Psychology Impact Assignment

Chapter 6

Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood

Malik is 8-1/2 years old and in the third grade. He lives in a blue-collar, urban neighborhood that borders on a much poorer section of the city. He’s on schedule when it comes to learning to read, and he’s particularly good in math. There are three kids in his class who are pulled out for an advanced math class, and he is one of them. The school’s playground has little to offer except a basketball hoop at one end. The most active and aggressive boys tend to take over that end of the playground during recess. Malik usually spends recess at the opposite end, with a couple of good friends, including his next-door neighbor, Benj. They like to play a complex game of tag, often negotiating and changing the rules.

Malik lives with his mother, father, grandmother, and 3-year-old twin brothers. All of the adults in his family work, and so after school each day Malik lets himself into their row home with his key, fixes himself a snack, and either does his homework or plays video games (usually the latter). He is not permitted outside, or to have friends in, unless one of his parents or grandmother is home to monitor him. His mom arrives home about 5:30, along with his brothers, who spend their weekdays in a child care center. After they talk for a bit, his mom expects Malik to take charge of the twins, playing games or reading to them while she prepares dinner. Malik is good at distracting the boys, and after being on his own for several hours he’s usually happy to have their company until everyone else gets home. When dinner is over, Malik has responsibility for taking out the trash, but otherwise, if his homework is done, he watches TV or plays video games with Benj until bedtime.

Development is so rapid during the early childhood years that it is not uncommon for parents to view their elementary school aged child as having grown up, almost overnight. However, children are still far from grown up in middle childhood. They face a whole new set of developmental challenges. Many youngsters begin to spend longer periods away from home, some face hours on their own, and all children must adjust to more rigorous schedules. They must learn to control their behavior, monitor their attention, and acquire formal and complicated academic competencies. They must make friends and learn to navigate the schoolyard, with its greater demands for athletic prowess, social skill, and cooperative negotiation of conflicts. They must also learn the rules of the group and when to abide by them. They must discover what it means to be male or female, not to mention what it means to be themselves. So many challenges await them.

However, children of elementary school age are also more adept at almost every task when compared to their preschool-aged siblings. Observing the eagerness and energy children exhibit in the early school years makes it easy to understand the capacity for industry that Erikson described (see Chapter 1). For most children, the challenges of school and peer group will be mastered gradually, and in many different ways. Armed with foundational skills in language, mobility, self-regulation, and understanding of self and others, the youngster is now poised to assume membership in a larger social network.

Clearly, the years of elementary school, as the years to follow, are marked by ups and downs. These normal fluctuations create opportunities for helpers to provide support or guidance for children, their families, and their teachers. What are the cognitive, emotional, and social needs of children at this stage? What approaches are most helpful given children’s developmental level? In the next two chapters, we will attempt to provide you with information that will be useful when working with children at this point in their development. Your understanding of cognitive development, the focus of this chapter, will enable you to understand children’s ways of construing the world, helping you appreciate their academic needs as well as the intellectual bases for their friendships, gender roles, moral understanding, and conflicts.

Brain and Behavior

Let’s begin by briefly considering the child’s changing brain. Changes in brain size and organization accompany the accomplishments of middle childhood. It is tempting to assume that these brain changes are “maturational,” that is, triggered by pre-programmed genetic activity. But remember the epigenetic process when you think about brain development: “it is the ongoing interaction of the organism and the environment that guides biological . . . development. Brains do not develop normally in the absence of genetic signaling, and they do not develop normally in the absence of essential and contingent environmental input” (emphasis added; Stiles, 2009, pp. 196–197). Put more positively, genes and experience dynamically interact to influence emerging brain organization (Stiles, Brown, Hoist, Hoist & Jernigan, 2015). There is no simple answer to the question, “Is this brain/behavioral change genetic or determined by experience?” It is both.

Even though the brain is at 95% of its peak size by age 6, it grows measurably in middle childhood (Blakemore, 2012; Mills et al., 2016). Cortical gray areas increase in volume up to about age 9 or 10, at least partly because the surface of the cortex expands (Mills et al., 2016; Ziegler, Ridgway, Blakemore, Ashburner, & Penny, 2017). There is some dispute about whether the cortex thickens during this period as well, or whether it starts to thin from about age 3 (Walhovd, Fjell, Giedd, Dale, & Brown, 2017). But there is no disagreement that much of the growth of the brain during childhood is due to increases in the volume of white matter (Piccolo et al., 2016; Walhovd et al., 2017). These brain changes slow down by late adolescence, although some continue into adulthood.

Let’s consider the growth of white matter in middle childhood. As you learned in Chapter 2, white matter is “white” because of the fatty myelin sheaths that form around the axons, insulating them so that electrical impulses travel faster from one neuron to another. Myelination increases the speed of neural signals dramatically. Also, functional neural networks become more integrated because myelin changes the timing and synchrony of neuronal firing (Giedd & Rapoport, 2010). Overall then, increasing white matter seems to reflect increasing neural connectivity and communication between neurons and between brain areas.

For example, one important area of white matter increase is the corpus callosum. This is the system of connecting fibers (bundles of axons) between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. As the corpus callosum myelinates, the left and right sides of the body become more coordinated. The upshot is that children have much greater motor control, something you can appreciate if you compare the awkward full frontal running of a 3-year-old to the ducking and weaving you might see by Malik and his friends as they avoid capture during a game of tag. Changes in the corpus callosum (along with other brain areas, like the cerebellum) influence and are influenced by the great strides school age children make in both gross motor (e.g., riding a bicycle, skating, climbing trees, jumping rope) and fine motor (e.g., cutting, drawing, writing) skills. Much of this chapter is focused on typical (normative) development in middle childhood, but there are many individual differences among children. Researchers are beginning to link some of these to brain development. For example, children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can show atypical variations in brain development (e.g., Sowell et al., 2003). Between 5% and 10% of school-age children are diagnosed with ADHD based on one or more of a cluster of symptoms that are especially problematic for school performance: poor attentional control (distractibility, problems sustaining attention), restlessness or hyperactivity. , and impulsivity (e.g., Martel, Levinson, Langer, & Nigg, 2016). Studies comparing structural MRIs for children with and without ADHD have found differences in several brain areas. These include the frontal lobes, where normative growth is associated with improvements in attention and other higher order cognitive processes. Other areas include the parietal lobes, basal ganglia, corpus callosum, and cerebellum (e.g., Friedman & Rapoport, 2015; Kumar, Arya, & Agarwal, 2017; Wyciszkiewicz, Pawlak, & Krawiec, 2017).

