bird) or incongruent with its real size (a large mouse, a small elephant). The child’s task is to name the size of each animal in “real life”—large or small. Findings indicate that inhibition improves sharply between ages 6 and 10, with gains continuing through adolescence (Gomez-Perez & Ostrosky-Solis, 2006; Macdonald et al., 2014; Vakil et al., 2009).

Older children are also better at flexibly shifting their attention in response to task requirements. When given the Dimensional Change Card Sort, which requires them to switch the rules they use to sort picture cards containing conflicting cues (see page 323 in Chapter 9), schoolchildren gain steadily with age in the complexity of rules they can keep in mind and in the speed and accuracy with which they shift between the rules. Recall that flexible shifting benefits from gains in inhibition, which enables children to ignore rules that are momentarily irrelevant. Expansion of working memory is also vital: To succeed on tasks with complex rule shifting, children must keep in mind a greater number of relevant rules and update that information after each rule switch.

Biology and EnvironmentChildren with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

While the other fifth graders worked quietly at their desks, Calvin squirmed, dropped his pencil, looked out the window, fiddled with his shoelaces, and talked aloud. “Hey Joey,” he yelled across the room, “wanna play ball after school?” The other children weren’t eager to play with Calvin, who was physically awkward and failed to follow the rules of the game. He had trouble taking turns at bat. In the outfield, he tossed his mitt up in the air and looked elsewhere when the ball came his way. Calvin’s desk was a chaotic mess. He often lost pencils, books, and other school materials, and he had difficulty remembering assignments and due dates.

Symptoms of ADHD

Calvin is one of 5 to 8 percent of North American school-age children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which involves inattention, impulsivity, and excessive motor activity resulting in academic and social problems (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Danielson et al., 2018; Hauck et al., 2017). Boys are diagnosed two to three times as often as girls. However, many girls with ADHD seem to be overlooked, either because their symptoms are less flagrant or because of a gender bias: A difficult, disruptive boy is more likely to be referred for treatment (Owens, Cardoos, & Hinshaw, 2015).

Children with ADHD cannot stay focused on a task that requires mental effort for more than a few minutes. They often act impulsively, ignoring social rules and lashing out with hostility when frustrated. Many, though not all, are hyperactive, exhausting parents and teachers and irritating other children with their excessive motor activity. For a child to be diagnosed with ADHD, these symptoms must have appeared before age 12 as a persistent problem.

Because of their difficulty concentrating, ADHD children score lower in IQ than other children, though the difference is mostly accounted for by a small subgroup with substantially below-average scores (Biederman et al., 2012). Researchers agree that deficient executive function underlies ADHD symptoms. Children with ADHD are impaired in the ability to inhibit distracting behaviors and irrelevant information, and they score low in working-memory capacity (Antshel, Hier, & Barkley, 2015). Consequently, they have difficulty with sustained attention, planning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving in academic and social situations and often fail to manage frustration and intense emotion.

Origins of ADHD

ADHD runs in families and is highly heritable. Identical twins more often share the disorder than fraternal twins do, and full siblings more often share it than half-siblings (Eilertsen et al., 2019; Polderman et al., 2015). Children with ADHD show abnormal brain functioning, including reduced electrical and blood-flow activity and structural abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex and in other areas involved in attention, inhibition of behavior, and other aspects of motor control (Mackie et al., 2007). Also, the brains of children with ADHD grow more slowly and are about 3 percent smaller in overall volume, with a thinner cerebral cortex, than the brains of unaffected agemates (Narr et al., 2009; Shaw et al., 2007). Several genes that disrupt functioning of the neurotransmitters serotonin (involved in inhibition and self-control) and dopamine (required for effective cognitive processing) have been implicated in the disorder (Akutagava-Martins et al., 2013).

At the same time, ADHD is associated with environmental factors. Prenatal teratogens—such as tobacco, alcohol, illegal drugs, and environmental pollutants—are linked to inattention and hyperactivity (see Chapter 3). Furthermore, children with ADHD are more likely to have parents with psychological disorders and to come from homes where family stress is high (Law et al., 2014). These circumstances often intensify the child’s preexisting difficulties.

Treating ADHD

Calvin’s doctor eventually prescribed stimulant medication—the most common treatment for ADHD, taken by nearly two-thirds of U.S. children diagnosed with the disorder. Stimulant medication seems to increase activity in the prefrontal cortex, thereby lessening impulsivity and hyperactivity and improving attention in most children who take it (Connor, 2015; Danielson et al., 2018). However, if stimulant treatment is initiated late, after age 9 or 10, it does not reduce the decline in academic performance associated with ADHD (Zoëga et al., 2012).

By itself, drug treatment is insufficient for helping children compensate for inattention and impulsivity in everyday situations. So far, the most effective treatments combine medication with interventions that provide training in executive function skills and that model and reinforce appropriate academic and social behavior (Smith & Shapiro, 2015; Tamm, Nakonezny, & Hughes, 2014). Some evidence suggests that initiating these cognitive and behavioral interventions prior to medication treatment not only yields more favorable outcomes but also reduces the necessary dose of medication, thereby protecting children from its dose-related side effects (sleep problems, decreased appetite, and temporary slowing of physical growth) (Pelham, 2016). Some children do so well under this treatment protocol that they can stop taking low-dose medication within a year.

Family intervention is also vital. Inattentive, hyperactive children strain the patience of parents, who are likely to react punitively and inconsistently—a child-rearing style that strengthens defiant, aggressive behavior. In fact, in 50 to 75 percent of cases, these two sets of behavior problems occur together (Goldstein, 2011a).

ADHD is usually a lifelong disorder. Affected individuals are at risk for persistent antisocial behavior, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and other problems (Wender & Tomb, 2017). Adults with ADHD continue to need help in structuring their environments, regulating negative emotion, selecting appropriate careers, and understanding their condition as a biological deficit rather than a character flaw.

This child frequently engages in disruptive behavior at school. Children with ADHD have great difficulty staying on task and often act impulsively, ignoring social rules.

© ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

In sum, selectivity and flexibility of attention become better controlled and more efficient over middle childhood (Carlson, Zelazo, & Faja, 2013). Children can adapt their attention more quickly in the face of increasingly complex distractors—skills that contribute to more organized, strategic approaches to challenging tasks.

Working Memory

As Case’s theory emphasizes, working memory profits from increased efficiency of thinking. In diverse cultures, time needed to process information on a wide variety of cognitive tasks declines rapidly between ages 6 and 12, likely due to myelination and connectivity among regions of the cerebral cortex (Kail & Ferrer, 2007; Kail et al., 2013). A faster thinker can hold on to and operate on more information at once. Still, individual differences in working-memory capacity exist, and they are of particular concern because they predict intelligence test scores and academic achievement in many subjects (DeMarie & Lopez, 2014; Nicolaou et al., 2017).

Observations of elementary school children with limited working memories revealed that they often did poorly on school assignments that made heavy memory demands (Alloway et al., 2009). They could not follow complex instructions, lost their place in tasks with multiple steps, and frequently gave up before finishing their work. The children struggled because they could not hold in mind sufficient information to complete assignments.

Children from poverty-stricken families are especially likely to score low on working-memory tasks. In one study, years of childhood spent in poverty predicted reduced working memory in early adulthood (Evans & Schamberg, 2009). Childhood neurobiological measures of stress—elevated blood pressure and levels of stress hormones, including cortisol—largely explained this poverty–working-memory association. Chronic stress, as we saw in Chapter 5, can impair brain structure and function, especially in the prefrontal cortex and its connections with the hippocampus, which govern working-memory capacity.

Two 7-year-olds play Uno, a game requiring executive-function skills that improve over middle childhood—the ability to keep track of changing rules of play, to inhibit irrelevant rules, and to shift attention flexibly among rules to select an appropriate card to play.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

About 15 percent of children have very low working-memory scores (Holmes, Gathercole, & Dunning, 2010). Scaffolding in which parents and teachers modify tasks to reduce memory load is essential for these children to learn. Effective approaches include communicating in short sentences with familiar vocabulary, repeating task instructions, breaking complex tasks into manageable parts, and encouraging children to use external memory aids—for example, lists of useful spellings while writing or number lines while doing math (Gathercole & Alloway, 2008).

Training Executive Function

Children’s executive function skills can be improved through training, yielding both academic and social benefits (Müller & Kerns, 2015). Both direct and indirect training approaches are effective.

To enhance control of attention and working memory, researchers often embed direct training in interactive electronic games. In one study, 10-year-olds with learning difficulties who played a game providing working-memory training four times a week for eight weeks showed substantially greater improvement in working-memory capacity, IQ, and spelling and math achievement than agemates who played less often or did not play at all (Alloway, Bibile, & Lau, 2013). Working memory, IQ, and spelling gains were still evident eight months after the training ended.

Executive function can also be enhanced indirectly, by increasing children’s participation in activities—such as exercise—known to promote it (see page 421 in Chapter 11). Another indirect method is mindfulness training, which—similar to meditation- and yoga-based exercises for adults—encourages children to focus attention on their current thoughts, feelings, and sensations, without judging them. For example, children might be asked to attend to their own breathing or to manipulate an object held behind their backs while noticing how it feels (Zelazo & Lyons, 2012). If their attention wanders, they are told to bring it back to the current moment. Mindfulness training leads to gains in executive function, school grades, prosocial behavior, and positive peer relations (Schonert-Reichl & Lawlor, 2010; Schonert-Reichl et al., 2015). The sustained attention and reflection that mindfulness requires seem to help children avoid snap judgments, distracting thoughts and emotions, and impulsive behavior.

Fourth graders take a break from school work to meditate, a practice that requires focused attention and reflection. Mindfulness training such as meditation leads to gains in executive function, school grades, prosocial behavior, and positive peer relations.

© WAVEBREAK MEDIA LTD/Shutterstock

Planning

Planning on multistep tasks improves over the school years. Older children make decisions about what to do first and what to do next in a more orderly fashion. Effective planning, however, often goes beyond implementing a sequence of moves: In many instances, children must evaluate the entire sequence in advance to see if it will get them to their goal.

To assess both sequential and advance planning, 4- to-10-year-olds were presented with the paddle-box illustrated in Figure 12.2. On each trial, they had to get a small item from the paddle on which an adult placed it to the open goal at the bottom of the box. The paddles could be rotated to three positions: flat, diagonal left, or diagonal right. On sequential trials, children could rotate the start paddle first and still succeed. On advance-planning trials, to prevent the object from being trapped, children needed to preset one or two other paddles before rotating the start paddle (Tecwyn, Thorpe, & Chappell, 2014). Many of the younger children succeeded at sequential planning but had difficulty with advance planning. Not until age 9 to 10 did children consistently perform well on advance-planning trials.

The development of planning illustrates how attention becomes coordinated with other cognitive processes. Children must postpone action in favor of weighing alternatives, organizing an efficient sequence of steps, and remembering the steps so they can attend to each one. Along the way, they must monitor how well the plan works and revise it if necessary.

As Chapter 9 revealed, children learn much about planning by collaborating with more expert planners. With age, they take more responsibility in these joint endeavors, such as suggesting planning strategies and organizing task materials. The demands of school tasks—and teachers’ explanations of how to plan—also contribute to gains in planning. As early as first grade, planning skills predict later reading and math achievement (Friedman et al., 2014).

Figure 12.2 Examples of sequential- and advance-planning solutions using the paddle box. An adult placed a small item on one of the horizontal paddles within the box, visible to the child through its transparent cover. Children had to get the item to the open goal at the bottom of the box. The paddles could be rotated to three positions—flat, diagonal left, or diagonal right—using handles extending out the front of the box. (a) In sequential planning, rotating the start paddle first, without presetting other paddles, leads to success. (b) In advance planning, children must preset at least one other paddle before rotating the start paddle. (From E. C. Tecwyn, S. K. S. Thorpe, & J. Chappell, 2014, “Development of Planning in 4- to 10-Year-Old Children: Reducing Inhibitory Demands Does Not Improve Performance,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 125, p. 92. Copyright © 2014 with permission from Elsevier, Ltd., conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.)

But adult-controlled activities may rob children of opportunities to plan. In one study, researchers videotaped small groups of first and second graders devising plays that they would perform for their class (Baker-Sennett, Matusov, & Rogoff, 2008). Some groups were child-led; others were led by adult volunteers. Child-led groups engaged in extensive planning—brainstorming themes and working out the details of their improvisations. But when adults planned the play in advance, the children spent most of their time in nonplanning pursuits, such as rehearsing lines and making play props. The adults missed a rich opportunity to scaffold learning (see page 320 in Chapter 9) by turning over responsibility for play planning to the children and guiding and supporting, as needed.

12.2.2 Memory Strategies

As attention improves, so do memory strategies, the deliberate mental activities we use to store and retain information. When 6-year-old Lizzie had a list of things to learn, such as the state capitals of the United States or the names of geometric shapes, she immediately used rehearsal—repeating the information to herself. Attention supports rehearsal by enabling children to focus on memory traces of the items they are learning. And language proficiency predicts the emergence of rehearsal in the early school years, perhaps because a certain vocabulary size and the ability to automatically name items is necessary for children to use the strategy (Bebko et al., 2014; Oftinger & Camos, 2018). Around 8 to 9 years, a second strategy typically appears when adults prompt children to use it: organization—grouping related items together (for example, all animals, tools, vehicles), an approach that greatly improves recall (Schleepen & Jonkman, 2014).

Perfecting memory strategies requires time and effort. For example, Lizzie rehearsed in a piecemeal fashion. After being given the word cat in a list of words, she said, “Cat, cat, cat.” But 10-year-old Joey combined previous words with each new item, saying, “Desk, man, yard, cat, cat.” This active, cumulative approach, in which neighboring words create contexts for each other that trigger recall, yields much better memory (Lehman & Hasselhorn, 2012). Furthermore, whereas Lizzy occasionally linked items together by association (carrot–rabbit, hat–head), Joey organized items taxonomically, based on common properties (clothing, food, animals) and, thus, into fewer categories—an efficient procedure yielding dramatic memory gains (Bjorklund et al., 1994).

As children gain in processing speed, working-memory capacity, and familiarity with memory strategies, they use strategies automatically and more effectively. They also combine several strategies—for example, organizing items, stating the category names, and then rehearsing. The more strategies children apply simultaneously, the better they remember (Bjorklund & Sellers, 2014; Schwenck, Bjorklund, & Schneider, 2007). Younger children often try out various memory strategies but use them less systematically and successfully than older children. Still, their tendency to experiment allows them to discover which strategies work best and how to combine them. Recall from overlapping-waves theory, discussed in Chapter 9, that children experiment with strategies when faced with many cognitive challenges—an approach that enables them to gradually “home in” on the most effective techniques.

By the end of middle childhood, children start to use elaboration—creating a relationship, or shared meaning, between two or more pieces of information that are not members of the same category. For example, to learn the words fish and pipe, you might generate the verbal statement or mental image, “The fish is smoking a pipe” (Schneider & Ornstein, 2015; Schneider & Pressley, 1997). This highly effective memory technique, which requires considerable effort and space in working memory, becomes increasingly common in adolescence.

Because organization and elaboration combine items into meaningful chunks, they permit children to hold onto much more information and, as a result, further expand working memory. In addition, when children link a new item to information they already know, they can retrieve it easily by thinking of other items associated with it. As we will see, this also contributes to improved memory during the school years.

12.2.3 Knowledge and Memory

During middle childhood, children’s general knowledge base, or semantic memory, grows larger and becomes organized into increasingly elaborate, hierarchically structured networks. This rapid growth of knowledge helps children use strategies to remember (Schneider, 2002). Knowing more about a topic makes new information more meaningful and familiar, so it is easier to store and retrieve.

To investigate this idea, school-age children who were expert chess players were tested on how well they could remember complex chessboard arrangements. Then their performance was compared with that of adults who knew how to play chess but were not especially knowledgeable. The children’s expert knowledge enabled them to reproduce the chessboard configurations considerably better than the adults could (Bédard & Chi, 1992).

In another study, researchers classified fourth graders as either experts or novices in knowledge of soccer and then gave both groups lists of soccer and nonsoccer items to learn. Experts remembered far more items on the soccer list (but not on the nonsoccer list) than novices. And during recall, the experts’ listing of items was better organized, as indicated by clustering of items into categories (Schneider & Bjorklund, 1992). This superior organization at retrieval suggests that highly knowledgeable children organize information in their area of expertise with little or no effort—by rapidly associating new items with the large number they already know. Consequently, experts can devote more working-memory resources to using recalled information to reason and solve problems.

But knowledge is not the only important factor in children’s strategic memory processing. Children who are expert in an area are usually highly motivated. As a result, they not only acquire knowledge more quickly but also actively use what they know to add more. In contrast, academically unsuccessful children often fail to ask how previously stored information can clarify new material. This, in turn, interferes with the development of a broad knowledge base (Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998). So extensive knowledge and use of memory strategies support each other.

12.2.4 Culture, Schooling, and Memory Strategies

Rehearsal, organization, and elaboration are techniques that children and adults usually use when they need to remember information for its own sake. On many other occasions, memories form as a natural byproduct of participation in daily activities. For example, Joey can spout a wealth of facts about baseball teams and players—information he picked up from watching ball games, discussing the games, and trading baseball cards with his friends. And without prior rehearsal, he can recount the story line of an exciting movie or novel—narrative material that is already meaningfully organized.

A repeated finding is that people in village cultures who have little formal schooling do not use or benefit from instruction in memory strategies because they see no practical reason to use them (Rogoff, 2003). Tasks requiring children to engage in isolated recall, which are common in classrooms, strongly motivate memory strategies. In fact, children in developed nations get so much practice with this type of learning that they do not refine techniques that rely on cues available in everyday life, such as spatial location and arrangement of objects. For example, Guatemalan Mayan 9-year-olds do slightly better than their U.S. agemates when told to remember the placement of 40 familiar objects in a play scene (Rogoff & Waddell, 1982). U.S. children often rehearse object names when it would be more effective to keep track of spatial relations, as Mayan children do.

A teacher in Bafoussam, Cameroon, guides 7- to 10-year-olds in the use of educational software. Societal modernization—access to contemporary resources for communication and literacy—is broadly associated with cognitive skills valued in industrialized nations.

© DAVIDE BONALDO/SHUTTERSTOCK

Societal modernization, as indicated by the presence of communication, literacy, and other economically advantageous resources in homes—such as books, writing tablets, electricity, radio, TV, computers, and car ownership—is broadly associated with performance on cognitive tasks commonly administered to children in industrialized nations. In an investigation in which researchers rated towns in Belize, Kenya, Nepal, and American Samoa for degree of modernization, Belize and American Samoa exceeded Kenya and Nepal (Gauvain & Munroe, 2009). Modernity predicted both extent of schooling and 5- to 9-year-olds’ cognitive scores—on a memory test plus an array of other measures.

In sum, the development of memory strategies and other cognitive skills valued in complex societies is not just a product of a more competent information-processing system. It also depends on task demands, schooling, and cultural circumstances.

12.2.5 The School-Age Child’s Theory of Mind

During middle childhood, children’s theory of mind, or set of beliefs about mental activities, becomes much more elaborate and refined. Recall from Chapter 9 that this awareness of thought is often called metacognition. Children’s improved ability to reflect on their own mental life is another reason that their thinking and problem solving advance.

Knowledge of Cognitive Capacities

Unlike preschoolers, who view the mind as a passive container of information, older children regard it as an active, constructive agent that selects and transforms information (Astington & Hughes, 2013). Consequently, they have a much better understanding of cognitive processes and the impact of psychological factors on performance. For example, with age, elementary school children become increasingly aware of effective memory strategies and why they work (Alexander et al., 2003). And they gradually grasp relationships between mental activities—for example, that remembering is crucial for understanding and that understanding strengthens memory (Schwanenflugel, Henderson, & Fabricius, 1998).

Furthermore, school-age children’s understanding of sources of knowledge expands. They are aware that people can extend their knowledge not only by directly observing events and talking to others but also by making mental inferences (Miller, Hardin, & Montgomery, 2003). This grasp of inference enables knowledge of false belief to expand. In several studies, researchers told children complex stories involving one character’s belief about a second character’s belief. Then the children answered questions about what the first character thought the second character would do (see Figure 12.3). By age 6 to 7, children were aware that people form beliefs about other people’s beliefs and that these second-order beliefs can be wrong!

Figure 12.3 A second-order false belief task. After relating the story in the sequence of pictures, the researcher asks a second-order false-belief question: “Where does Lisa think Jason will look for the letter? Why?” Around age 7, children answer correctly—that Lisa thinks Jason will look under his pillow because Lisa doesn’t know that Jason saw her put the letter in the desk. (Adapted from Astington, Pelletier, & Homer, 2002.)

Appreciation of second-order false belief enables children to pinpoint the reasons that another person arrived at a certain belief (Miller, 2013). Notice how it requires the ability to view a situation from at least two perspectives—that is, to reason simultaneously about what two or more people are thinking, a form of perspective taking called recursive thought. We think recursively when we make such statements as, “Lisa believes that Jason believes the letter is under his pillow, but that’s not what Jason really believes; he knows the letter is in the desk.”

The capacity for recursive thought greatly assists children in appreciating that people can harbor quite different interpretations of the same situation. For example, 6- to 7-year-olds understand that when two people view the same object, their trains of thought will differ because of variations in their knowledge, experiences, or other characteristics (Eisbach, 2004). They realize that the same reality can legitimately be construed in multiple ways. Indeed, children’s newfound awareness of varying viewpoints is so powerful that, at first, they overextend it (Lagattuta, Sayfan, & Blattman, 2010). Six- and 7-year-olds are especially likely to overlook the fact that people with differing past experiences sometimes agree! Not surprisingly, school-age children who score higher on theory-of-mind tasks are rated by their teachers as more socially competent (Devine et al., 2016).

Electrical brain-wave and neuroimaging evidence reveals that from age 6 to 11, children become increasingly selective in the brain regions they recruit when thinking about another’s mental states (Bowman et al., 2012; Gweon et al., 2012). In addition to the prefrontal cortex, they activate an area connecting the right temporal and parietal lobes (known to play a crucial role in theory-of-mind processes), just as adults do.

Schooling contributes to a more reflective, process-oriented view of the mind. In a study of rural children of Cameroon, Africa, those who attended school performed much better on theory-of-mind tasks (Vinden, 2002). In school, teachers often call attention to the workings of the mind when they remind children to pay attention, remember mental steps, share points of view with peers, and evaluate their own and others’ reasoning. As recursive perspective taking becomes more secure, children more often use persuasive strategies to try to change others’ viewpoints (Bartsch, London, & Campbell, 2007). They also grasp complex, recursive verbal expressions, such as irony and sarcasm, as we will see later when we address language development.

Look and Listen

Watch a teacher explain a learning activity to 6- to 8-year-olds. How often did the teacher call attention to the workings of the mind?

Knowledge of Strategies

Consistent with their more active view of the mind, school-age children are far more conscious of mental strategies than preschoolers. When shown video clips depicting two children using different recall strategies and asked which one is likely to produce better memory, kindergarten and young elementary school children knew that rehearsing or organizing is better than looking or naming (Justice, 1986; Schneider, 1986). Older children were aware of more subtle differences—that organizing is better than rehearsing.

Between third and fifth grade, children develop a much better appreciation of how and why strategies work (Alexander et al., 2003). Consequently, fifth graders are considerably better than younger children at discriminating good from bad reasoning. When given examples varying in quality, fifth graders consistently rated “good” reasoning as based on weighing of possibilities (rather than jumping to conclusions) and gathering of evidence (rather than ignoring important facts), even if such reasoning led to an unfavorable result (Amsterlaw, 2006).

12.2.6 Cognitive Self-Regulation

Although metacognition expands, school-age children frequently have difficulty putting what they know about thinking into action. They are not yet good at cognitive self-regulation, the process of continuously monitoring progress toward a goal, checking outcomes, and redirecting unsuccessful efforts. For example, Lizzie is aware that she should attend closely to her teacher’s directions, group items when memorizing, reread a complicated paragraph to make sure she understands it, and relate new information to what she already knows. But she does not always engage in these activities.

To study cognitive self-regulation, researchers sometimes look at the impact of children’s awareness of memory strategies on how well they remember. By second grade, the more children know about memory strategies, the more they recall—a relationship that strengthens over middle childhood (DeMarie et al., 2004; Geurten, Catale, & Meulemans, 2015). And when children apply a strategy consistently, their knowledge of strategies strengthens, resulting in a bidirectional relationship between metacognition and strategic processing that enhances self-regulation (Schlagmüller & Schneider, 2002).

Why does cognitive self-regulation develop gradually? Monitoring learning outcomes is cognitively demanding, requiring constant evaluation of effort and progress. Throughout elementary and secondary school, self-regulation predicts academic success (Zimmerman & Labuhn, 2012). Students who do well in school know when their learning is going well and when it is not. If they encounter obstacles, they take steps to address them—for example, organize the learning environment, review confusing material, or seek support from more-expert adults or peers (Schunk & Zimmerman, 2013). This active, purposeful approach contrasts sharply with the passive orientation of students who achieve poorly.

A second grader helps a classmate complete a project. Providing school-age children with opportunities to teach others promotes deeper learning and increased self-regulation.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Parents and teachers can foster self-regulation. In one study, researchers observed parents instructing their children on a problem-solving task during the summer before third grade. Parents who patiently pointed out important features of the task, suggested strategies, and explained why they were helpful had children who, in the classroom, more often discussed ways to approach problems and monitored their own performance (Stright et al., 2002).

Providing school-age children with opportunities to teach academic content to others is also effective. In another investigation, 11-year-olds were randomly assigned to a preparing-to-teach or a learning-for-learning (control) condition and then given a complex, multistep math problem to solve. Those in the preparing-to-teach group displayed a more organized and detailed understanding of the problem and more effective self-regulation, including monitoring the effectiveness of their strategies and changing direction as needed. As a result, they arrived at higher-quality solutions (Muis et al., 2015). In an effort to ensure they would be able to explain what they knew to others, the children preparing to teach engaged in deeper learning.

Children who acquire effective self-regulatory skills develop a sense of academic self-efficacy—confidence in their own ability, which supports future self-regulation (Fernandez-Rio et al., 2017). Unfortunately, some children receive messages from parents and teachers that seriously undermine their academic self-esteem and self-regulatory skills. We will consider these learned-helpless students, along with ways to help them, in Chapter 13.

12.2.7 Applications of Information Processing to Academic Learning

When Joey completed kindergarten, he recognized some familiar written words, used what he knew about letter–sound relations to decode simple words, predicted what might happen next in a beginning-reader story, and could retell its main events in sequence. In second grade, he read grade-level books independently, used story context to help identify unfamiliar words, and read aloud with expression. By fourth grade, he was a proficient reader who understood different types of texts, including biographies, fiction, and poetry.

In math, as a new first grader Joey counted to 100 by ones and tens, performed one-digit addition and subtraction with ease, and could decompose the numbers from 11 to 19 to determine, “How many more than 10” as the foundation for understanding place value. In third grade, he used his grasp of place value to perform two-digit arithmetic, multiplied and divided within 100, and had begun to master fractions and percentages.

Fundamental discoveries about the development of information processing have been applied to children’s learning of reading and mathematics. Researchers are identifying the cognitive ingredients of skilled performance, tracing their development, and distinguishing good from poor learners by pinpointing differences in cognitive skills. They hope, as a result, to design teaching methods that will improve children’s learning.

Reading

Reading makes use of many skills at once, taxing all aspects of our information-processing systems. We must perceive single letters and letter combinations, translate them into speech sounds, recognize the visual appearance of many common words, hold chunks of text in working memory while interpreting their meaning, and combine the meanings of various parts of a text passage into an understandable whole. Because reading is so demanding, most or all of these skills must be done automatically. If one or more are poorly developed, they will compete for resources in our limited working memories, and reading performance will decline.

As children make the transition from emergent literacy to conventional reading, phonological awareness, vocabulary growth, and narrative competence (see page 333 in Chapter 9) continue to facilitate their progress. Other information-processing skills also contribute. Gains in processing speed foster children’s rapid conversion of visual symbols into sounds (Moll et al., 2014). Visual scanning and discrimination play important roles and improve with reading experience (Rayner, Pollatsek, & Starr, 2003). Performing these skills efficiently releases working memory for higher-level activities involved in comprehending the text’s meaning.

Until recently, researchers were involved in an intense debate over how to teach beginning reading. The whole-language approach exposes children to text in its complete form—stories, poems, letters, posters, and lists. It assumes that by keeping reading whole and meaningful, children will be motivated to discover the specific skills they need. The phonics approach, in contrast, is grounded in the view that word reading skills must be explicitly taught to beginning readers. It coaches children on the basic rules for translating written symbols into sounds before giving them complex reading material.

Many studies show that children learn best with a mixture of both approaches. In kindergarten, first, and second grades, teaching that includes phonics boosts reading scores, especially for children who lag behind in reading progress (Brady, 2011; Henbest & Apel, 2017). Coaching in letter–sound relationships enables children to decode, or decipher, words they have never seen before. Children who enter school low in phonological awareness make far better reading progress when given training in phonics (Casalis & Cole, 2009). Soon they detect new letter–sound relations while reading on their own, and as their fluency in decoding words increases, they are freer to attend to text meaning. Without early phonics training, such children (many of whom come from low-SES families) are substantially behind their agemates in text comprehension skills by third grade (Foster & Miller, 2007).

In this second-grade classroom, teaching of phonics is embedded in captivating stories. In the early school grades, coaching in letter–sound relationships enhances children’s fluency in decoding words, so they are freer to attend to text meaning.

© ELLEN B. SENISI

Yet too much emphasis on basic skills may cause children to lose sight of the goal of reading: understanding. Children who read aloud fluently without registering meaning know little about effective reading strategies—for example, that they must read more carefully if they will be tested than if they are reading for pleasure, that relating ideas in the text to personal experiences and general knowledge will deepen understanding, and that explaining a passage in one’s own words is a good way to assess comprehension. Teaching aimed at increasing awareness and use of reading strategies enhances reading performance from third grade on (Lonigan, 2015; McKeown & Beck, 2009).

Furthermore, acquiring the English spelling system strengthens reading comprehension. It helps children distinguish the many words with different meanings that sound the same (such as here and hear) (Bowers & Bowers, 2017). Likewise, spelling similarities help children identify word meanings (for example, the similar spellings of here, there, and where specify location, whereas the spelling of hear links it to the word ear). Lessons in such spelling regularities are especially effective in enhancing the reading progress of children struggling with reading and those learning English as a second language (Goodwin & Ahn, 2010, 2013).

Table 12.1 Sequence of Reading Development

Grade/Age

Development

Preschool 2–5 years

“Pretends” to read; recognizes some familiar signs (“ON,” “OFF,” “PIZZA”); “pretends” to write; prints own name and other words

Kindergarten 5–6 years

Knows the most frequent letter–sound correspondences; recognizes some familiar written words; decodes simple, one-syllable words; retells story main events in sequence

Grades 1 and 2 6–7 years

Knows letter–sound correspondences for common double consonants; decodes regularly spelled one-syllable words; recognizes some irregularly spelled words; reads grade-level texts with increasing accuracy on repeated readings

Grades 2 and 3 7–8 years

Reads grade-level stories more fluently; knows letter–sound correspondences for common vowel combinations; decodes multisyllable words and an increasing number of irregularly spelled words; reads grade-level stories more fluently and expressively, while also comprehending

Grades 4 to 9 9–15 years

Reads to acquire new knowledge, usually without questioning the reading material; understands different types of texts, including biographies, fiction, and poetry

Grades 10 to 12 15–18 years

Reads more widely, tapping materials with diverse viewpoints

Source: Chall, 1983; Common Core, 2019.