For many children with ADHD, the “difference” is really a delay, especially in the growth of the cerebral cortex. The middle prefrontal cortex shows the greatest delay, with growth for ADHD children lagging behind typically developing children by as much as 5 years (e.g., Shaw et al., 2007, 2012). Fortunately, about half of ADHD cases diagnosed in childhood remit by late adolescence or early adulthood. For those children, it appears that brain development follows a delayed but typical trajectory. For cases of ADHD that do not remit, researchers have found unusual, progressive loss of brain volume in some brain areas, such as the cerebellum (Mackie et al., 2007; Shaw et al., 2013). Note that there is some disagreement about whether ADHD actually comprises more than one disorder, with different frontal brain areas more affected in one type versus another (see Diamond, 2005).

Many children not diagnosed with ADHD are behaviorally different from average—they have better or worse attentional control or they are more or less impulsive or active than other children their age. Giedd and Rapoport (2010) suggest that “ADHD is best considered dimensionally, lying at the extreme of a continuous distribution of symptoms and underlying cognitive impairments” (p. 730). In line with this argument, they report that for children who are considered typically developing but more active and impulsive than average, brain changes also take place at a slower rate. Thus, researchers are beginning to identify some neurological differences among children that align with their behavioral differences. In general, helpers need to remember that there is a significant amount of unevenness in brain development in middle childhood, both between and within children (e.g., Berninger & Hart, 1992; Myers et al., 2014). It is not unusual for children to show lagging performance in some skills and more rapid advances in other skills than their age mates.

Cognitive Development

When children leave behind the preschool years, they begin to seem more savvy to adults. As you saw with Malik, they can be given fairly complex responsibilities (“Come straight home from school and lock the door after you’re in the house. Don’t forget to have a snack and then do your homework.”). They can participate in discussions of local or world events, and they often appreciate humor that would have been lost on them earlier. The cognitive developments that underlie these new capacities have been described and studied from several different theoretical traditions. We will first present Jean Piaget’s characterization of cognitive change in middle childhood.

Piaget’s View: The Emergence of Concrete Operations

Let’s review the basic points you have already learned about Piaget’s description of cognitive development. One key idea is that knowledge is constructed; it is not just “stamped in” by experience or teaching. Children assimilate new information, meaning that they change it, interpreting it in ways that fit in with what they already know or with the way their thinking is structured. Simultaneously, they accommodate or adjust their existing knowledge structures somewhat. The result can be that when children are presented with new information, what they actually learn and understand about it often is not completely consistent with reality or with the information that adults mean to convey. Gradually, as new experiences are assimilated and accommodated, children’s knowledge and understanding come closer and closer to matching reality.

The Construction of Knowledge in Middle Childhood

Children in the middle years are confronted with lots of new information every day, especially in school. Let’s consider one illustration: the information that the Earth is round. Children all over the world are taught the “round Earth concept” early in elementary school. But the Earth looks flat, so much so that for thousands of years, until Copernicus came along in the 16th century, even scholars believed that it was flat. It will not surprise you then that children start out believing that the Earth is flat. So how do they reconcile what they believe, based on what they perceive, with what they are told? Piaget (1929) and many other researchers since have found that children construct some surprising theories as they try to fit the information their elders give them to the concepts they already have.

For example, Vosniadou and her colleagues did a series of studies interviewing children about how the Earth could be round. Figure 6.1 illustrates a few of the ideas Minnesota children in grades 1 to 5 came up with (Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992). It appears that children begin by trying to fit the information that the Earth is round to their naïve view that the Earth is flat. Some children said the Earth was a flat disc—like a coin. Some thought it was a ball that has a flat surface within it and a domed sky overhead. Others saw the Earth as spherical but with a flattened side where people live. The researchers found that the older the child, the more likely he was to represent the Earth as the sphere that scientists believe it to be. But even in fifth grade, 40% of the children still had some other idea of what it meant for the Earth to be round. Similar ideas have been found among school children from countries around the world, including Israel, Nepal, India, Greece, Samoa, Australia, and China (see Hayes, Goodhew, Heit, & Gillan, 2003; Tao, Oliver, & Venville, 2013), and from different subcultures within the United States (e.g., Native Americans; Diakidoy, Vosniadou, & Hawks, 1997).

It appears that what adults teach is not necessarily what children learn. One of the practical implications of Piaget’s constructivism is that teachers are likely to be more effective in promoting change in children’s naïve concepts if they are mindful of how new information is being assimilated and accommodated by their students. Asking probing questions can be quite useful. Carey (e.g., 2000, 2015) has argued that it helps to know as much about the structure of children’s current conceptual ideas or “theories” as possible. Then, teaching can focus on modifying the pieces of the structure that are, in a sense, supporting each other. So, for example, Vosniadou’s interviews of children about round Earth concepts uncovered that two important beliefs were connected. First, children saw the Earth as flat. Second, children had a simple idea of gravity: Things fall down, not up, which makes it difficult to understand why things wouldn’t fall off the Earth on the “bottom side” of a round Earth. Some of children’s strange models of a round Earth were efforts to integrate the round earth concept with both of these ideas.

Logical Thinking and Problem Solving in Middle Childhood

You’ll recall that despite the gradual construction process that Piaget described, in which knowledge structures are continually changing, he considered there to be stages of thought development, so that within a relatively broad period of time, children’s thinking about many different things has some similar organizational properties. We have already discussed some of the characteristics that Piaget attributed to the sensorimotor (0 to 2 years) and preoperational (2 to 6 or 7 years) stages (see Chapter 3). In this chapter, we will consider his view of children’s thinking in the concrete operational stage, the period spanning the elementary school years from about age 6 to 12.