Table 12.1 charts the general sequence of reading development. Notice the major shift, around age 7 to 8, from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” (Melzi & Schick, 2013). As decoding and comprehension skills reach a high level of efficiency, older readers become actively engaged with the text. They adjust the way they read to fit their current purpose—sometimes seeking new facts and ideas, sometimes questioning, agreeing with, or disagreeing with the writer’s viewpoint.

Mathematics

Mathematics teaching in elementary school builds on and greatly enriches children’s informal knowledge of number concepts and counting. Written notation systems and formal computational techniques enhance children’s ability to represent numbers and compute. Over the early elementary school years, children acquire basic math facts through a combination of frequent practice, experimentation with diverse computational procedures (through which they discover faster, more accurate techniques), reasoning about number concepts, and teaching that conveys effective strategies. (Return to pages 334–336 in Chapter 9 for research supporting the importance of both extended practice and a grasp of concepts.)

Eventually children apply their basic knowledge to more complex problems. A vital foundation of their mathematical development is the gradual expansion of a mental number line, which they first extend to the right with larger whole numbers, next start to fill in with fractions, and then extend to the left with negative numbers (see Figure 12.4). As children gain counting and computation experience with ranges of numbers—typically, 0–10 in early childhood, 0–100 between ages 5 and 7, and 0–1,000 between ages 7 and 12—this spatial representation of numerical magnitudes enlarges and becomes more accurate (Siegler, 2016). Studies carried out in North America, Europe, and East Asia reveal that the quality of children’s mental number lines predicts current and later math achievement, even after other relevant factors such as IQ, executive function, and SES are controlled (Bailey et al., 2015; Resnick et al., 2016; Siegler et al., 2012).

Arguments about how to teach mathematics resemble those about reading, pitting drill in computing against conceptual understanding. As with reading, a blend of both approaches is most beneficial (Rittle-Johnson, Schneider, & Star, 2015). In learning basic math, poorly performing students use cumbersome, error-prone techniques or try to retrieve answers from memory too soon. They have not sufficiently experimented with strategies to see which are most effective or to reorganize their observations in logical, efficient ways—for example, noticing that multiplication problems involving 2 (2 × 8) are equivalent to addition doubles (8 + 8). On tasks assessing their grasp of math concepts, their performance is weak (Clements & Sarama, 2012). This suggests that teaching math concepts, including the reasons certain computation strategies work well, is essential for solid mastery of basic math.

Figure 12.4 Typical mental number lines of school-age children. During the elementary school years, children’s mental number lines expand to the right to include larger whole numbers, in between to include fractions, and to the left to include negative numbers. (From R. S. Siegler, 2016, “Magnitude Knowledge: The Common Core of Numerical Development,” Developmental Science, 19, p. 353. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Adapted by permission.)

A similar picture emerges for more complex skills, such as carrying in addition, borrowing in subtraction, and operating with decimals and fractions. Children taught by rote cannot apply the procedure to new problems. Instead, they persistently make mistakes, often following a “math rule” that they recall incorrectly because they do not understand it (Carpenter et al., 1999). Look at the following subtraction errors:

In the first problem, the child consistently subtracts a smaller from a larger digit, regardless of which is on top. In the second, the child skips columns with zeros in a borrowing operation and, whenever there is a zero on top, writes the bottom digit as the answer.

Children who are given rich opportunities to build an understanding of numerical magnitudes, experiment with problem solving, appreciate the reasons behind strategies, and evaluate solution techniques by explaining them to others seldom make such errors (Fuchs et al., 2016). In one study, second graders taught in these ways not only mastered correct procedures but even invented their own successful strategies, some of which were superior to standard, school-taught methods (Fuson & Burghard, 2003). Consider this solution:

In subtracting, the child performed all trades first, flexibly moving either from right to left or from left to right, and then subtracted all four columns—a highly efficient, accurate approach.

Children with a solid grasp of math concepts draw on their knowledge of relationships between operations (for example, that the inverse of division is multiplication) to generate efficient, flexible procedures: To solve the division problem 360/9, they might multiply 9 × 40 = 360. And because such children have been encouraged to estimate answers, if they go down the wrong track in computation, they are usually self-correcting. Furthermore, they appreciate connections between math operations and problem contexts (De Corte & Verschaffel, 2006). They can solve a word problem (“Jesse spent $3.45 for bananas, $2.62 for bread, and $3.55 for peanut butter. Can he pay for it all with a $10 bill?”) quickly through estimation instead of exact calculation.

In East Asian countries, students receive a variety of supports for acquiring mathematical knowledge and often excel at math computation and reasoning. Use of the metric system helps Asian children grasp place value. The consistent structure of number words in Asian languages (ten-two for 12, ten-three for 13) also makes this idea clear (Okamoto, 2015). And because Asian number words are shorter and more quickly pronounced than those in many other languages, they permit more digits to be held in working memory at once, increasing speed of thinking. Furthermore, Chinese parents provide their children with extensive everyday practice in counting and computation—experiences that contribute to the superiority of Chinese over U.S. children’s math knowledge, even before they start school (Siegler & Mu, 2008; Zhou et al., 2006). Finally, as we will see later in this chapter, East Asian classrooms devote more time to exploring math concepts and less to drill and repetition than U.S. classrooms do.

Japanese first graders respond to a math problem presented by their teacher. In East Asian countries, classrooms devote more time to exploring math concepts and less to drill and repetition than U.S. classrooms do.

© YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images

Ask Yourself

Connect ■ Explain why gains in executive function are vital for mastery of reading and math in middle childhood.

Apply ■ Lizzie knows that if you have difficulty learning part of a task, you should devote extra attention to that part. But she plays each of her piano pieces from beginning to end instead of practicing the hard parts. Explain why Lizzie does not engage in cognitive self-regulation.

Reflect ■ In your elementary school math education, how much emphasis was placed on computational drill and how much on understanding concepts? How do you think that balance affected your interest and performance in math?

12.3 INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN MENTAL DEVELOPMENT

12.3a Describe major approaches to defining and measuring intelligence.

12.3b Describe evidence indicating that both heredity and environment contribute to intelligence.

Around age 6, IQ becomes more stable than it was at earlier ages, and it correlates moderately well with academic achievement, typically around.50 to.60. Children with higher IQs are also more likely to attain higher levels of education and enter more cognitively complex, higher paid occupations in adulthood (Deary et al., 2007). Because IQ predicts school performance and educational attainment, it often enters into important educational decisions. Do intelligence tests accurately assess school-age children’s ability to profit from academic instruction? Let’s look closely at this controversial issue.

12.3.1 Defining and Measuring Intelligence

Virtually all intelligence tests provide an overall score (the IQ), which represents general intelligence, or reasoning ability, along with an array of separate scores measuring specific mental abilities. But intelligence is a collection of many capacities, not all of which are included on currently available intelligence tests (Sternberg, 2018b). Test designers use a complicated statistical technique called factor analysis to identify the various abilities that intelligence tests measure. It identifies which sets of test items cluster together, meaning that test-takers who do well on one item in the cluster tend to do well on the others. Distinct clusters are called factors, each of which represents an ability. Figure 12.5 illustrates typical items included in intelligence tests for children.

Although group-administered tests are available that permit large numbers of students to be tested at once, intelligence is most often assessed with individually administered tests, which are best suited to identifying highly intelligent children and diagnosing children with learning problems. During an individually administered test, a well-trained examiner not only considers the child’s answers but also observes the child’s behavior, noting such reactions as attention to and interest in the tasks and wariness of the adult. These observations provide insight into whether the test results accurately reflect the child’s abilities. Two individual tests—the Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler—are used especially often.

The contemporary descendent of Alfred Binet’s first successful intelligence test is the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition, for individuals from age 2 to adulthood. In addition to general intelligence, it assesses five intellectual factors: general knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual–spatial processing, working memory, and basic information processing (such as speed of analyzing information). Each factor includes a verbal mode and a nonverbal mode of testing (Roid, 2003; Roid & Pomplun, 2012). The nonverbal mode is useful when assessing individuals with limited English, hearing impairments, or communication disorders. The knowledge and quantitative reasoning factors emphasize culturally loaded, fact-oriented information, such as vocabulary and arithmetic problems. In contrast, the visual–spatial processing, working-memory, and basic information-processing factors are assumed to be less culturally biased because they require little specific information (see the spatial visualization item in Figure 12.5).

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-V) is the fifth edition of a widely used test for 6- through 16-year-olds. A downward extension of it, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence–Revised (WPPSI–III), is appropriate for children 2 years 6 months through 7 years 3 months. The WISC-V measures general intelligence and an array of intellectual factors, five of which are recommended for a comprehensive evaluation of a child’s intellectual ability: verbal comprehension, visual–spatial reasoning, fluid reasoning (assessing ability to apply rules in reasoning and to detect conceptual relationships among objects), working memory, and processing speed (Weiss et al., 2015). The WISC-V was designed to downplay culture-dependent information, which is emphasized on only one factor (verbal comprehension). The goal is to provide a test that is as “culture-fair” as possible.

Figure 12.5 Test items like those on commonly used intelligence tests for children. The verbal items emphasize culturally loaded, fact-oriented information. The perceptual- and spatial-reasoning, working-memory, and processing-speed items emphasize aspects of information processing and are assumed to assess more biologically based skills.

12.3.2 Other Efforts to Define Intelligence

As we have seen, intelligence tests now tap important aspects of information processing. In line with this trend, some researchers have combined the mental-testing approach to defining intelligence with the information-processing approach. These investigators look for relationships between aspects of information processing and children’s intelligence test scores. They believe that once we identify the processing skills that separate individuals who test well from those who test poorly, we will know more about how to intervene to improve performance.

Processing speed, assessed in terms of reaction time on diverse cognitive tasks, is moderately related to IQ (Coyle, 2013; Schubert, Hagemann, & Frischkorn, 2017). Individuals whose nervous systems function more efficiently, permitting them to take in more information and manipulate it quickly, appear to have an edge in intellectual skills. And not surprisingly, executive function strongly predicts general intelligence (Brydges et al., 2012; Schweizer, Moosebrugger, & Goldhammer, 2006). We have seen that the components of executive function are vital for success on a great many cognitive tasks.

Individual differences in intelligence, however, are not entirely due to causes within the child. Throughout this book, we have seen how cultural and situational factors also affect children’s thinking. Robert Sternberg has devised a comprehensive theory that regards intelligence as a product of both inner and outer forces.

Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory

As Figure 12.6 shows, Sternberg’s (2008, 2013, 2018) triarchic theory of successful intelligence is made up of three broad, interacting intelligences: (1) analytical intelligence, or information-processing skills; (2) creative intelligence, the capacity to solve novel problems; and (3) practical intelligence, application of intellectual skills in everyday situations. Intelligent behavior involves balancing all three intelligences to achieve success in life according to one’s personal goals and the requirements of one’s cultural community.

Figure 12.6 Sternberg’s triarchic theory of successful intelligence. People who behave intelligently balance three interrelated intelligences—analytical, creative, and practical—to achieve success in life, defined by their personal goals and the requirements of their cultural communities.

Analytical Intelligence

Analytical intelligence consists of the information-processing components that underlie all intelligent acts: executive function, strategic thinking, knowledge acquisition, and cognitive self-regulation. But on intelligence tests, processing skills are used in only a few of their potential ways, resulting in far too narrow a view of intelligent behavior. As we have seen, children in village societies do not necessarily perform well on measures of “school” knowledge but thrive when processing information in out-of-school situations.

Creative Intelligence

In any context, success depends not only on processing familiar information but also on generating useful solutions to new problems. People who are creative think more skillfully than others when faced with novelty. Given a new task, they apply their information-processing skills in exceptionally effective ways, rapidly making these skills automatic so that working memory is freed for more complex aspects of the situation. Consequently, they quickly move to high-level performance. Although all of us are capable of some creativity, only a few individuals excel at generating novel solutions.

Practical Intelligence

Finally, the application of intelligence is a practical, goal-oriented activity aimed at adapting to, shaping, or selecting environments. Intelligent people skillfully adapt their thinking to fit with both their desires and the demands of their everyday worlds. When they cannot adapt to a situation, they try to shape, or change, it to meet their needs. If they cannot shape it, they select new contexts that better match their skills, values, or goals. Practical intelligence reminds us that intelligent behavior is never culture-free. Children with certain life histories do well at the behaviors required for success on intelligence tests and adapt easily to the testing conditions and tasks. Others, with different backgrounds, may misinterpret or reject the testing context. Yet these children often display sophisticated abilities in daily life—for example, telling stories, engaging in complex artistic activities, or interacting skillfully with other people.

The triarchic theory emphasizes the complexity of intelligent behavior and the limitations of current intelligence tests in assessing that complexity. For example, out-of-school, practical forms of intelligence are vital for life success and help explain why cultures vary widely in the behaviors they regard as intelligent (Sternberg, 2011). In villages in Kenya, children regarded as intelligent are highly knowledgeable about how to use herbal medicines to treat disease. Among the Yup’ik Eskimo people of central Alaska, intelligent youths are those with expert hunting, gathering, navigating, and fishing skills (Hein, Reich, & Grigorenko, 2015). And U.S. Cambodian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Mexican immigrant parents, when asked to describe an intelligent first grader, emphasized noncognitive capacities—motivation, self-management, and social skills (Okagaki & Sternberg, 1993).

According to Sternberg, intelligence tests, devised to predict achievement in school, do not capture the intellectual strengths that many children acquire through informal learning experiences in their cultural communities. But systematically measuring those strengths remains challenging. Tests devised to reflect the triarchic theory have not consistently yielded distinct analytical, creative, and practical ability factors (Aljughaiman & Ayoub, 2012; Gubbels et al., 2016). Researchers are not sure whether these findings signify deficiencies in the triarchic theory or in available assessments.

Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences

In yet another view of how information-processing skills underlie intelligent behavior, Howard Gardner’s (1983, 1993, 2011) theory of multiple intelligences defines intelligence in terms of distinct sets of processing operations that permit individuals to engage in a wide range of culturally valued activities. Dismissing the idea of general intelligence, Gardner proposes at least eight independent intelligences (see Table 12.2).

Gardner believes that each intelligence has a unique neurological basis, a distinct course of development, and different expert, or “end-state,” performances. At the same time, he emphasizes that a lengthy process of education is required to transform any raw potential into a mature social role (Gardner, 2011). Cultural values and learning opportunities affect the extent to which a child’s intellectual strengths are realized and the way they are expressed.

Gardner’s list of abilities has yet to be firmly grounded in research. Neurological evidence for the independence of his abilities is weak. Some exceptionally gifted individuals have abilities that are broad rather than limited to a particular domain (Piirto, 2007). And research with mental tests suggests that several of Gardner’s intelligences (linguistic, logico-mathematical, and spatial) have at least some features in common. Nevertheless, Gardner’s theory calls attention to several intelligences not tapped by IQ scores and to the importance of assessing children’s performance in domains generally regarded as nonacademic, such as music, movement, and understanding of self and others (Chen & Gardner, 2018).