To understand how Piaget described the thinking of school-aged children, recall the limitations of the younger, preoperational thinker. Generally, preschoolers focus on one salient dimension of a situation at a time, and so they often miss the important relationships among aspects of a situation. Logical thinking is difficult to characterize, but it certainly includes the ability to recognize and take into account all of the relevant information in a problem situation and then to identify how those pieces of relevant information are related to each other. Consider the following simple problem in deductive logic: “All glippies are annoying. George is a glippy. Is George annoying?” To answer correctly, you must take into account a number of pieces of information—that there are glippies, that they are annoying, that there is an individual named George, and that George is a glippy. The important relationship you are then in a position to identify is between George and the characteristics of glippies: If he’s one of them, he must be like them. From there you can infer that George is, indeed, annoying.

As we saw in Chapter 3, in very simple situations, even preschoolers can sometimes take into account more than one piece of information at a time. For example, sometimes they can solve very simple deductive inference problems, like the glippy problem (e.g., Blewitt, 1989; Smith, 1979). But more often, their thinking is centered, making it seem quite illogical. Remember the number conservation problems that Piaget invented? Three-year-olds actually think that the number of candies in a row increases if the row is spread out. They focus (center) on the change in length, but they fail to note the corresponding change in the density of the row.

When children are in the concrete operational stage, they usually answer number conservation questions correctly. They may look at the “spread out” row of candies and say “it looks like more,” but they can logically conclude that it remains the same number of candies as before. Piaget argued that their logic is dependent on being able to understand the relationship between the row’s increasing length and decreasing density (the candies are not as close together). Because children can decenter (think about more than one dimension of the situation at once), they can discover the relationships among those dimensions.

The compensatory relationship between the length and density of the row of candies is a kind of reversible relationship. In essence, one change reverses the effects of the other change. Piaget thought that being able to recognize reversible relationships is especially important for solving many kinds of logical problems, allowing children a deeper understanding of the world around them. For example, preschoolers can learn the following two number facts: “2 + 1 = 3” and “3 – 1 = 2.” But only when a child recognizes reversible relationships is he likely to realize that the second fact is the inverse of the first and therefore that they are logically connected. If the first fact is true, then the second fact must be true. To put it differently, knowing the first fact allows the child to deduce the second one if he can think reversibly. When children’s thinking becomes efficient enough to decenter, and thus to identify reversible relationships, children can begin to draw logical conclusions in many situations. This is the hallmark of the concrete operational child.

Piaget also identified limits to concrete operations. School-aged children seem to be most capable when the problems they are solving relate to concrete contents, and they seem to expect their solutions to map onto the real world in a straightforward way. But when a problem is disconnected from familiar, realistic content, these children have a difficult time identifying the relevant aspects of the problem and finding how those aspects are related to each other. Here are two versions of the same logical problem. (Logicians call it a modus tollens conditional reasoning problem.) The first version is completely abstract—disconnected from any familiar content. The second is framed in terms of familiar, concrete events (adapted from Markovits, 2017). Try to solve the first one before reading the second one.

1. Suppose it is true that if P occurs, then Q occurs. And suppose that Q has not occurred. Has P occurred?

2. Suppose that it is true that if a rock is thrown at a window, then the window will break. And suppose that the window is not broken. Has a rock been thrown at the window?

3. The logical relationship among the pieces of information is the same for each problem, and the answer to each is the same: “No.” Concrete operational children can usually give the right answer to the second problem, but not the first. You may have found the first problem more difficult too; most of us find completely abstract problems a challenge. But we adults are much more likely to solve them correctly than elementary school children.

Here is another example of how important concrete experience is for elementary school children to think logically. In a classic study, Osherson and Markman (1975) asked children to say whether certain statements were true, false, or “can’t tell.” The experimenter made statements such as “The [poker] chip in my hand is either green or it’s not green.” Sometimes the poker chip was visible; at other times the chip was hidden in the experimenter’s fist. If the chip were hidden, children in the elementary school years would usually say, “can’t tell,” asking to see the chip to judge the statement. But the statement’s truth was not determined by the actual color of the chip; it was determined by the linguistic elements in the sentence and the relationships between them (e.g., “either-or”). No check with the concrete world was necessary or even helpful. A chip, any chip, is either green or it’s not. In other words, the abstract, formal properties of the statement, not concrete objects, were the contents of importance. Concrete operational children find it difficult to think logically about abstract contents, and they seek out concrete or realistic equivalents to think about in order to solve a problem.

Children’s tendency to “hug the ground of empirical reality” (Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 1993, p. 139) is especially obvious when they need to think logically about their own thinking. Suppose for a moment that you are a child who believes you have a pair of lucky socks. You think that if you wear your lucky socks, you’re more likely to hit a home run playing baseball than if you don’t wear them. To test this theory scientifically, you would need to weigh the evidence, pro and con. But before you could do this effectively, you would need to recognize that your belief about your lucky socks is really an assumption or a theory, only one of many possible theories. As such, it could be wrong. Because you already believe your theory, it will seem like a fact to you. You would need to apply careful logical thinking to your own thought processes, first to distinguish your belief from true facts or observations and then to see the relationship between your theory and those facts. However, if you are 8 or 9 years old, you have trouble thinking logically about anything abstract, and theories (or thoughts) are certainly abstract. So, logically evaluating any of your own beliefs or theories is not likely to be easy for you.

Children’s tendency to “hug the ground of empirical reality” (Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 1993, p. 139) is especially obvious when they need to think logically about their own thinking. Suppose for a moment that you are a child who believes you have a pair of lucky socks. You think that if you wear your lucky socks, you’re more likely to hit a home run playing baseball than if you don’t wear them. To test this theory scientifically, you would need to weigh the evidence, pro and con. But before you could do this effectively, you would need to recognize that your belief about your lucky socks is really an assumption or a theory, only one of many possible theories. As such, it could be wrong. Because you already believe your theory, it will seem like a fact to you. You would need to apply careful logical thinking to your own thought processes, first to distinguish your belief from true facts or observations and then to see the relationship between your theory and those facts. However, if you are 8 or 9 years old, you have trouble thinking logically about anything abstract, and theories (or thoughts) are certainly abstract. So, logically evaluating any of your own beliefs or theories is not likely to be easy for you.