Table 12.2 Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

Intelligence

Processing Operations

End-State Performance Possibilities

Linguistic

Sensitivity to the sounds, rhythms, and meaning of words and the functions of language

Poet, journalist

Logico-mathematical

Sensitivity to, and capacity to detect, logical or numerical patterns; ability to handle long chains of logical reasoning

Mathematician

Musical

Ability to produce and appreciate pitch, rhythm (or melody), and aesthetic quality of the forms of musical expressiveness

Instrumentalist, composer

Spatial

Ability to perceive the visual–spatial world accurately, to perform transformations on those perceptions, and to re-create aspects of visual experience in the absence of relevant stimuli

Sculptor, navigator

Bodily-kinesthetic

Ability to use the body skillfully for expressive as well as goal-directed purposes; ability to handle objects skillfully

Dancer, athlete

Naturalist

Ability to recognize and classify all varieties of animals, minerals, and plants

Biologist

Interpersonal

Ability to detect and respond appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations, and intentions of others

Therapist, salesperson

Intrapersonal

Ability to discriminate complex inner feelings and to use them to guide one’s own behavior; knowledge of one’s own strengths, weaknesses, desires, and intelligences

Person with detailed, accurate self-knowledge

Sources: Gardner, 1983, 1993, 2011.

For example, Gardner’s interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences include a set of skills for accurately perceiving, reasoning about, and regulating emotion that has become known as emotional intelligence. Among school-age children and adolescents, measures of emotional intelligence are positively associated with self-esteem, empathy, prosocial behavior, cooperation, leadership skills, and academic performance and negatively associated with internalizing (fear and anxiety) and externalizing (anger and aggression) problems (Brackett, Rivers, & Salovey, 2011; Ferrando et al., 2011). These findings have increased teachers’ awareness that providing classroom lessons that coach students in emotional abilities can improve their adjustment.

Review the core knowledge perspective, discussed on pages 207–208 in Chapter 6, and compare it with Gardner’s view. Gardner also accepts the existence of innately specified, core domains of thought, present at birth or emerging early in life. Then, as children respond to the demands of their culture, they transform those intelligences to fit the activities they are called on to perform. Gardner’s multiple intelligences have been helpful in efforts to understand and nurture children’s special talents, a topic we will take up at the end of this chapter.

According to Gardner, people are capable of at least eight distinct intelligences. The dance program at their school gives these fourth and fifth graders the opportunity to expand their bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

12.3.3 Explaining Individual and Group Differences in IQ

When we compare individuals in terms of academic achievement, years of education, and occupational status, it is clear that certain sectors of the population are advantaged over others. As part of an effort to explain these differences, researchers have compared the IQ scores of ethnic and SES groups. African-American children and adolescents score, on average, 10 to 12 IQ points below European-American children, although the difference has been shrinking over the past several decades (Nisbett, 2009; Nisbett et al., 2012). Hispanic children fall midway between African-American and European-American children, and Asian Americans score slightly higher than their European-American counterparts—by about 3 points (Ceci, Rosenblum, & Kumpf, 1998).

The IQ gap between middle- and low-SES children—about 9 points—accounts for some of the ethnic differences in IQ, but not all (Brooks-Gunn et al., 2003). Of course, IQ varies greatly within each ethnic and SES group, and minority top performers are typically indistinguishable from top performers in the European-American majority. Still, these group differences are large enough and of serious enough consequence that they cannot be ignored.

Beginning in the 1970s, the IQ nature–nurture controversy escalated after psychologist Arthur Jensen (1969) claimed that heredity is largely responsible for individual, ethnic, and SES variations in intelligence—a position others asserted as well (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Rushton & Jensen, 2006, 2010). These contentions prompted an outpouring of research studies and responses, including ethical challenges reflecting deep concern that the conclusions would fuel social prejudices (Colman, 2016). Let’s look closely at some of the important evidence that resulted.

Nature and Nurture

In Chapter 2 we introduced the heritability estimate. Recall that heritabilities are obtained from kinship studies, which compare family members. The most powerful evidence on the heritability of IQ involves twin comparisons. The IQ scores of identical twins (who share all their genes) are more similar than those of fraternal twins (who are genetically no more alike than ordinary siblings). On the basis of this and other kinship evidence, researchers estimate that about half the differences in IQ among children can be traced to their genetic makeup.

Recall, however, that heritabilities risk overestimating genetic influences and underestimating environmental influences. Although these measures offer convincing evidence that genes contribute to IQ, disagreement persists over how large that contribution is. As we saw in Chapter 2, the heritability of intelligence is lower in infancy and childhood than at older ages, and it rises with parental education and income—conditions that enable children to realize their genetic potential. Furthermore, heritability estimates do not reveal the complex processes through which genes and experiences influence intelligence as children develop.

As we also noted in Chapter 2, using heritability estimates computed mostly on White twin samples to draw conclusions about the genetic basis of differences between ethnic groups is invalid. Indeed, research using contemporary methods of molecular genetic testing and brain imaging has failed to uncover any relationships among genetic markers, brain anatomy (such as volumes of the frontal and parietal regions of the cerebral cortex), and ethnicity (Butcher et al., 2008; Nisbett et al., 2012; Richardson, 2011).

In this fifth-grade class at an urban elementary school, IQ scores may vary with ethnicity and SES. Research aimed at explaining these differences has generated heated controversy.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Adoption studies shed further light on the origins of the Black–White disparity in IQ. In two investigations, African-American children adopted into economically well-off European-American homes during the first year of life scored high on intelligence tests, attaining mean IQs of 110 and 117 by middle childhood—20 to 30 points higher than the typical scores of children growing up in low-income African-American communities and as high as or higher than the scores of adopted European-American children (Moore, 1986; Scarr & Weinberg, 1983).

These findings are consistent with a wealth of evidence that poverty severely depresses the intelligence of ethnic minority children (Nisbett et al., 2012). Providing additional support for this conclusion, a longitudinal study of a randomly selected sample of nearly 1,000 families from 10 cities across the United States whose children were tested periodically from ages 4 through 15 found that a substantial Black–White gap in IQ appeared in early childhood and persisted into adolescence. A three-step sequence of family conditions accounted for 80 percent of the group difference: (1) greater disadvantage in income, maternal education, and maternal verbal ability and knowledge in Black families, which led to (2) lower birth weight and less effective parenting, reflected in reduced maternal sensitivity and provision of learning materials and more cluttered and crowded home environments, which yielded (3) lower mental-test scores (Cottrell, Newman, & Roisman, 2015). Greater family adversity among the African-American children was already apparent in early childhood.

Dramatic gains in IQ from one generation to the next offer additional evidence that, given stimulating experiences and learning opportunities, members of oppressed groups can move far beyond their current test performance. See the Cultural Influences box on page 454 to learn about the Flynn effect.

Cultural Influences

A controversial question raised about ethnic differences in IQ has to do with whether test bias contributes to them. If a test samples knowledge and skills that not all groups of children have had an equal chance to learn, or if the testing situation impairs the performance of some groups but not others, the resulting scores will be a biased, or unfair, measure of intelligence.

Some experts reject the idea that intelligence tests are biased, claiming that they are intended to represent success in the common culture. According to this view, because IQ predicts academic achievement equally well for majority and minority children, IQ tests are fair to both groups (Edwards & Oakland, 2006). Others believe that lack of exposure to certain communication styles and knowledge, along with negative stereotypes about the test-taker’s ethnic group, can undermine children’s performance (McKown, 2013; Sternberg, 2018a). Let’s look at the evidence.

Cultural InfluencesThe Flynn Effect: Massive Generational Gains in IQ

After gathering IQ scores from diverse nations that had either military mental testing or frequent testing of other large, representative samples, James Flynn (1999, 2007) reported a finding so consistent and intriguing that it became known as the Flynn effect: IQs have increased steadily from one generation to the next. Evidence for the Flynn effect now exists for more than 30 nations. This dramatic secular trend in intelligence test performance holds for industrialized and developing nations, both males and females, and individuals varying in ethnicity and SES (Nisbett et al., 2012; Pietschnig & Voracek, 2015). Gains are greatest on tests of spatial reasoning—tasks often assumed to be “culture-fair” and, therefore, mostly genetically based.

The amount of increase depends on extent of societal modernization (see page 441 in this chapter, to review). Among European and North American countries that modernized by the early twentieth century, IQ gains have been about 3 points per decade. With the attainment of highly favorable economic and social conditions, gains have slowed in most of these countries (Weber, Dekhtyar, & Herlitz, 2017).

Among nations that modernized later, around the mid-twentieth century (such as Argentina), IQ gains tend to be larger, as much as 5 to 6 points per decade (Flynn & Rossi-Casé, 2011). And nations that began to modernize in the late twentieth century (Caribbean countries, Kenya, Sudan) show even greater increments, especially in spatial reasoning (Khaleefa, Sulman, & Lynn, 2009; Sauce & Matzel, 2018). The degree of societal modernity possible today is far greater than it was a century ago.

Diverse aspects of modernization probably underlie the better reasoning ability of each successive generation. These include improved education, health, and technology (TV, computers, the Internet); more cognitively demanding jobs and leisure activities (reading, chess, video games); a generally more stimulating world; and greater test-taking motivation.

As developing nations continue to advance in IQ, they are projected to catch up with the industrialized world by the end of the twenty-first century (Nisbett et al., 2012). Large, environmentally induced gains in IQ over time present a major challenge to the assumption that ethnic variations in IQ are genetic.

Dramatic generational gains in IQ are related to diverse aspects of societal modernization, such as greater participation by each successive generation in cognitively stimulating leisure activities.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Language and Communication Styles

Ethnic minority families often foster unique language skills that do not match the expectations of most classrooms and testing situations. African-American English is a complex, rule-governed dialect used by most African Americans in the United States (Craig & Washington, 2006). Nevertheless, it is often inaccurately viewed as a deficient form of mainstream American English rather than as different from it, and as a low-status dialect associated with poverty.

The majority of African-American children entering school speak African-American English, though they vary greatly in the extent to which they use it. Greater users, who tend to come from low-SES families, quickly learn that the language they bring from home is devalued in school, whereas mainstream American English is respected. Teachers frequently try to “correct” or eliminate their use of African-American English forms, replacing them with mainstream English (Washington & Thomas-Tate, 2009). Because the conventions of their home discourse are distinctly different from those of the language used for learning to read, children who speak mostly African-American English in school generally progress slowly in reading and achieve poorly (Brown et al., 2015).

Many African-American children learn to flexibly shift between African-American English and mainstream English by third grade. But those who continue to speak mostly their African-American dialect through the later grades—the majority of whom live in poverty and therefore have few opportunities outside of school for exposure to mainstream English—fall further behind in reading and in overall achievement (Craig, 2015; Craig, Kolenic, & Hensel, 2014). These children have a special need for school programs that facilitate mastery of mainstream English while respecting and accommodating their home language in the classroom.

Many African-American children enter school speaking African-American English. Their home discourse differs from mainstream American English, on which their school learning is based.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Research also reveals that ethnic minority parents without extensive education often prefer a collaborative style of communication when completing tasks with children. They work together in a coordinated, fluid way, each focused on the same aspect of the problem. This pattern of adult–child engagement has been observed in Native-American, Canadian Inuit, Mexican, and Guatemalan Mayan cultures (López et al., 2012; Rogoff, 2014). With increasing education, parents establish a hierarchical style of communication, like that of classrooms and tests. The parent directs each child to carry out an aspect of the task, and children work independently. The sharp discontinuity between home and school communication practices likely contributes to low-SES minority children’s lower IQ scores and school performance.

Knowledge

Many researchers argue that IQ scores are affected by specific information acquired as part of majority-culture upbringing. In one study, researchers assessed African-American and European-American community college students’ familiarity with vocabulary taken from items on an intelligence test. When verbal comprehension, similarities, and analogies test items depended on words and concepts that the European-American students knew better, they scored higher than the African Americans. When the same types of items involved words and concepts that the two groups knew equally well, the two groups did not differ (Fagan & Holland, 2007). Prior knowledge, not reasoning ability, fully explained ethnic differences in performance.

Performance even on nonverbal test items, such as those tapping spatial reasoning, depends on learning opportunities. For example, among children, adolescents, and adults alike, playing video games that require fast responding and mental rotation of visual images increases success on spatial test items (Uttal et al., 2013). Low-income minority children, however, may have less access to games and objects that promote these skills.

Furthermore, the sheer amount of time a child spends in school predicts IQ. In research on large samples of children and adolescents that takes into account both variations in age and completed years of schooling, quantity of schooling exerted a considerably stronger impact on mental-test performance than did advancing age (Cliffordson & Gustafson, 2008; Wang et al., 2016; Winship & Korenman, 1997). In line with these findings, the earlier young people leave school, the greater their loss of IQ points (Ceci, 1999).

At the same time, poverty, oppression, and diminished quality of education can undermine the effects of schooling on intellectual development. For example, in segregated, economically disadvantaged Palestinian towns in Israel and in overcrowded Palestinian refugee camps with entrenched poverty on the West Bank, the impact of schooling on children’s mental-test scores is greatly reduced (Jabr & Cahan, 2014a, 2014b). Taken together, these findings indicate that supportive home and community contexts for learning along with opportunities to acquire the knowledge and ways of thinking valued in classrooms have a substantial impact on intelligence test performance.

School-age children become increasingly conscious of ethnic stereotypes, and those from stigmatized groups are especially mindful of them. Fear of being judged on the basis of a negative stereotype may undermine this Hispanic student’s performance on a math test.

© HILL STREET STUDIOS/GETTY IMAGES

Stereotypes

Imagine trying to succeed at an activity when the prevailing attitude is that members of your group are incompetent. Stereotype threat—the fear of being judged on the basis of a negative stereotype—can trigger anxiety that interferes with performance. Mounting evidence confirms that stereotype threat undermines test taking in children and adults (Nadler & Clark, 2011). For example, researchers gave African-American, Hispanic, and European-American 6- to 10-year-olds verbal tasks. Some children were told that the tasks were “not a test.” Others were told that they were “a test of how good children are at school problems”—a statement designed to induce stereotype threat in the ethnic minority children. Among children who were aware of ethnic stereotypes (such as “Black people aren’t smart”), African Americans and Hispanics performed far worse in the “test” condition than in the “not a test” condition (McKown & Weinstein, 2003). European-American children, in contrast, performed similarly in both conditions.

From third grade on, children become increasingly conscious of ethnic stereotypes, and those from stigmatized groups are especially mindful of them. When confronted with stereotype threat, they well up with anxiety, which reduces mental resources available for doing well on challenging tasks. By early adolescence, many low-SES minority students start to devalue doing well in school, saying it is not important to them (Killen, Rutland, & Ruck, 2011). Self-protective disengagement, sparked by stereotype threat, may be responsible. This weakening of motivation can have serious long-term consequences. Research shows that self-discipline—effort and delay of gratification—predicts changes in school performance, as measured by report card grades, better than IQ does (Duckworth, Quinn, & Tsukayama, 2012).

12.3.4 Reducing Cultural Bias in Testing

Although not all experts agree, many acknowledge that IQ scores can underestimate the intelligence of children from ethnic minority groups. Of special concern is that minority children will be incorrectly labeled as slow learners and assigned to remedial classes, which are far less stimulating than regular classes. To avoid this danger, test scores need to be combined with assessments of children’s adaptive behavior—their ability to cope with the demands of their everyday environments. The child who does poorly on an IQ test yet plays a complex game on the playground or figures out how to rewire a broken TV is unlikely to be intellectually deficient.

In addition, flexible testing procedures enhance minority children’s performance. In an approach called dynamic assessment, an innovation consistent with Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, the adult introduces purposeful teaching into the testing situation to find out what the child can attain with social support (Robinson-Zañartu & Carlson, 2013).

Research shows that children’s receptivity to teaching and capacity to transfer what they have learned to novel problems add considerably to the prediction of future performance (Haywood & Lidz, 2007). In one study, first graders diverse in SES and ethnicity participated in dynamic assessment in which they were asked to solve a series of math equations that increased in difficulty, such as ___ + 1 = 4 (easier) and 3 + 6 = 5 + ___ (difficult). When a child could not solve an equation, an adult provided increasingly explicit teaching. Beyond static IQ-like measures of children’s verbal, math, and reasoning abilities, performance during dynamic assessment strongly predicted end-of-year scores on a test of math story problems, which children usually find highly challenging (Seethaler et al., 2012). Dynamic assessment seemed to evoke reasoning skills and conceptual understandings that children readily transferred to a very different and demanding type of math. Although their initial scores are lower, low-SES ethnic minority children show gains after dynamic assessment that are just as large as those of their cultural-majority agemates (Stevenson, Heiser, & Resing, 2016).

Cultural bias in testing can also be reduced by countering the negative impact of stereotype threat. A variety of brief, school-based interventions are effective. Persuading students that their intelligence depends heavily on effort, not on a stereotype of native endowment, is helpful. Mindfulness training, in which students practice focusing on the present task rather than on distracting thoughts about a negative stereotype, is also effective (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007; Weger et al., 2012). Yet another approach is to encourage minority students to affirm their self-worth by writing a short essay about their most important values (for example, a close friendship or a self-defining skill). This self-affirmation intervention was just as successful in boosting end-of-term grades of poorly performing middle school students as it was for students doing moderately well in school (see Figure 12.7) (Cohen, Garcia, & Master, 2006).

A teacher uses dynamic assessment, introducing purposeful teaching into a testing situation to find out what this third grader can learn with social support.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

In view of its many problems, should intelligence testing in schools be suspended? Most experts reject this solution. Without testing, important educational decisions would be based only on subjective impressions, perhaps increasing discriminatory placement of minority children. Intelligence tests are useful when interpreted carefully by examiners who are sensitive to cultural influences on test performance. And despite their limitations, IQ scores continue to be valid measures of school learning potential for the majority of Western children.

Figure 12.7 Impact of a self-affirmation intervention on African-American middle school students’ end-of-term grade-point average. In the fall, several hundred students were randomly assigned to either a self-affirmation intervention, in which they wrote brief essays about the personal meaning of their most important values, or a control condition, in which they wrote essays about why their least important values might be meaningful to someone else. African-American students experiencing the self-affirmation condition attained substantially higher end-of-term course grades than did controls; poorly performing and moderately performing students benefitted similarly. European-American students’ grades (not shown) were unaffected, indicating that the treatment succeeded by lessening the negative impact of stereotype threat on the African Americans. (Based on Cohen, Garcia, & Master, 2006.)

Ask Yourself

Connect ■ Explain how dynamic assessment is consistent with Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and with scaffolding (see pages 319–320 in Chapter 9).

Apply ■ Josefina, a Hispanic fourth grader, does well on homework assignments. But when her teacher announces, “It’s time for a test to see how much you’ve learned,” Josefina usually does poorly. How might stereotype threat explain this inconsistency?

Reflect ■ Do you think that intelligence tests are culturally biased? What observations and evidence influenced your conclusion?

12.4 LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

12.4a Describe changes in school-age children’s metalinguistic awareness, vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatics.

12.4b Describe bilingual development, the cognitive benefits of bilingualism, and the effectiveness of bilingual education programs.

Vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatics continue to develop in middle childhood, though less obviously than at earlier ages. In addition, children’s attitude toward language undergoes a fundamental shift. They develop metalinguistic awareness, the ability to think about language as a system.

12.4.1 Vocabulary and Grammar

During the elementary school years, vocabulary increases fourfold, eventually exceeding comprehension of 40,000 words. On average, children learn about 20 new words each day—a rate of growth greater than in early childhood. In addition to the word-learning strategies discussed in Chapter 9, school-age children enlarge their vocabularies by analyzing the structure of complex words. From happy and decide, they quickly derive the meanings of happiness and decision (Larsen & Nippold, 2007). They also figure out many more word meanings from context

As at younger ages, children benefit from conversations with more-expert speakers. But because written language contains a far more diverse and complex vocabulary than spoken language, reading contributes enormously to vocabulary growth. Avid readers are exposed to more than 4 million words per year, average readers to 600,000 words. In contrast, children who rarely read encounter only about 50,000 words (Anderson, Wilson, & Fielding, 1988). By second to third grade, reading comprehension and reading habits strongly predict later vocabulary size into high school (Cain & Oakhill, 2011).

As their knowledge becomes better organized, older school-age children think about and use words more precisely: In addition to the verb fall, for example, they also use topple, tumble, and plummet. Word definitions also illustrate this change. Five- and 6-year-olds offer concrete descriptions referring to functions or appearance—knife: “when you’re cutting carrots”; bicycle: “it’s got wheels, a chain, and handlebars.” By the end of elementary school, synonyms and explanations of categorical relationships appear—for example, knife: “something you could cut with. A saw is like a knife. It could also be a weapon” (Uccelli, Rowe, & Pan, 2017). This advance reflects older children’s ability to deal with word meanings on an entirely verbal plane. They can add new words to their vocabulary simply by being given a definition.

School-age children’s more reflective and analytical approach to language enables them to appreciate the multiple meanings of words—to recognize, for example, that many words, such as cool or neat, have psychological as well as physical meanings: “Cool shirt!” or “Neat movie!” This grasp of double meanings permits 8- to 10-year-olds to comprehend subtle metaphors, such as “sharp as a tack” and “spilling the beans” (Nippold, Taylor, & Baker, 1996; Seigneuric et al., 2016). It also leads to a change in children’s humor. Riddles and puns that play on different meanings of a key word are common: “Hey, did you take a bath?” “Why, is one missing?”

Mastery of complex grammatical constructions also improves. For example, English-speaking children use the passive voice more frequently, and they more often extend it from an abbreviated form (“It got broken”) into full statements (“The glass was broken by Mary”) (Tomasello, 2006). Although the passive form is challenging, language input makes a difference. When adults speak a language that emphasizes full passives, such as Inuktitut (spoken by the Inuit people of Arctic Canada), children produce them earlier (Allen & Crago, 1996).

A fifth grader encounters new words with complex meanings in a current events article. Stimulating reading experiences contribute greatly to vocabulary growth.

© ELLEN B. SENISI

Another grammatical achievement of middle childhood is advanced understanding of infinitive phrases—the difference between “John is eager to please” and “John is easy to please” (Berman, 2007; Chomsky, 1969). Like gains in vocabulary, appreciation of these subtle grammatical distinctions is supported by improved ability to analyze and reflect on language.

Look and Listen

Record examples of 8- to 10-year-olds’ humor, or examine storybooks for humor aimed at second through fourth graders. Does it require a grasp of the multiple meanings of words?

12.4.2 Pragmatics

A more advanced theory of mind—in particular, the capacity for recursive thought—enables school-age children to understand and use increasingly subtle, indirect expressions of meaning (Lee, Torrance, & Olson, 2001). Seven-year-old Lizzie often avoided her daily garbage-disposal chore, so she knew that her mother’s comment, “The garbage is beginning to smell,” really meant, “Take that garbage out!” Around age 8, children begin to grasp irony and sarcasm (Glenright & Pexman, 2010). After Rena prepared a dish for dinner that Joey didn’t like, he quipped sarcastically, “Oh boy, my favorite!” Notice how this remark requires the speaker to consider at least two perspectives simultaneously—in Joey’s case, his mother’s desire to serve a particular dish despite his objection, expressed through a critical comment with a double meaning.

Furthermore, as a result of improved memory and ability to take the perspective of listeners, children’s narratives increase in organization, detail, and expressiveness. A typical 4- or 5-year-old’s narrative states what happened: “We went to the lake. We fished and waited. Paul caught a huge catfish!” Six- and 7-year-olds add orienting information (time, place, participants) and connectives (“next,” “then,” “so,” “finally”) that lend coherence to the story. Gradually, narratives lengthen into a classic form in which events not only build to a high point but resolve: “After Paul reeled in the catfish, Dad cleaned and cooked it. Then we ate it all up!” And evaluative comments rise dramatically, becoming common by age 8 to 9: “The catfish tasted great. Paul was so proud!” (Melzi & Schick, 2017; Ukrainetz et al., 2005).

Because children pick up the narrative styles of significant adults in their lives, their narratives vary widely across cultures. For example, instead of the topic-focused style of most European-American children, who describe an experience from beginning to end, African-American children often use a topic-associating style in which they blend several similar experiences. One 9-year-old related having a tooth pulled, then described seeing her sister’s tooth pulled, next told how she had removed one of her baby teeth, and concluded, “I’m a pullin-teeth expert … call me, and I’ll be over” (McCabe, 1997, p. 164). Like adults in their families and communities, African-American children are more attuned to keeping their listeners interested than to relating a linear sequence of story events. They often embellish their narratives by including fictional elements and many references to characters’ motives and intentions (Gorman et al., 2011). As a result, African-American children’s narratives are usually longer and more complex than those of European-American children.

In families that regularly eat meals together, children are advanced in language and literacy development. Mealtimes offer many opportunities to relate complex, extended personal stories.

Melissa Lyttle/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press

The ability to generate clear oral narratives enhances reading comprehension and prepares children for producing longer, more explicit written narratives. In families who regularly eat meals together, children are advanced in language and literacy development (Snow & Beals, 2006). Mealtimes offer many opportunities to relate personal stories.

12.4.3 Learning Two Languages

Joey and Lizzie speak only one language—English, their native tongue. Yet throughout the world, many children grow up bilingual, learning two languages and sometimes more than two. An estimated 23 percent of U.S. 5- to 17-year-olds—more than 12 million children and adolescents—speak a language other than English at home (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019).

Bilingual Development

Children can become bilingual in two ways: Their parents may expose them to both languages at the same time in infancy and early childhood, making them simultaneous bilinguals. Alternatively, as in most immigrant families, preschool and school-age children acquire a second language after they already speak the language of their cultural heritage, making them sequential bilinguals.

Children who are simultaneous bilinguals separate the language systems early on and attain most language milestones according to a typical timetable (Aguilar-Mediavilla et al., 2017). Although early vocabulary growth in each language tends to be somewhat slower than in their monolingual agemates, the vocabularies of both languages together are similar to or larger in size (Ezeizabarrena & Fernández, 2017; Poulin-Dubois et al., 2013). Preschool simultaneous bilinguals attain normal native ability in the language of their surrounding community and good-to-native ability in the second language, depending on their exposure to it (Serratrice, 2013). In middle childhood, simultaneous bilinguals’ use of the most complex grammatical structures may be slightly delayed, but these differences usually diminish and disappear as children are exposed to more language input (Gathercole, 2007).

When preschool and school-age children from immigrant families acquire a second language after they already speak the language of their cultural heritage, the time required to master the second language to the level of native-speaking agemates varies greatly, from 1 to 5 or more years (MacWhinney, 2015; Páez & Hunter, 2015). Influential factors include child motivation, knowledge of the first language (which supports mastery of the second), and quality of communication and of literacy experiences in both languages at home and at school.

Like many bilingual adults, bilingual children sometimes engage in code switching—producing an utterance in one language that contains one or more “guest” words from the other—without violating the grammar of either language. Rather than a sign of confusion, code switching is adaptive, reflecting deliberate control of the two languages. Children may engage in code switching because they lack the vocabulary to convey a particular thought in one language, so they use the other. And children who code-switch the most regularly participate in social contexts where code switching is a common practice (Yow, Patrycia, & Flynn, 2016). Bilingual adults frequently code-switch to express cultural identity, and children may follow suit—as when a Korean child speaking English switches to Korean on mentioning her piano teacher, as a sign of respect for authority (Chung, 2006). Opportunities to listen to code switching may facilitate bilingual development. For example, a child accustomed to hearing French sentences with English guest words may rely on sentence-level cues to figure out English word meanings.

Recall from Chapter 6 that, just as with first-language development, a sensitive period for second-language development exists. Although mastery must begin sometime in childhood for full development to occur, a precise age cutoff for a decline in second-language learning has not been established (see page 229 in Chapter 6).

Children who become fluent in two languages develop denser gray matter (neurons and connective fibers) and white matter (myelination) in areas of the left cerebral hemisphere devoted to language. And compared to monolinguals, bilinguals show greater activity in these areas and in the prefrontal cortex during linguistic tasks, likely due to the high executive-processing demands of controlling two languages (Costa & Sebastián-Gallés, 2014; Li, Legault, & Litcofsky, 2014). Because both languages are always active, bilingual speakers must continuously decide which one to use in particular social situations and inhibit attention to the other.

This increase in executive processing has diverse cognitive benefits, providing bilinguals with especially efficient executive function skills that can be applied to other tasks (Bialystok, 2015). Bilingual children and adults outperform others on tests of inhibition, sustained and selective attention, flexible thinking, analytical reasoning, concept formation, and false-belief understanding. The higher the degree of bilingualism (balance of proficiency in both languages), the greater the cognitive gains (Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2012; Diaz & Farrar, 2018; Thomas-Sunesson, Hakuta, & Bialystok, 2018). Bilingual children are also advanced in certain aspects of metalinguistic awareness, such as detection of errors in grammar, meaning, and conventions of conversation (responding politely, relevantly, and informatively). And children transfer their phonological awareness skills in one language to the other, especially if their two languages share phonological features and letter–sound correspondences, as Spanish and English do (Bialystok, 2013; Siegal, Iozzi, & Surian, 2009). These capacities enhance reading achievement.

Bilingual Education

The advantages of bilingualism provide strong justification for bilingual education programs in schools. In Canada, nearly 20 percent of elementary school students are enrolled in language immersion programs, in which English-speaking children typically are taught entirely in French from kindergarten through second grade (Statistics Canada, 2018,). Gradually, English is introduced as a subject in third grade, though French continues to be the main classroom language. This strategy succeeds in developing children who are proficient in both languages and who, by grade 6, achieve as well in reading, writing, and math as their counterparts in the regular English program (Genesee & Jared, 2008; Lyster & Genesee, 2012).

In the United States, some educators believe that time spent communicating in ethnic minority children’s native language detracts from English-language achievement, which is crucial for success in the worlds of school and work. Others, committed to developing minority children’s native language while fostering mastery of English, note that providing instruction in the native tongue lets minority children know that their heritage is respected. It also prevents inadequate proficiency in both languages. Minority children who gradually lose facility in the first language as a result of being taught only the second end up limited in both languages for a time (McCabe et al., 2013). This circumstance leads to serious academic difficulties and is believed to contribute to the high rates of school failure and dropout among low-SES Hispanic youths, who make up over 70 percent of the U.S. language-minority population.

Many U.S. states have passed laws declaring English to be their official language, creating conditions in which schools have no obligation to teach language minority students in languages other than English. Where bilingual education exists, its goal is to transition minority students to English-only instruction as soon as possible (Wright, 2013). Yet in classrooms where both languages are integrated into the curriculum, minority children are more involved in learning, participate more actively in class discussions, and acquire the second language more easily—gains that predict better academic achievement (Guglielmi, 2008). In contrast, when teachers speak only in a language that children can barely understand, minority children become frustrated, bored, and withdrawn. Under these conditions, U.S. kindergartners with limited English proficiency quickly fall behind their English-proficient counterparts in oral language and reading skills and are likely to struggle academically throughout their school years (Paradis, Genesee, & Crago, 2011). This downward spiral in achievement is greatest in high-poverty schools, where resources to support the needs of language minority children are especially scarce.

In a second-grade two-way language immersion classroom, a bilingual teacher presents a lesson in Spanish. Two-way language immersion programs are increasing rapidly in U.S. public schools. They are especially effective in promoting mastery of both languages and reading achievement.