As a result, researchers have found that although elementary-school-aged children can think scientifically sometimes, identifying simple theories and checking them against evidence, they make a muddle of it if they already believe a certain theory (e.g., Kuhn & Franklin, 2006; Moshman, 2015). Children get better at evaluating their own theories as they move into adolescence and become capable of what Piaget called formal operational thought—logical thought about abstract material. As you will see in Chapter 9, adolescents often extend their logical thought processes to many kinds of highly abstract contents, including their own thinking. As you have already seen though, even adolescents and adults find this kind of abstract thinking a challenge and may make some of the same errors as concrete thinkers.

Even though middle childhood has its cognitive limitations, Piaget was on to something in identifying it as a time when children can be expected to think logically. In every culture in the world, adults seem to recognize that somewhere between ages 5 and 7 children become more sensible, reliable problem solvers. In societies with formal schooling, kids are sent to school to work at serious tasks that will prepare them to take their place in the community of adults. In societies without formal schooling, children are given real work to do by age 6 or 7, tasks that are essential to the community (such as watching younger children, planting, or shepherding).

Piaget’s description of the concrete operational child as a logical thinker about concrete contents has proved a useful one, and it seems to capture the typical cognitive characteristics of middle childhood quite well. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, some of Piaget’s own research and much of the newer work makes it clear that there are no sharply defined stages in development. Just as adults sometimes have trouble thinking clearly about abstract problems, younger children sometimes solve problems that we might expect only adolescents or adults to manage. Take a concept like “proportionality” in math. It refers to a relationship between two things, such that if one thing changes by a certain ratio the other thing will change by the same ratio (e.g., we might find that the amount of food children eat is proportional to how much they grow). Proportionality is an abstract concept that generally is difficult for children to reason correctly about before age 11 or 12 (e.g., Inhelder & Piaget, 1955/1958). But with some materials, especially liquids, even 6- and 7-year-olds find the concept easier to intuit, and they often solve proportionality problems correctly with these materials (Boyer, Levine, & Huttenlocher, 2008).

On the whole, logical thinking seems to emerge over an extended period of development and “must be achieved at successively greater levels of complexity” (Kuhn, 2011, p. 502). Many factors affect how advanced a child’s reasoning will be in any situation. Among these are the particular properties of the materials or context (as proportionality problems illustrate); the child’s general knowledge; his experience with the technology he is using (see Box 6.1); and his particular expertise (see Ricco, 2015). Expertise refers to how much a child has learned about a specific domain of knowledge (that is, a particular subject matter or content area). If a child has a lot of knowledge about a particular domain, say dinosaurs or chess, his ability to think logically about problems within that domain is often more advanced than in other content areas (Chi, Hutchinson, & Robin, 1989). It seems that a child or adult with a lot of domain knowledge is better at identifying the important features of a problem within that domain and at identifying the relationships among those important features (Moran & Gardner, 2006). Thus, logical thinking is at least somewhat domain specific (that is, applicable to a particular area of knowledge) rather than strictly domain general and determined by one’s stage of development, as Piaget’s stage theory implies. For a child who loves experimenting with chemistry sets, reasoning about chemistry is likely to advance more quickly than for a child whose passion in music.

Box 6.1: Techno-Kids: Cognitive Development in a Wired World

Across from the reference desk at the local public library, Kim, Jeanine, and Serena, third-grade classmates, huddle together in front of a computer screen, looking for information for a group project. They are accustomed to using computers, both at home and at school. As the girls take turns speedily clicking the mouse, scanning screens, jumping from one webpage to another, an elderly woman at the next desk observes them with wonder. She too is using a computer, but the children have a facility and comfort with the equipment that she can only dream about. How else might their “tech savvy” make them different from the woman? Are there developmental consequences for children to having easy access to television, video, computer games, the Internet, or any of the myriad electronic media that are part of our technologically saturated environment? Are the consequences different depending on whether access begins early or late in childhood? What practical advice should helpers give to parents who want to protect their children from harm but also to provide them with the advantages that make sense?

These are among the questions that developmental scientists are tackling, as a technological tsunami engulfs us. Let’s consider some of what we have learned so far.

Infants and Toddlers

Babies automatically orient to novel stimuli. Visual electronic media like television, videos, and computer games tend to draw their attention with rapidly changing sights and sounds. There is little evidence that this attentional pull is good for very young children and some evidence that it may be harmful (see Kostyrka-Allchorne, Cooper, & Simpson, 2017). In longitudinal studies of television use, Christakis and his colleagues (Christakis, 2011; Zimmerman & Christakis, 2007) found a link between infant/toddler viewing and later attention problems, even though several other sources of attention difficulties, such as low family income, were controlled in their research. In one study, the more television children watched before age 3, the more likely they were to have difficulty regulating attention at age 7. In a second study, the actual content of television programs turned out to be important. Amount of educational television viewing (e.g., Barney, Sesame Street) before age 3 was not a predictor of attention problems later, but children’s entertainment television (e.g., cartoons) was. Also, the more violent the content, the more serious the later attention problems were. The researchers hypothesize that a key factor in these content differences may be the pacing of visual and auditory changes. Entertainment programming tends to have shorter scenes with more frequent changes that may “overstimulate the developing brain” (Zimmerman & Christakis, 2007, p. 990). Language use is also much more quickly paced in these programs than the slower “parentese” that young children hear in actual interaction with adults (see Chapter 3); educational programs are more likely to mimic the pacing of parentese.

While some studies implicate early video viewing as a cause of attention problems, not all researchers have found similar associations. In the research where links have been found there may be alternative explanations (Courage & Setliff, 2009). For example, temperament differences in infants and toddlers predict how much video viewing parents allow them to do (Brand, Hardesty, & Dixon, 2011; Brand & Dixon, 2013). Children who are difficult to soothe watch more TV, probably because parents find that it has a calming effect on them. Attention problems at 7 or 8 may be the result of these early temperament differences instead of the amount of early TV viewing children have done.

Do infants and toddlers actually learn from videos that are intended to be educational? Marketers claim great educational benefits, but the evidence does not support these claims (Barr, 2013; Choi & Kirkorian, 2016). For example, DeLoache and her colleagues (2010) tested the effectiveness of a best-selling DVD designed and marketed for infants from “12 months and up.” The video shows a variety of house and yard scenes and repeatedly presents labels for household objects. Parents enthusiastically endorse the video in marketing testimonials. Yet babies who watched the video at least 4 times a week over 4 weeks performed no better on a test of the target words than babies who never viewed the video. In a condition where mothers were asked to teach the target words to their babies “in whatever way seems natural to you” over a 4-week period, those children performed substantially better on the final word test than babies who had watched the video. Interestingly, mothers who liked the video also believed that their babies had learned a lot from it, even though they had not, which may account for some of the enthusiastic testimonials on marketing websites!

These findings are consistent with a survey of over 1,000 parents of 2- to 24-month-old children (Zimmerman, Christakis, & Meltzoff, 2007). Parents reported on the children’s video viewing (including television) and completed a measure of children’s language development. For 8- to 16-month-olds, viewing “educational” DVDs was actually linked to a slower pace of language development, and the more viewing there was the worse the language delay was (even when factors such as SES were controlled; although see Ferguson & Donellan, 2013 for a different interpretation). Sometimes parents interact in positive ways with babies when they watch educational media together. When they do, children seem to learn more, but high quality interactions are much more likely when there is no TV or video playing (Simcock, Garrity, & Barr, 2011). Twelve- to 30-month-olds can learn to some degree from video—for example, they will imitate some of the actions that they see on screen—but they imitate substantially more when they witness live demonstrations of the same actions (Barr, 2013).

In sum, it is still uncertain whether early use of electronic media actually causes harm (such as later attention problems) (e.g., Fields, 2016). But one thing is clear. These media can displace, or take time away from, other activities that are more critical for positive cognitive development. Interactions with sensitive, responsive adults are central to the processes of acquiring language skills, building event and autobiographical memories, and learning about emotions, the self, and others. The “full body” exploration of objects and spaces that characterizes early play—smelling, tasting, manipulating, climbing, opening, closing, putting together, taking apart—helps babies and toddlers build a foundation of temporal, spatial, and physical knowledge that prepares them for later developments (see Chapter 3). Unfortunately, even when they are engaged in play with objects, if a television is on in the background, babies frequently turn toward the screen, reducing the length of play episodes and disrupting focused attention (Schmidt, Pempek, Kirkorian, Lund, & Anderson, 2008). Short play episodes and reduced attention during play are “marker(s) for poor developmental outcome” (Schmidt et al., 2008, p. 1148). Despite such concerns, many parents and other caregivers give infants and toddlers access to these media. For example, one startling finding from a large survey of families by Common Sense Media in 2013 is that 16% of infants and 37% of 2- to 4-year-olds in the United States actually had televisions in their bedrooms. Concerns about brain and behavioral development have led the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to recommend no use of digital media (e.g., television, videos, and computer games) for children under 18 to 24 months of age, except for video-chatting (Council on Communications and Media, 2016a). For 18- to 24-month-old toddlers, the AAP suggests that parents might introduce a child to digital media with high quality programming if child and adult watch or play together, but recommends no solo viewing yet.

Children and Adolescents

As children grow older, controlled exposure to electronic media is less problematic for perceptual and cognitive development. For example, television watching by 4- and 5-year-olds does not appear to be associated with long-term attentional problems (Stevens & Muslow, 2006; Zimmerman & Christakis, 2007), although children this age are still likely to have short-term attention difficulties after watching violent programs (Freidrich & Stein, 1973; Geist & Gibson, 2000). On the positive side, preschoolers’ experience with some age-appropriate educational programming, such as Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer, is linked to improved school readiness, vocabulary growth and better number skills by kindergarten (Anderson & Kirkorian, 2015), and with better school achievement by adolescence (Kostyrka-Allchorne et al., 2017), even when other characteristics of the home environment and parenting are controlled. Among the features to look for in quality programming for young children are “the use of child-directed speech, elicitation of responses, object labeling, and/or a coherent storybook-like framework throughout the show” (Bavelier, Green, & Dye, 2010, p. 693). Unfortunately, the more exposure to entertainment programming in the preschool and elementary school years, including child-directed programming like cartoons, the less likely children are to perform well in school. Just as we have seen with infants and toddlers, part of the problem seems to be that watching television displaces more achievement-related activities. Another problem may be that early television exposure socializes children’s tastes, building preferences for superficial, rapid action, formulaic sequences and plots, and reducing the appeal of slower paced, more intellectually challenging entertainment, such as reading and puzzle solving (Comstock & Sharrer, 2006). What are the costs and benefits when children use interactive media, such as computers and gaming devices? To begin, there is little doubt or disagreement that giving all children means and opportunity to become computer literate is an important educational goal. Learning to use basic computer software and the Internet as tools for acquiring, organizing, storing, and communicating information should be part of every child’s experience. Some schools are even teaching basic programming in elementary school, another useful skill for children in today’s world. Individuals who lack computer skills will be disadvantaged in many settings, especially the workplace. Also, having access to computer technology and the Internet can benefit academic performance. For example, Jackson et al. (2006) analyzed data from HomeNetToo, a longitudinal project in which low-income families were offered free computers, Internet access, and in-home technical support in return for permission to monitor each family member’s Internet use. Children in these families were mostly low achievers in school, but those who used the Internet more during the 16 months of the project had higher GPAs and reading achievement scores at the end (but not at the beginning) than children who used it less. The authors suggest that surfing web pages gave children substantially more reading practice than they would otherwise have had, helping to explain the benefits.

Such benefits do not seem to be limited to low-income children. In another longitudinal study, 1,000 adolescents from a range of backgrounds were surveyed in the 9th or 10th grade and then again in the 11th or 12th grade (Willoughby, 2008). Controlling for factors such as parents’ education, moderate use of the Internet (about 1 to 2 hours per day) was more predictive of better school grades than either nonuse or high levels of use. It appears that nonuse is an academic liability in today’s schools and that excessive use is also problematic.