© JOE AMON/THE DENVER POST/GETTY IMAGES

The benefits of sustained bilingual education throughout the school years—for language minority and native-English-speaking students alike—have inspired U.S. educators to devise two-way language immersion programs. In these classrooms, language-minority students acquiring English and native English-speaking students interested in learning a second language are taught together, with most programs beginning in first grade and running for at least five years, and some extending through twelfth grade (Kim, Hutchinson, & Winsler, 2015). In one approach, called full immersion, students mostly learn in the minority language during the first few years and then transition to a setting in which both groups receive half of their educational experiences in English and half in the minority language. In a second approach, called partial immersion, students are taught half the time in each language.

Two-way immersion programs are growing rapidly in U.S. public schools: More than two thousand exist across the country (Gross, 2016). Programs are especially prevalent in areas where the majority of immigrants share a native language so enough students from the same minority language are available to make up half of classrooms. Consequently, Spanish–English is the most common, followed by Chinese–English, though some large cities offer as many as five minority languages. Evaluations reveal that two-way immersion programs are especially effective in promoting proficiency in both languages and positive attitudes toward school. And academic performance is at least as high in two-way immersion as in English-only classrooms, with immersion students consistently scoring higher in reading achievement (Bialystok, 2018; Lindholm-Leary & Block, 2009; Marian, Shook, & Schroeder, 2013).

So far, two-way immersion is available in only a limited number of languages, leaving immigrant children who speak most of the more than 140 minority languages in the United States without access. Nevertheless, the proliferation of these programs confirms that long-held misconceptions about bilingual education in the United States—for example, that it interferes with immigrant children’s progress in learning to speak and read English—have begun to wane. Today, more educators and parents view bilingual education as beneficial for all children and as an asset to American society.

Ask Yourself

Connect ■ How can bilingual education promote ethnic minority children’s cognitive and academic development?

Apply ■ After soccer practice, 10-year-old Shana remarked, “I’m wiped out!” Megan, her 5-year-old sister, responded, “What did’ya wipe out?” Explain Shana’s and Megan’s different understandings.

Reflect ■ Considering research on bilingualism, what changes would you make in your own second-language learning, and why?

12.5 CHILDREN’S LEARNING IN SCHOOL

12.5a Describe the influence of educational philosophies on children’s motivation and academic achievement.

12.5b Discuss the role of teacher–student interaction and grouping practices in academic achievement.

12.5c Describe academic benefits of, as well as concerns about, educational media.

12.5d Describe conditions that promote successful placement of children with learning disabilities in regular classrooms.

12.5e Describe the characteristics of gifted children and efforts to meet their educational needs.

12.5f Discuss factors that lead U.S. students to fall behind in academic achievement compared to students in top-achieving nations.

Evidence cited throughout this chapter indicates that schools are vital forces in children’s cognitive development. How do schools exert such a powerful influence? Research looking at schools as complex social systems—educational philosophies, teacher–student relationships, and larger cultural context—provides important insights. As you read about these topics, refer to Applying What We Know on the following page, which summarizes characteristics of high-quality education in elementary school.

12.5.1 Educational Philosophies

Teachers’ educational philosophies play a major role in children’s learning. Two philosophical approaches have received the most research attention. They differ in what children are taught, the way they are believed to learn, and in how their progress is evaluated.

Traditional versus Constructivist Classrooms

In a traditional classroom, the teacher is the sole authority for knowledge, rules, and decision making. Students are relatively passive—listening, responding when called on, and completing teacher-assigned tasks. Their progress is evaluated by how well they keep pace with a uniform set of standards for their grade.

A constructivist classroom, in contrast, encourages students to construct their own knowledge. Although constructivist approaches vary, many are grounded in Piaget’s theory, which views children as active agents who reflect on and coordinate their own thoughts rather than absorbing those of others. A glance inside a constructivist classroom reveals richly equipped learning centers, small groups and individuals solving self-chosen problems, and a teacher who guides and supports in response to children’s needs. Students are evaluated by considering their progress in relation to their own prior development.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, constructivist classrooms gained in popularity in the United States. Then, as concern arose over the academic progress of children and youths, classrooms returned to traditional instruction—a style that became increasingly pronounced as a result of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA), followed by its 2015 replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA transferred NCLBA’s federal control of school academic standards and assessments to the states in an effort to introduce flexibility in approaches to measuring student learning, including evaluations of various types of student work. However, ESSA continues to require students to take annual achievement tests from third through eighth grade and in high school. Consequently, the narrowing of the curricular focus in public schools to preparing students for achievement tests, which resulted from NCLBA, persists (Gewertz, 2018).

Although older elementary school children in traditional classrooms have a slight edge in achievement test scores, constructivist settings are associated with many other benefits—gains in critical thinking, greater social and moral maturity, and more positive attitudes toward school (DeVries, 2001; Rathunde & Csikszentmihalyi, 2005; Walberg, 1986). And as noted in Chapter 9, when teacher-directed instruction is emphasized in preschool and kindergarten, it actually undermines academic motivation and achievement, especially in low-SES children.

The emphasis on knowledge absorption in many kindergarten and primary classrooms has contributed to a trend among parents to delay their child’s school entry, especially in higher-SES families and for boys with a birth date close to the cutoff for kindergarten enrollment. Research, however, reveals few long-term academic or social benefits for doing so (Bassok & Reardon, 2013; Dağli & Jones, 2013; Lincove & Painter, 2006). An alternative perspective is that school readiness should be cultivated through classroom experiences that foster children’s individual progress.

Signs of High-Quality Education in Elementary School

Classroom Characteristics

Signs of Quality

Physical setting

Space is divided into richly equipped activity centers—for reading, writing, playing math or language games, exploring science, working on construction projects, using computers, and engaging in other academic pursuits. Spaces are used flexibly for individual and small-group activities and whole-class gatherings.

Curriculum

The curriculum helps children both achieve academic standards and make sense of their learning. Subjects are integrated so that children apply knowledge in one area to others. The curriculum is implemented through activities responsive to children’s interests, ideas, and everyday lives, including their cultural backgrounds.

Daily activities

Teachers provide challenging activities that include opportunities for small-group and independent work. Groupings vary in size and makeup of children, depending on the activity and on children’s learning needs. Teachers encourage cooperative learning and guide children in attaining it.

Interactions between teachers and children

Teachers foster each child’s progress and use intellectually engaging strategies, including posing problems, asking thought-provoking questions, discussing ideas, and adding complexity to tasks. They also demonstrate, explain, coach, and assist in other ways, depending on each child’s learning needs.

Evaluations of progress

Teachers regularly evaluate children’s progress through written observations and work samples, which they use to enhance and individualize teaching. They help children reflect on their work and decide how to improve it. They also seek information and perspectives from parents on how well children are learning and include parents’ views in evaluations.

Relationship with parents

Teachers forge partnerships with parents. They hold periodic conferences and encourage parents to visit the classroom anytime, to observe and volunteer.

Source: Copple & Bredekamp, 2009; National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2017.

Recent Philosophical Directions

Recent approaches to education, grounded in Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, capitalize on the rich social context of the classroom to spur children’s learning. In these social-constructivist classrooms, children participate in a wide range of challenging activities with teachers and peers, with whom they jointly construct understandings. As children acquire knowledge and strategies through working together, they become competent, contributing members of their classroom community and advance in cognitive and social development (Bodrova & Leong, 2007; Lourenço, 2012). Vygotsky’s emphasis on the social origins of complex mental activities has inspired the following educational themes:

Teachers and children as partners in learning. A classroom rich in both teacher–child and child–child collaboration transfers culturally valued ways of thinking to children.

Experience with many types of symbolic communication in meaningful activities. As children master reading, writing, and mathematics, they become aware of their culture’s communication systems, reflect on their own thinking, and bring it under voluntary control. Can you identify research presented earlier in this chapter that supports this theme?

Teaching adapted to each child’s zone of proximal development. Assistance that both responds to current understandings and encourages children to take the next step forward helps ensure that each child makes the best progress possible.

Let’s look at two examples of a growing number of programs that have translated these ideas into action.

Reciprocal Teaching

Originally designed to improve reading comprehension in poorly achieving students, this Vygotsky-inspired teaching method has been extended to other subjects and all schoolchildren (Palincsar & Herrenkohl, 1999). In reciprocal teaching, a teacher and a small number of students form a cooperative group and take turns leading dialogues on the content of a text passage. Within the dialogues, group members apply four cognitive strategies: questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting.

The dialogue leader (at first a teacher, later a student) begins by asking questions about the content of the text passage. Students offer answers, raise additional questions, and, in case of disagreement, reread the original text. Next, the leader summarizes the passage, and students discuss the summary and clarify unfamiliar ideas. Finally, the leader encourages students to predict upcoming content based on clues in the passage.

Elementary and secondary school students exposed to reciprocal teaching show impressive gains in reading comprehension compared to controls taught in other ways (Okkinga et al., 2018; Schunemann, Spörer, & Brunstein, 2013; Spörer, Brunstein, & Kieschke, 2009). Notice how reciprocal teaching creates a zone of proximal development in which children learn to scaffold one another’s progress and assume more responsibility for comprehending text passages. Also, by collaborating with others, children forge group expectations for high-level thinking, more often apply their metacognitive knowledge, and acquire skills vital for learning and success in everyday life.

Communities of Learners

Recognizing that collaboration requires a supportive context to be most effective, another Vygotsky-based innovation makes it a schoolwide value. Classrooms become communities of learners where teachers guide the overall process of learning but no other distinction is made between adult and child contributors: All participate in joint endeavors and have the authority to define and resolve problems. This approach is based on the assumption that different people have different expertises that can benefit the community and that students, too, may become experts (Sewell, St George, & Cullen, 2013). Classroom activities are often long-term projects addressing complex, real-world problems. In working toward project goals, children and teachers draw on the expertises of one another and of others within and outside the school.

A teacher and students form a community of learners to plan, plant, and track the growth of a vegetable garden. During this complex, long-term project, all participants—adults as well as children—may become experts who share knowledge, teaching one another.

© ALISTAIR BERG/GETTY IMAGES

In a rural school in Tanzania, Africa, a researcher knowledgeable about the community-of-learners approach guided teachers in an elementary school in launching several after-school science clubs. The teachers collaborated with 10- to 15-year-old students in investigating how to induce changes in local health, agricultural, and environmental practices. For example, the health club conducted research on the number and type of illnesses that had recently affected their family members; studied the causes, symptoms, treatment, and prevention of serious diseases in their community, such as malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis; and shadowed doctors and nurses as they engaged in daily activities at a nearby hospital. Club members shared their findings and experiences with one another and with community representatives, collaborating with them to come up with ways that the knowledge gathered could be used to improve local health practices (Roberts, Brown, & Edwards, 2015). The result was a multifaceted understanding of the topic that would have been too difficult and time-consuming for any learner to acquire alone.

After witnessing student involvement and enthusiasm in the after-school clubs, the Tanzanian teachers, who had previously used traditional teaching strategies, began to infuse community-of-learners collaborative, real-world problem-solving techniques into their classrooms. The community-of-learners approach broadens Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development from a child collaborating with a more expert partner (adult or peer) to multiple, interrelated zones of collaboration.

Look and Listen

Ask an elementary school teacher to sum up his or her educational philosophy. Is it closest to a traditional, constructivist, or social-constructivist view? Has the teacher encountered any obstacles to implementing that philosophy? Explain.

12.5.2 Teacher–Student Interaction

Elementary and secondary school students describe good teachers as caring, helpful, and stimulating—behaviors associated with gains in motivation, achievement, and positive peer relations (Kiuru et al., 2015; Hughes & Kwok, 2006, 2007; Sabol & Pianta, 2012). But too many U.S. teachers—especially those in schools with many students from low-income families—emphasize repetitive drill over higher-level thinking, such as grappling with ideas and applying knowledge to new situations (Valli, Croninger, & Buese, 2012). This focus on low-level skills becomes increasingly pronounced over the school year as state-mandated achievement testing draws nearer.

Of course, teachers do not interact in the same way with all children. Well-behaved, high-achieving students typically get more support and praise, whereas unruly students have more conflicts with teachers and receive more criticism, which predicts increased unruliness and worsening achievement over time (Henricsson & Rydell, 2004; Rucinski, Brown, & Downer, 2018). Warm, low-conflict teacher–student relationships have an especially strong impact on the academic self-esteem, achievement, and social behavior of low-SES minority students and other children at risk for learning difficulties (Elledge et al., 2016; McCormick, O’Connor, & Horn, 2017; Spilt et al., 2012). But overall, higher-SES students—who tend to be higher-achieving and to have fewer learning and behavior problems—have more sensitive and supportive relationships with teachers (Jerome, Hamre, & Pianta, 2009).

Unfortunately, once teachers’ attitudes toward students are established, they can become more extreme than is warranted by children’s behavior. Of special concern are educational self-fulfilling prophecies: Children may adopt teachers’ positive or negative views and start to live up to them. This effect is particularly strong when teachers emphasize competition and publicly compare children, regularly favoring the best students (Weinstein, 2002).

Teacher expectations have a greater impact on low-achieving than high-achieving students (McKown, Gregory, & Weinstein, 2010). When a teacher is critical, high achievers can fall back on their history of success. Low-achieving students’ sensitivity to self-fulfilling prophecies can be beneficial when teachers believe in their capacity to learn. But biased teacher judgments are usually slanted in a negative direction. Among students with the same record of school performance, teachers tend to hold lower expectations for those from economically disadvantaged families—circumstances that contribute to declines in their achievement (Ready & Wright, 2011; Spreybroeck et al., 2012; Timmermans, Kuyper, & van der Werf, 2015).

Furthermore, much evidence confirms that academic stereotypes about ethnic minority students have self-fulfilling effects on their behavior (Madon et al., 2011). In one study, African-American and Hispanic elementary school students taught by high-bias teachers (who expected them to do poorly) showed substantially lower end-of-year achievement than their counterparts taught by low-bias teachers (McKown & Weinstein, 2008). Similarly, in a New Zealand study, teachers’ negative beliefs about the academic ability of third- to seventh-grade Maori students relative to European-American students predicted nearly a full year’s difference in math achievement between the two ethnicities at the end of the school year (Peterson et al., 2016). Recall our discussion of stereotype threat. A child in the position of confirming a negative stereotype may respond with especially intense anxiety and reduced motivation, amplifying a negative self-fulfilling prophecy.

12.5.3 Grouping Practices

In many schools, students are assigned to homogeneous groups or classes, in which children of similar ability levels are taught together. Homogeneous grouping can be a potent source of self-fulfilling prophecies. Low-group students—who as early as first grade are more likely to be low-SES, minority, and male—get more drill on basic facts and skills, engage in less discussion, and progress at a slower pace. Gradually, they decline in self-esteem and motivation and fall further behind in achievement (Lleras & Rangel, 2009; Worthy, Hungerford-Kresser, & Hampton, 2009).

Fourth graders work together to complete an assignment. Successful cooperative learning (page 466) enhances children’s enjoyment of learning and academic achievement.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Unfortunately, widespread SES and ethnic segregation in U.S. schools consigns large numbers of low-SES, minority students to a form of schoolwide, deleterious homogeneous grouping. Refer to the Social Issues: Education box above to find out how heterogeneous learning contexts can reduce achievement differences between SES groups and ethnic minority and majority students.

Social Issues: EducationMagnet Schools: Equal Access to High-Quality Education

Each school-day morning, Emma leaves her affluent suburban neighborhood, riding a school bus to a magnet school in a mostly African-American neighborhood. In her fifth-grade class, she settles into a science project with her friend Zaniya, who lives in the local neighborhood. For the first hour of the day, Emma and Zaniya use a thermometer, ice water, and a stopwatch to determine which of several materials is the best insulator, recording and graphing their data. Throughout the school, which specializes in innovative math and science teaching, students diverse in SES and ethnicity learn side by side.