Academic performance today depends on achieving a balance between on- and off-screen activities (Anderson & Kirkorkian, 2015). Another study of reading skills helps to demonstrate. As you have just seen, the more that low-income children use the Internet, the better they tend to score on standardized tests of reading, apparently because of the practice that reading web pages gives them. But if screen use displaces reading books and other printed matter, then children’s reading skills are likely to suffer. In a large study of 8- to 13-year-olds in Great Britain, the larger proportion of reading kids did on screen versus with print material, the more poorly they performed on measures of reading (Clark, 2012). That may be because off-screen reading sources often provide more challenging content. Electronic games, whether they are played on a computer or on some other platform, such as an Xbox or Play Station, can help develop the skills that the games use (see Markey & Ferguson, 2017). There is more esearch on these practice effects with adults than with children, but for skills that have been studied in children the same benefits apply, and they seem to be wide ranging, from improvements in vision and attention to refinements in motor skills. For example, playing action video games improves the ability to find small details in cluttered scenes or to see dim signals (Benady-Chorney, Yau, Zeighami, Bohbot, & West, 2018). Many studies indicate that playing action video games also can improve children’s visual-spatial abilities, such as spatial rotation skill. The latter involves looking at an image of a three-dimensional object or scene and recognizing a representation of that object or scene from another perspective, a skill that many games use (Uttal et al., 2013) and that plays an important role in mathematical problem solving (Newcombe, Levine, & Mix, 2015). Some games are designed specifically for educational purposes, such as improving math skills or vocabulary. Some are effective; some are not. Many are not substitutes for other educational experiences, but can be helpful supports. Interestingly, younger children seem to prefer educational games to games designed purely for entertainment.

Research on the cognitive benefits of interactive media for children is in its infancy. There is certainly potential not only for teaching specific knowledge or skills but also for achieving broader cognitive impact (see Adachi & Willoughby, 2017). Imagine a program that asks probing questions and encourages the child to hypothesize solutions, then to test and evaluate hypotheses, and so on. Or consider that many games have multiple levels of skill and require extended practice and intensive effort, rewarding the persistent player with the pleasure of achieving mastery at one level and the opportunity to face the challenge of a new level (e.g., Gee, 2007). These kinds of experiences seem likely to promote good problem solving and learning strategies if they generalize to other situations. But whether they do is not yet clear (see Markey & Ferguson, 2017, for a discussion of when learning from video games is likely to transfer).

Extrapolating from decades of research on children’s television viewing, it seems very likely that the content of a game or web page, along with the level of parent or teacher engagement in screening, explaining, and discussing that content, is more important than the electronic tool that delivers the content. What we know about television is that educational content can promote learning, and prosocial portrayals encourage prosocial behavior. Violent content can promote aggressive behavior, at least for individuals who are prone to aggression, and, as we noted earlier, may have problematic consequences for the development of attention in very young children. Exposure to explicit sexual content and to sexism (e.g., women washing floors, men washing cars) and pervasive commercial propaganda about what is “fun” and important to own affect children’s beliefs and values about sexual behavior, gender, and what is important in life. We also know that when caring, knowledgeable adults help children to choose content and when they join children in their media use, scaffold their problem solving, and discuss and interpret media messages, children are less negatively and more positively affected (see Calvert, 2015).

Guidelines for Parents

When should interactive media be introduced? Experts tend to agree that children under age 2 are better off not being “wired” at all, but opinions about access for preschoolers are much more mixed. On the one hand, organizations like the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media (2012) are cautiously in favor of integrating “developmentally appropriate” exposure to computers and educational software into the preschool classroom. On the other hand, many researchers emphasize the dangers of preschool computer use, especially because time with electronic media displaces social interaction, pretend play, and constructive, creative problem solving in the three-dimensional world (e.g., Healy, 1998). Unfortunately, although some truly constructive computer learning games are available, much of the programming for preschoolers is focused on superficial and largely rote activities. Research on electronic books, for example, suggests that children’s attention is often drawn to flashy elements—such as clicking on icons that are peripheral to the story—at the expense of attending to the story. The result is that children’s story comprehension is not as good with electronic books as it is with traditional books (Bus, Takacs, & Kegel, 2015; Parish-Morris, Mahajan, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Fuller Collins, 2013). There are also concerns about possible health effects: muscular skeletal injuries, visual strain, and obesity due to inactivity (Alliance for Childhood, 2000). Because of such concerns, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP; 2016a) recommends limiting screen time for 2- to 5-year-olds to 1 hour a day. They also urge that adults choose quality programming, and that parents view with children to help them understand the content and learn how to apply it to the real world (Council on Communications and Media, 2016a).

For children older than 6 or 7, the AAP suggests developing a clear plan for family media use (Council on Communications and Media, 2016b). The primary concerns are that parents control content exposure and set time limits on media use so that it does not displace other important developmental experiences. Children should avoid screen use for one hour before bedtime and should not sleep with devices in their bedrooms. Parents also need to monitor whom their children communicate with through the Internet, scaffold children’s efforts to master programs, and help children to evaluate not only programming content but also commercial messages, which can be as ubiquitous on the Internet as they are on television.

Parents and educators need to recognize that to make effective use of computers and the Internet in the classroom, teachers must be well trained in their use and know how to judge the value of educational programs (e.g., Roschelle, Pea, Hoadley, Gordin, & Means, 2000). Does the teacher, for example, know how to guide children to information that comes from a reliable, objective source as opposed to a source with an agenda (commercial or cause driven)? Time and money invested in teacher training is at least as important as investments in hardware and software. “The best results from all technology use for children come accompanied by a skilled adult ‘coach’ who adds language, empathy, and flexibility” (Healy, 1998, p. 247).

A number of authors and organizations provide helpful guidelines and information for parents and educators, who often are not as savvy or comfortable with newer electronic media as children are. Some valuable websites are:

American Academy of Pediatrics (aac.org) U.S. Department of Education (ed.gov) Common Sense Media (commonsensemedia.org) The Children’s Partnership (childrenspartnership.org) Children Now (childrennow.org) Entertainment Software Rating Board (esrb.org) Center for Media Literacy (medialit.org)

An Alternative Perspective: The Information Processing Approach

Many interesting studies of middle childhood cognition—especially memory and problem solving—have been done by researchers in the information processing tradition. Information processing theories compare cognitive functioning to a computer’s processing of information (see Chapter 1). The structural organization of the cognitive system is thought to be the same throughout development. A typical example of the kinds of structural components through which information is thought to “flow” during cognitive processing is presented in Figure 6.2. In this view, there are no qualitative, stage-like changes that characterize most of a child’s thinking or processing. There are some changes with time, however, mostly in the amount and efficiency with which information can be processed. With increasing age, children can work with more information at once, and the strategies that children use to organize, understand, or remember information may also change. However, children apply different processing strategies to different specific contents, such as math, reading, and spatial concepts, so that strategies are not usually considered to be the result of broad cognitive skills that are applied across different domains. Instead, strategies appear to be largely domain specific.

Information processing researchers focus heavily on what children do with information of particular kinds: what they pay attention to, how they encode it, what and how much information they store, what other information they link it with, and how they retrieve it. In other words, information processing theories are focused on the mechanics of thinking. A Piagetian researcher might try to demonstrate that one cognitive achievement, perhaps in math, is related to another, perhaps in social perspective taking, to illustrate the global effects of some underlying stage characteristic. An information processing researcher typically tries to track the specific information handling that underlies a child’s increasing mastery of a single domain.

The skills that appear to guide the flow of information are called executive functions (EFs), as you saw in Chapter 3. These include working memory, self-regulation (or inhibitory control), and cognitive flexibility. Improvements in the efficiency of these skills in particular are seen as supporting other cognitive advances throughout childhood. Longitudinal studies find that good executive functions in childhood are related to many positive outcomes in adolescence (e.g., frustration tolerance) and adulthood (e.g., higher socioeconomic status) (Zelazo & Carlson, 2012). Interestingly, some of the negative consequences of poverty on children’s academic performance are related to slower development of executive functions in poor children. As you have seen in earlier chapters, many children in low-income families experience chronic stress, which affects neuroendocrine pathways and the development of the body’s typical reactions to stress. This in turn affects how well children can modulate their emotions and exercise control over attention and other higher order cognitive functions (e.g., Obradović, 2016).

As EFs improve, children get better at consciously controlling their thinking (e.g., planning, strategically problem solving), their actions (e.g., inhibiting automatic responses), and their emotions. Self-regulation or inhibitory control is typically quite good by the end of middle childhood. For example, Bunge and colleagues (2002) asked 8- to 12-year-olds to push a button on the left side of a panel if a central arrow pointed to the left and to push a button on the right if the central arrow pointed to the right. It’s a simple task—unless the central arrow is surrounded by arrows pointing the wrong way. Then it takes some doing to inhibit the tendency to push the button that all the other arrows point toward. Children were not as good at the task as adults, but they nonetheless were about 90% accurate.

Children show improvement on measures of executive functions through middle childhood and adolescence (Boelema et al., 2014; Zelazo et al., 2013; see Zelazo, Blair, & Willoughby, 2017 for a review). Neural circuits that heavily involve the prefrontal cortex mediate these functions, and their development is dependent on experience or practice. Genetic processes are certainly at work here, but social, cultural, and educational experiences make important contributions (see Hughes, Roman, & Ensor, 2014). The role of experience is clear when we examine cross-cultural differences in executive functions. From early childhood through adolescence, children from Asian countries, such as Japan and China, make more rapid progress in the development of executive functions than children from Western countries, such as Great Britain and the United States, even though adults in these different countries eventually achieve similar levels of performance on EF tasks (e.g., Ellefson, Ng, Wang, & Hughes, 2017; Imada, Carlson, & Itakura, 2013). Culturally based differences in socialization practices may be important here. For example, Asian parents put more emphasis than Western parents on teaching children to inhibit their own desires in order to conform with the collectivist (versus individualistic) norms of their culture. Such practices may encourage earlier development of some self-regulation skills.

Information processing theorists have traditionally paid special attention to the executive function of working memory and its role in cognitive development. This is the part of the cognitive machinery that holds information we are actively thinking about at the moment. It “works” with that information in ways that allow us to maintain our attention, to plan, to solve problems, and to learn. That’s why it is depicted so centrally in Figure 6.2.

You will also notice in Figure 6.2 that some information coming in from the senses bypasses working memory. This is because information processing seems to occur at two general levels (e.g., Evans & Stanovich, 2013; Ricco, 2015). The first level of processing tends to be automatic, intuitive, and unintentional. Processes of this type are usually fast, and they do not need working memory. They are sometimes called “bottom up” processes. So, for example, you might automatically jump up when you hear the soft beeping sound of your microwave. You’re conditioned to do it and you do not need to make a conscious decision to respond. In comparison, working memory and other EFs govern a second level of processing that is slower, more intentional, and deliberative. These are sometimes called “top-down” processes (e.g., Diamond, 2013). If you are conditioned to react to the sound of your microwave, not responding to the sound might actually require that you use your working memory to think through what you want and take conscious control of your behavior.

We will take a closer look at working memory and its development later in this chapter. You will also learn more about the importance and modifiability of executive functions during middle childhood in the Applications section.

Some Other Approaches to Understanding Cognitive Development

The influence of both Piagetian and information processing approaches has fueled a rapid increase in our understanding of cognitive development, and it is not surprising that some theorists have attempted to marry the best components of each. NeoPiagetians explain Piaget’s stages, or revise the stages, using many information processing concepts (e.g., Case, 1985, 1992; Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Halford & Andrews, 2006; Pascual-Leone & Johnson, 2017). For example, Case (1985) specifies four stages comparable to Piaget’s, but explains the transition from one to another partly in terms of increases in the capacity of working memory. Another example, offered by Halford and colleagues (see Halford, 2014; Halford & Andrews, 2006), analyzes many of Piaget’s tasks in terms of “complexity theory.” Instead of assessing logical problem solving as dependent on how concrete or abstract the contents are, they suggest that the difficulty children have with problems depends on the number of variables that must be related to each other, that is, the size of the “processing load.” The idea is that younger children can process fewer variables at once than older children.