Despite the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering schools to desegregate, school integration began to recede during the 1990s as federal courts canceled their integration orders and returned this authority to states and cities. Since 2000, the racial–ethnic divide in U.S. education has intensified. When minority students from low-SES families attend ethnically mixed schools, most do so with other minorities. Both African-American and Hispanic students are far more likely than European-American students to attend schools where 60 percent or more of the student body lives in poverty (Orfield et al., 2016).

U.S. schools in high-poverty neighborhoods are vastly disadvantaged in funding and therefore in educational opportunities, largely because public education is primarily supported by local property taxes. Federal and state grants-in-aid are not sufficient to close this funding gap between rich and poor districts. Consequently, in segregated neighborhoods, dilapidated school buildings; inexperienced teachers; high teacher turnover rates; outdated, poor-quality educational resources; and school cultures that fail to encourage strong teaching and student motivation are widespread. According to a large-scale study that included millions of public school students, the greater the difference in poverty rates between European-American and African-American students’ schools, the larger the achievement gap (Reardon, 2015).

Magnet schools were introduced in the 1970s to promote voluntary desegregation by offering families school choices that would draw students from across neighborhood boundaries. Today, over 3,200 magnets enrolling more than 3.5 million students exist (U.S. Department of Education, 2017a). In addition to the usual curriculum, magnets emphasize a specific area of interest—such as performing arts, math and science, or technology. Families are attracted to magnet schools (hence the name) by their rich academic offerings. Often they are located in economically disadvantaged, minority areas, where they serve the neighborhood student population. Other students, who apply and are typically admitted by lottery, are bussed in—many from well-to-do city and suburban neighborhoods. In another model, all students—including those in the surrounding neighborhood—must apply. In either case, magnet schools are voluntarily desegregated.

Fourth graders at a magnet school in Florida discuss a reading assignment. Because of their rich academic offerings and innovative teaching, magnet schools typically attract students diverse in ethnicity and SES.

© WILFRED LEE/AP IMAGES

The majority of evaluations conducted on magnet schools that use lottery systems for admission indicate that they succeed in enhancing minority student achievement (Pack, 2019; Wang & Herman, 2019). One such study compared Connecticut students enrolled in magnet middle schools with those whose lottery numbers were not drawn and who therefore attended other city schools. Although magnet-school enrollees and nonadmitted applicants were similar in ethnicity, SES, and prior academic achievement, magnet students showed greater gains in reading and math achievement over a two-year period (Bifulco, Cobb, & Bell, 2009). These outcomes were strongest for low-SES, ethnic minority students.

Magnet schools offer a path to SES and ethnic equity in quality of education while also enhancing teaching and learning. They are a promising approach to overcoming the negative forces of SES and ethnic isolation in American schools.

However, small, heterogeneous groups of students working together do not necessarily engage in high-quality discourse that promotes learning, such as elaborating on one another’s ideas and engaging in collaborative reasoning. Often their interaction is of lower quality than that of homogeneous groups of above-average students (Murphy et al., 2009; Webb, Nemer, & Chizhik, 1998). For collaboration between heterogeneous peers to succeed, children need extensive training and guidance in cooperative learning, in which small groups of classmates work toward common goals—by considering one another’s ideas, appropriately challenging one another, providing sufficient explanations to correct misunderstandings, and resolving differences of opinion on the basis of reasons and evidence. When teachers explain, model, and have children role-play how to work together effectively, cooperative learning among heterogeneous peers results in more complex reasoning, greater enjoyment of learning, and achievement gains across a wide range of subjects (Jadallah et al., 2011; Murphy et al., 2017; Slavin, 2015).

Consider an investigation in which teachers taught heterogeneous groups of fourth graders to collaborate in reasoning about controversial issues, such as whether zoos are good places for animals. Over 10 group sessions, the students increasingly engaged in more advanced reasoning by analogy—comparisons that moved beyond surface features (“In a zoo it would be just like being in jail”) to higher-order relations (“Pretend this classroom is like a cage. Who would rather be here or recess?”). During discussions, use of analogies “snowballed.” When one student introduced an analogy, other students often elaborated on it and contributed new analogies (“ ‘Cause it’s like your mom locking you in your room for a week”) (Lin et al., 2012). Together, students used analogy as a powerfully persuasive tool, capitalizing on it to introduce new information and perspectives.

12.5.4 Educational Screen Media

Virtually all public schools in industrialized nations have integrated computers into their instructional programs and can access the Internet. And, as noted in Chapter 9, most U.S. children have access to a home computer and one or more mobile devices with an Internet connection, including smartphones and tablets (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018a).

Interactive screen media use is associated with academic progress. Word processing, for example, enables children to write freely, without having to struggle with handwriting. Because they can revise their text’s meaning and style and check their spelling, they worry less about making mistakes. As a result, their written products tend to be longer and of higher quality (Clements & Sarama, 2003). And as in early childhood, computer programming projects promote metacognition, reasoning, mathematical and spatial abilities, and creative thinking, and they are common classroom contexts for peer collaboration (Scherer, Siddiq, & Viveros, 2019).

As children get older, they increasingly use interactive media for schoolwork, mostly to search the Web for information and to prepare written assignments—activities linked to improved problem-solving skills and academic achievement (Judge, Puckett, & Bell, 2006; Tran & Subrahmanyam, 2013). The more low-SES middle school students use the Internet for information gathering (either for school or for personal interests), the better their subsequent reading achievement and school grades (Jackson et al., 2011). Perhaps those who use the Web to find information also devote more time to reading, given that many Web pages are heavily text-based. As students work on school projects, social media platforms that offer video chatting and conferencing enable them to collaborate with students in distant locations, which contributes to their engagement and learning (Chassiakos et al., 2016).

Although video game play is increasingly being integrated into classroom teaching because of its rich cognitive benefits, boys are far more likely than girls to be attracted to it. In this classroom, girls are encouraged to play challenging educational games on tablets.

© KLAUS VEDFELT/GETTY IMAGES

With age, video game play rises dramatically: two-thirds of U.S. 6- to 8-year-olds, and the overwhelming majority of 8- to 18-year-olds, have played at one time or another. Young school-age children, on average, devote 42 minutes per day to gaming, older school-age children and adolescents 80 minutes. Boys are two to three times more likely than girls to be daily players (Rideout, 2015, 2018).

Although video games with violent content are harmful (see Chapter 10), electronic game play is increasingly being integrated into classroom teaching because of its rich cognitive benefits. These include gains in eye-and-hand coordination, visual processing speed, executive function, strategic thinking, spatial reasoning, and problem solving, all of which facilitate children’s academic learning. Games emphasizing academic knowledge and skills, such as reading or math, succeed in teaching their intended content (Blumberg et al., 2019). And because adventure games typically involve substantial cognitive challenge—navigating a series of worlds and manipulating variables to overcome obstacles—successful play boosts several of the cognitive abilities just mentioned along with others, including strategic thinking, planning, problem solving, cognitive self-regulation, and (in fantasy role-play games) imagination (Adachi & Willoughby, 2013; Boyan & Sherry, 2011; Valkenburg & Calvert, 2012). Furthermore, playing electronic games collaboratively with peers can promote cooperative skills, which may transfer to other contexts.

Despite unprecedented access to interactive media by today’s children, those from low-SES homes remain disadvantaged relative to their higher-SES agemates (as noted in Chapter 9). Furthermore, schools in high-poverty areas are often inadequately equipped with electronic devices and high-speed Internet, and their teachers often lack sufficient training and support to ensure effective classroom use of games and other media tools (Herold, 2017). With respect to gender, boys spend more time with screen media than girls and use them somewhat differently. Boys, as mentioned earlier, play games far more often than girls, and they also devote more time to downloading music, creating Web pages, writing computer programs, and using graphics programs. Girls emphasize information gathering and social communication (Lenhart et al., 2010; Looker & Thiessen, 2003; Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010). Schools need to ensure that girls and economically disadvantaged students have many opportunities to benefit from the diverse, cognitively enriching aspects of media technology.

Because children find mastering complex game elements highly motivating, designing electronic games to teach academic content is likely to boost achievement for all children. But devoting too much time to screen media—especially playing entertainment video games, even those with nonviolent content—predicts declines in school performance, even after an array of other factors that might explain the association are controlled (Boxer, Groves, & Docherty, 2015; Gnambs et al., 2019; Hofferth, 2010). Like entertainment TV (see Chapter 10), excessive game play detracts from time devoted to homework, reading, and other activities that have vital educational benefits.

12.5.5 Teaching Children with Special Needs

We have seen that effective teachers flexibly adjust their teaching strategies to accommodate students with a wide range of abilities and characteristics. But such adjustments are increasingly challenging at the low and high ends of the ability distribution. How do schools serve children with special learning needs?

Children with Learning Difficulties

U.S. legislation mandates that schools place children who require special supports for learning in the “least restrictive” (as close to normal as possible) environments that meet their educational needs. In inclusive classrooms, students with learning difficulties learn alongside typical students in the regular educational setting for part or all of the school day—a practice designed to prepare them for participation in society and to combat prejudices against individuals with disabilities. Largely as the result of parental pressures, an increasing number of students experience full inclusion—full-time placement in regular classrooms.

In this inclusive classroom, extra support from a teaching assistant enables a student with special needs to join his classmates for a small-group writing lesson. When the learning needs of students with disabilities are met, inclusion is beneficial for academic achievement.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Students with mild intellectual disability are sometimes integrated into inclusive classrooms. Typically, their IQs fall between 50 and 70, and they also show problems in adaptive behavior, or skills of everyday living (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). But the largest number of students designated for inclusion—5 to 10 percent of school-age children—have learning disabilities, great difficulty with one or more aspects of learning, usually reading. As a result, they do not progress academically at an appropriate rate, even when more intensive instruction is provided in the regular classroom. Often the problems of students with learning disabilities express themselves in other ways—for example, as deficits in processing speed and executive function (Church, 2019; Cornoldi et al., 2014). Their problems cannot be traced to any obvious physical or emotional difficulty or to environmental disadvantage. Instead, deficits in brain functioning are involved (Swanson, Harris, & Graham, 2014). Some learning disabilities run in families, and in certain cases, specific genes have been identified that contribute to the problem (Goldstein, 2011b; Mozzi et al., 2017). In many instances, the cause is unknown.

Although some students benefit academically from inclusion, many do not. Achievement gains depend on both the severity of the disability and the support services available (Downing, 2010). Furthermore, children with disabilities often are rejected by regular-classroom peers. Students with intellectual disability are overwhelmed by the social skills of their classmates; they cannot interact adeptly in a conversation or game. And the processing deficits of some students with learning disabilities lead to problems in social awareness and responsiveness (Nowicki, Brown, & Stepien, 2014).

Does this mean that students with special needs cannot be served in regular classrooms? Not necessarily. Often these children do best when they receive instruction in a resource room for part of the day and in the regular classroom for the remainder (McLeskey & Waldron, 2011). In the resource room, a special education teacher works with students on an individual and small-group basis. Then, with extra support available that fits students’ learning needs, they join typically developing classmates for different subjects and amounts of time. Under these conditions, inclusion is beneficial for academic achievement (Tremblay, 2013).

Special steps must be taken to promote positive peer relations in inclusive classrooms. Peer tutoring experiences in which teachers guide typical students in supporting the academic progress of classmates with learning difficulties lead to friendly interaction, improved peer acceptance, and achievement gains (Mastropieri et al., 2013). And when teachers prepare their class for the arrival of a student with special needs, inclusion may foster emotional sensitivity and prosocial behavior among regular classmates.

Gifted Children

In Joey and Lizzie’s school, some children were gifted, displaying exceptional intellectual strengths. One or two students in every grade have IQ scores above 130, the standard definition of giftedness based on intelligence test performance (Pfeiffer & Yermish, 2014). High-IQ children, as we have seen, have keen memories and an exceptional capacity to solve challenging academic problems. Yet recognition that intelligence tests do not sample the entire range of human cognitive skills, as noted earlier in this chapter, has led to an expanded conception of giftedness.

Creativity and Talent

Creativity is the ability to produce work that is original yet appropriate—something that others have not thought of that is useful in some way (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2007). A child with high potential for creativity can be designated as gifted. Tests of creative capacity tap divergent thinking—the generation of multiple and unusual possibilities when faced with a task or problem. Divergent thinking contrasts sharply with convergent thinking, which involves arriving at a single correct answer and is emphasized on intelligence tests (Guilford, 1985). Consistent with this distinction, correlations between divergent thinking and IQ scores are weak (Guignard & Lubart, 2007; Guignard, Kermarrec, & Tordjman, 2016).

Because highly creative children (like high-IQ children) are often better at some types of tasks than others, a variety of tests of divergent thinking are available (Runco, 1992; Torrance, 1988). A verbal measure might ask children to name uses for common objects (such as a newspaper). A figural measure might ask them to come up with drawings based on a circular motif (see Figure 12.8). A “real-world problem” measure requires students to suggest solutions to everyday problems. Responses can be scored for the number of ideas generated and their originality.

As sixth graders rehearse a play they have written, they gain experience in generating original ideas, evaluating those ideas, and choosing the most promising—vital ingredients of creativity.

© LAURA DWIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Yet critics point out that these measures are poor predictors of creative accomplishment in everyday life because they tap only one of the complex cognitive contributions to creativity (Plucker & Makel, 2010). Also involved are defining new and important problems, evaluating divergent ideas, choosing the most promising, and calling on relevant knowledge to understand and solve problems (Lubart, Georgsdottir, & Besançon, 2009; Plucker, Guo, & Dilley, 2018).

Consider these ingredients, and you will see why people usually demonstrate expertise and creativity in only one or a few related areas. Even individuals designated as gifted by virtue of their high IQ often show uneven ability across academic subjects. Partly for this reason, definitions of giftedness have been extended to include talent—outstanding performance in a specific field. Case studies reveal that excellence in such endeavors as creative writing, mathematics, science, music, visual arts, athletics, and leadership has roots in specialized skills that first appear in childhood (Sobotnik, Worrell, & Olszewski-Kubilius, 2016). Highly talented children are biologically prepared to master their domain of interest, and they display a passion for doing so.

Figure 12.8 Responses of an 8-year-old who scored high on a figural measure of divergent thinking. This child was asked to make as many pictures as she could from the circles on the page. The titles she gave her drawings, from left to right, are as follows: “Dracula,” “one-eyed monster,” “pumpkin,” “Hula-Hoop,” “poster,” “wheelchair,” “earth,” “stop-light,” “planet,” “movie camera,” “sad face,” “picture,” “beach ball,” “the letter O,” “car,” “glasses.” Tests of divergent thinking tap only one of the complex cognitive contributions to creativity. (Reprinted by permission of Laura E. Berk.)

But talent must be nurtured. Studies of the backgrounds of talented children and highly accomplished adults often reveal warm, sensitive parents who provide a stimulating home life, are devoted to developing their child’s abilities, and provide models of hard work and high achievement. These parents are reasonably demanding but not driving or overambitious (Witte et al., 2015). They arrange for caring teachers while the child is young and for more rigorous master teachers as the child’s talent develops.

Compared with their typically developing peers, most gifted children are capable of greater understanding of themselves and others. As a result, they cope especially well with stress and conflict and are usually well adjusted. However, as gifted students move into adolescence, they are more likely than their classmates to experience social isolation, partly because their exceptional abilities and highly driven, independent styles leave them out of step with peers and partly because they enjoy solitude, which is necessary to develop their talents (Pfeiffer & Yermish, 2014). Still, gifted children desire gratifying peer relationships, and some—more often girls than boys—try to become better-liked by hiding their abilities (Neihart & Yeo, 2018).

Finally, whereas many talented youths become experts in their fields and solve problems in new ways, few become highly creative. Rapidly mastering an existing field and thinking flexibly within it require different skills than innovating in that field. Gifted individuals who are restless with the status quo and daring about changing it are rare. And before these individuals become creative masters, they typically spend a decade or more becoming proficient in their field of interest (Simonton, 2018). The world, however, needs both experts and creators.

Educating the Gifted

Availability of gifted programs in public schools varies widely across the United States, with fewer than half of states mandating them and only a handful fully funding them. Yet public school programs for the gifted are essential for ensuring equality of educational opportunity (Davidson Institute, 2019; Hughes, 2015). When nurturing children’s talents is entirely left to parents, educational enrichment experiences rarely reach those from economically disadvantaged families.

Gifted children thrive in learning environments that permit self-chosen topics for extended projects; encourage critical thinking, complex problem solving, and creativity; and enable interaction with like-minded peers who stimulate one another’s learning. Providing opportunities for educational advancement is essential (Little, 2018). Research consistently shows that gifted students who are permitted to move ahead—whether through acceleration to a higher grade or quickening of the pace of learning in particular subjects—far exceed their agemates in academic achievement while at the same time faring well socially (Colangelo & Assouline, 2009). If not sufficiently challenged, gifted students may lose their drive to excel.

Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences has inspired several model programs that provide enrichment to all students in diverse subjects, so any child capable of high-level performance can manifest it. Meaningful activities, each tapping a specific intelligence or set of intelligences, serve as contexts for assessing strengths and weaknesses and, on that basis, teaching new knowledge and original thinking (Hoerr, 2004). For example, linguistic intelligence might be fostered through storytelling or playwriting; spatial intelligence through drawing, sculpting, or media arts; and kinesthetic intelligence through dance or pantomime.

Evidence is still needed on how effectively these programs nurture children’s talents and creativity. But they have already succeeded in one way—by highlighting the strengths of some students who previously had been considered unexceptional or even at risk for school failure (Ford, 2012). Consequently, they may be especially useful in identifying talented low-SES, ethnic minority children, whose capacities are particularly likely to be overlooked when giftedness is assessed only with IQ and achievement test scores.

12.5.6 How Well-Educated Are U.S. Children?

Our discussion of schooling has largely focused on how teachers can support the education of children. Yet we have also seen that many factors—both within and outside schools—affect children’s learning. Societal values, school resources, quality of teaching, and parental encouragement all play important roles. These multiple influences are especially apparent when schooling is examined in cross-cultural perspective.

In international studies of reading, mathematics, and science achievement, young people in China, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore are consistently top performers. Among Western nations, Canada, Estonia, Finland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland are regularly in the top tier. But U.S. students typically perform at or below the international averages (see Figure 12.9) (Programme for International Student Assessment, 2017).

Figure 12.9 Average mathematics scores of 15-year-olds by country. The Programme for International Student Assessment measures achievement of nationally representative samples of 15-year-olds attending public, private, urban, and rural schools in many countries around the world. In recent comparisons of developed nations, the United States performed below the international average in math; in reading and science, its performance was about average. (Adapted from Programme for International Student Assessment, 2017.)

Why do U.S. students fall behind many other developed nations in academic accomplishments? According to questionnaire responses gathered from parents, students, and teachers to help place the international comparisons in context, instruction in the United States is less challenging, more focused on absorbing facts, and less focused on high-level reasoning and critical thinking than in other countries. Furthermore, countries with large socioeconomic inequalities (such as the United States) rank lower in achievement, in part because low-SES children tend to experience less favorable family and neighborhood conditions (Condron, 2013). But the United States is also far less equitable than top achieving countries in the quality of education it provides its low-SES and ethnic minority students. U.S. teachers, for example, vary much more in training, salaries, and teaching conditions than teachers in top achieving countries.

Finland is a case in point. In the 1980s, it abandoned a national testing system used to group students by ability and replaced it with curricula, teaching practices, and assessments aimed at cultivating initiative, problem solving, and creativity. Finnish teachers are highly trained: They must complete several years of government-funded graduate-level education (Ripley, 2013). And Finnish education is grounded in equal opportunity for all—a policy that has nearly eliminated SES variations in achievement, despite an influx of immigrant students from low-income families into Finnish schools over the past two decades.

A Finnish teacher passes out materials to her second-grade students. Finland’s teachers are highly trained, and their education system—designed to cultivate initiative, problem solving, and creativity in all students—has nearly eliminated SES variations in achievement.

© OLIVIER MORIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

In-depth research on learning environments in East Asian nations, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, also highlights social forces that foster strong student learning. Among these is cultural valuing of effort. Whereas American parents and teachers tend to regard native ability as the key to academic success, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese parents and teachers believe that all children can succeed academically as long as they try hard. East Asian children, influenced by interdependent values, typically view striving to do well in school as a moral obligation—part of their responsibility to family and community (Hau & Ho, 2010). As in Finland, all students in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan receive the same nationally mandated, high-quality instruction, delivered by teachers who are well-prepared, highly respected in their society, and far better paid than U.S. teachers (Kang & Hong, 2008; U.S. Department of Education, 2018). Academic lessons are particularly well-organized and presented in ways that capture children’s attention and encourage high-level thinking (Grow-Maienza, Hahn, & Joo, 2001).

The Finnish and East Asian examples underscore the need for American families, schools, and the larger society to work together to upgrade education. Over the past 15 years, U.S. international rankings in reading, math, and science achievement have declined. And although the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress—in which challenging achievement tests are given to nationally representative samples of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders—has shown slight gains in reading and science scores and moderate gains in math scores since 1990, the increments have not been sufficient to catch up internationally (U.S. Department of Education, 2019).

These disappointing achievement outcomes underscore the need for “a broader, bolder approach” to U.S. education (Weiss & Reville, 2019). Recommended strategies, verified by research, include the following:

Supporting parents in attaining economic security, creating stimulating home learning environments, monitoring their children’s academic progress, and communicating often with teachers

Investing in high-quality preschool education, so every child arrives at school ready to learn

Strengthening teacher education

Providing intellectually challenging, relevant instruction with real-world applications

Vigorously pursuing school improvements that reduce the large inequities in quality of education between SES and ethnic groups

Ask Yourself

Connect ■ Review research on child-rearing styles on pages 392–394 in Chapter 10. What style do gifted children who realize their potential typically experience? Explain.

Apply ■ Sandy wonders why her daughter Mira’s teacher often has students work on assignments in small, cooperative groups. Explain the benefits of this approach to Sandy. What must Mira’s teacher do to ensure that cooperative learning succeeds?

Reflect ■ What grouping practices were used in your elementary education—homogeneous, heterogeneous, or a combination? What impact do you think those practices had on your motivation and achievement?

Summary

12.1 Piaget’s Theory: The Concrete Operational Stage (p. 431)

12.1a Describe advances in thinking and cognitive limitations during the concrete operational stage.

In the concrete operational stage, children’s thought becomes more logical, flexible, and organized. Attainment of conservation requires the capacity for decentration and reversibility.

School-age children are also better at hierarchical classification and seriation, including transitive inference. Their spatial reasoning improves, as illustrated by their increasingly accurate cognitive maps. By the end of middle childhood, they form overall views of large-scale spaces and grasp the meaning of scale and map symbols.

Concrete operational children think logically only when dealing with concrete, tangible information, and mastery of concrete operational tasks occurs gradually.

12.1b Discuss follow-up research on concrete operational thought.

Specific cultural practices, especially those associated with schooling, promote mastery of certain Piagetian tasks, such as transitive inference problems.

Some neo-Piagetian theorists attribute the gradual development of operational thought to expansion of information-processing capacity. Case’s theory proposes that gains in working-memory efficiency explain cognitive change within and between Piagetian stages.

12.2 Information Processing (p. 436)

12.2a Describe gains in executive function and memory in middle childhood, along with factors that influence children’s progress.

Marked improvement in executive function enables school-age children to handle increasingly complex tasks that require integration of working memory, inhibition, and flexible thinking. Heredity and environment combine to influence executive function.

Increased speed of thinking supports gains in working-memory capacity. Children with working-memory deficits often experience learning difficulties in school.

During middle childhood, attention becomes more sustained, selective, and flexible. Deficits in executive processing and inhibition may underlie symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Executive function skills can be improved directly through computer games that provide working memory training, and indirectly through activities such as exercise and mindfulness training.

Children become better at planning, particularly when adults turn over responsibility to them and guide and support them as needed.

Memory strategies also improve. Rehearsal is the first strategy to emerge, followed by organization and then elaboration. As children gain in processing speed, working-memory capacity, and familiarity with memory strategies, their use of strategies becomes increasingly automatic and effective.

Development of the long-term knowledge base facilitates strategic memory processing, as does children’s motivation to use what they know.

The need for memory strategies is associated with societal modernization and formal schooling.

12.2b Describe the school-age child’s theory of mind and capacity to engage in self-regulation.

Metacognition improves as school-age children come to view the mind as an active, constructive agent and, consequently, better understand cognitive processes and factors that influence them. Awareness of the role of mental inferences enables mastery of second-order false belief and promotes recursive thought.

School-age children also become increasingly conscious of how and why mental strategies work and able to discriminate good from bad reasoning.

Cognitive self-regulation, which develops gradually, predicts academic success. Children benefit from adult instruction in self-regulation, but providing them with opportunities to teach academic content to others is also effective.

12.2c Describe applications of the information-processing approach to children’s learning of reading and mathematics.

Skilled reading draws on all aspects of the information-processing system. A combination of whole-language and phonics is most effective for teaching beginning reading. Learning to recognize regularities in the English spelling system strengthens reading comprehension.

Teaching that combines practice in basic skills with conceptual understanding also is best in mathematics. Students benefit from extensive opportunities to experiment with strategies and reason about number concepts. A vital foundation for mathematical development is the emergence of an increasingly accurate and complete representation of numerical magnitudes in a mental number line.

12.3 Individual Differences in Mental Development (p. 448)

12.3a Describe major approaches to defining and measuring intelligence.

During the school years, IQ becomes more stable and correlates moderately with academic achievement. Most intelligence tests yield an overall score as well as scores for separate intellectual factors.

Research combining the mental-testing approach with the information-processing approach to defining intelligence reveals a moderate relationship between processing speed and IQ and a strong association between executive function and general intelligence.

Sternberg’s triarchic theory of successful intelligence views intelligence as an interaction of analytical intelligence (information-processing skills), creative intelligence (ability to solve novel problems), and practical intelligence (application of intellectual skills in everyday situations).

Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences identifies at least eight mental abilities, each with a distinct biological basis and course of development. It calls attention to several intelligences in nonacademic domains not tapped by IQ scores and to a set of skills that has become known as emotional intelligence.

12.3b Describe evidence indicating that both heredity and environment contribute to intelligence.

Heritability estimates and adoption research reveal that intelligence is a product of both heredity and environment. A wealth of evidence indicates that poverty severely depresses the IQ scores of ethnic minority children. The Flynn effect, steady generational gains in IQ in many nations, is closely associated with extent of societal modernization.

IQ scores are also affected by culturally influenced language and communication styles, acquired knowledge, and sheer amount of time spent in school. Stereotype threat can trigger anxiety that impairs test performance. Dynamic assessment helps many minority children perform more competently on mental tests.

12.4 Language Development (p. 457)

12.4a Describe changes in school-age children’s metalinguistic awareness, vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatics.

Metalinguistic awareness contributes to language progress in middle childhood. Vocabulary growth accelerates, and children display a more precise and flexible understanding of word meanings. They also use more complex grammatical constructions and produce more organized, detailed, and expressive narratives.

12.4b Describe bilingual development, the cognitive benefits of bilingualism, and the effectiveness of bilingual education programs.

Children who are simultaneous bilinguals attain most language milestones according to a typical timetable. When preschool and school-age sequential bilinguals acquire their second language, they take from 1 to 5 years to attain the competence of native-speaking agemates.

Bilingual children have denser gray and white matter in areas of the brain devoted to language and are better at diverse executive function skills and certain aspects of metalinguistic awareness.

The benefits of sustained bilingual education throughout the school years has led to an increase in two-way language immersion programs in the United States.

12.5 Children’s Learning in School (p. 462)

12.5a Describe the influence of educational philosophies on children’s motivation and academic achievement.

Older students in traditional classrooms have a slight edge in academic achievement over those in constructivist classrooms, who gain in academic motivation, critical thinking, and social and moral maturity.

Vygotsky-inspired social-constructivist classrooms use the rich social context of the classroom to promote learning, often employing such methods as reciprocal teaching and communities of learners. Students benefit from teaching adapted to each child’s zone of proximal development and from collaborating with others.

12.5b Discuss the role of teacher–student interaction and grouping practices in academic achievement.

Caring, helpful, and stimulating teaching fosters children’s motivation and academic achievement. Educational self-fulfilling prophecies have a greater impact on low achievers than high achievers. Teachers who expect ethnic minority students to do poorly have a substantial self-fulfilling impact on their end-of-year academic achievement.

For collaboration with heterogeneous peers to result in achievement gains, children need extensive training in cooperative learning. Ethnically diverse magnet schools are also associated with higher achievement.

12.5c Describe academic benefits of, as well as concerns about, educational media.

Using screen media for schoolwork—including searching for information, preparing assignments, and playing academic and nonviolent adventure games—has cognitive benefits and is linked to improved achievement.

Low-SES children are disadvantaged in computer and Internet use, and boys spend more time with screen media than girls. Devoting excessive time to entertainment screen media predicts declines in school performance.

12.5d Describe conditions that promote successful placement of children with learning disabilities in regular classrooms.

Students with mild intellectual disability and learning disabilities are often placed in inclusive classrooms where they learn alongside typical students. Success depends on meeting individual academic needs and promoting positive peer relations.

12.5e Describe the characteristics of gifted children and efforts to meet their educational needs.

Giftedness includes high IQ, creativity, and talent. Tests of creativity that tap divergent thinking focus on only one of the ingredients of creativity. Highly talented children generally have warm, sensitive parents who nurture their exceptional abilities.

Gifted children thrive in learning environments that permit self-chosen topics for extended projects, encourage critical thinking and creativity, and enable interaction with like-minded peers.

12.5f Discuss factors that lead U.S. students to fall behind in academic achievement compared to students in top-achieving nations.

In international studies of achievement, U.S. students typically display average or below-average performance. Compared with education in top-achieving nations, U.S. instruction is less focused on high-level reasoning and critical thinking and less equitable across SES groups.

IMPORTANT TERMS AND CONCEPTS

attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (p. 437)

cognitive maps (p. 432)

cognitive self-regulation (p. 443)

communities of learners (p. 464)

concrete operational stage (p. 431)

constructivist classroom (p. 462)

convergent thinking (p. 469)

cooperative learning (p. 466)

creativity (p. 469)

decentration (p. 431)

divergent thinking (p. 469)

dynamic assessment (p. 456)

educational self-fulfilling prophecies (p. 465)

elaboration (p. 440)

Flynn effect (p. 454)

gifted (p. 469)

inclusive classrooms (p. 468)

learning disabilities (p. 468)

metalinguistic awareness (p. 457)

organization (p. 440)

reciprocal teaching (p. 463)

recursive thought (p. 443)

rehearsal (p. 440)

reversibility (p. 431)

seriation (p. 432)

social-constructivist classroom (p. 463)

stereotype threat (p. 455)

talent (p. 470)

theory of multiple intelligences (p. 451)

traditional classroom (p. 462)

transitive inference (p. 432)

triarchic theory of successful intelligence (p. 450)