Theory theorists (see Carey et al., 2015; Gopnik & Wellman, 2012) suggest that children quite spontaneously construct theories about how the world works: about mind, matter, physical causality, and biology. Many theory theorists argue that humans have some innate knowledge of these domains, even in infancy, which is not consistent with Piaget’s view. And theory theorists do not typically agree with the idea of stage-like changes in overall cognitive functioning. But following Piaget, theory theorists are constructivists. They claim that children’s understandings in each conceptual domain are re-constructed over time, as children acquire new information. Children’s efforts to include information about the Earth being round into their concept of the physical world is an example. Like neoPiagetians, most theory theorists see executive functions as the mechanisms that make re-construction possible. Working memory, for example, makes it possible to hold more information in mind while reflecting on problems within a domain.

Focus on Memory: Why Does It Improve in Middle Childhood?

So far, we have considered major theoretical approaches to explaining cognitive development in middle childhood. We have talked about conceptual change (e.g., the round Earth concept) and the growth of logical reasoning skills (e.g., deductive inference) to illustrate these theories. Now, let’s focus on another cognitive ability, memory. By examining how memory improves during the elementary school years, you will be able to see how a whole host of factors contribute to the growth of intellectual functioning.

Let’s begin by imagining a child who has just had his annual medical examination. With his parent’s consent, an interviewer asks a set of questions to explore what the child remembers about the experience. Some are open-ended questions, such as “Can you tell me what happened when you went to the doctor?” Others are specific yes–no questions, such as “Did she look in your nose?” A subset of the yes–no questions are strange or silly, such as “Did the doctor cut your hair?”

As you might expect, elementary-school-aged children usually answer such questions more accurately than preschoolers do. If you wait for several weeks and then ask about the doctor’s exam again, a 3-year-old will forget more of what he could originally remember than a 7-year-old will. In one study, by 12 weeks after the checkup, 3-year-olds’ responses to the silly questions were at chance levels of accuracy (meaning that they were saying “yes” to about half of the silly questions), but 7-year-olds averaged about 90% accuracy, despite the delay. The older children’s answers had also remained relatively consistent over time, so that if they answered “yes” to a question right after the exam they tended to do so on repeated tests at later times (Gordon, Ornstein, Clubb, Nida, & Baker-Ward, 1991, as cited in Ceci & Bruck, 1998).

Almost all aspects of memory seem to improve with age, at least up through young adulthood. Before we consider some of the cognitive changes that contribute to these improvements, let’s briefly define terminology that is commonly used in discussions of memory. Many of these terms were first introduced by information processing theorists, and some are included in the information processing flow model depicted in Figure 6.2.

Memory Terminology

First, we can describe memory as consisting of different memory stores. Sensory memory refers to a brief retention of sensory experience. For about one third of a second, when we first see a scene, we store most of the sensory information that has come in, almost as though our eyes have taken a snapshot of the whole scene. A similar phenomenon occurs with hearing. Interestingly, sensory memory capacity does not seem to change much with age. At least for visual information, even infants’ sensory memory is similar to that of adults (e.g., Blaser & Kaldy, 2010).

Working memory is the next storage “unit.” It is partly a “short-term store.” As you have learned, working memory allows us to focus attention, plan, execute problem-solving strategies, and make inferences. It also organizes information for transfer into long-term memory, the almost unlimited store of knowledge. The information we pay attention to in working memory comes from our immediate sensory experience and from long-term memory. For example, suppose you are watching a movie about an African adventure, and an array of color and movement suddenly fills the screen. Your working memory combines the sensory data coming from the screen with information drawn from long-term memory to create a meaningful interpretation: It’s a charging zebra. Or suppose your supervisor reminds you that your counseling approach to a client’s new problem is similar to one that was not very successful in the past. Your thinking about the strategy (in working memory) combines elements of the supervisor’s input with stored memories of prior interactions.

Unlike long-term memory, working memory is thought to have a limited capacity. We can pay attention to, and think about, a limited number of meaningful units of information at one time, and material is lost from working memory in 15 to 30 seconds unless we engage in rehearsal (i.e., unless we actually keep working with it, making an effort to pay attention, such as repeating it to ourselves). Explicit learning that results in our ability to recall information later requires working memory. To get new information into long-term memory in a form that we can access later, we must pay attention to it and think about it. For example, you may hear the music playing as the zebra on the screen charges, but unless you pay attention to it, you are not likely to be able to intentionally recall the tune later. Or if you’re mulling over another problem while your supervisor gives you feedback, you will be unlikely to recall her comments later. So, much of learning seems to require real work or effort. If you find you have to go back and reread a section of this chapter to commit it to memory, you are making the kind of mental effort that characterizes working memory and accounts for successful learning.

We should note that some learning does seem to bypass working memory. It involves the kind of lower level, automatic processing we mentioned earlier. You can store connections or associations between stimuli that you experience together even when you’re not paying attention. Much of infant learning seems to be of this sort. So, even though you weren’t paying attention to the music when the zebra was on the screen, hearing that music later might remind you of the zebra, although you probably couldn’t say why. This kind of learning is sometimes referred to as implicit.

Learning, or acquiring knowledge, involves the storage of information. Retrieval is what we usually mean by remembering, that is, getting information out of storage so we can use it. In Chapter 3, we talked about two kinds of remembering or retrieval: recognition and recall. Recognition happens when the information to be remembered is immediately available to your senses. For example, you see a clerk from your local grocery store crossing the street in front of you, and you realize that you’re experiencing someone who is familiar. Your sensory image elicits information about the clerk stored in long-term memory. We saw in Chapter 3 that some ability for recognition seems to be present from birth, and generally young children’s recognition skills are very good, especially for visual-spatial information, such as memory for pictures. (Try playing a game that involves visual memory with a 4-year-old. You might not win!) However, long-term retention of visual-spatial information does improve over the preschool years (Morgan & Hayne, 2011), and recognition of verbally presented information shows even longer-term developmental improvement (Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998).

Recall is more work. The to-be-remembered information is not present, and you must somehow draw it out of long-term memory and re-present it to yourself, as when you must answer an essay question on an exam. Or, as we described in the opening of this section, a researcher asks a child to remember what he experienced when he went to the doctor. When a child has problems with recall, it could be because he did not attend to the information in the first place, because he did not store the information in long-term memory despite having paid attention to it, or because the child does not have adequate strategies for finding the stored information. Clearly, recall depends on many processes.

One feature of human memory is that we can store different kinds of information or knowledge. Knowledge about facts and events, called declarative knowledge, is of two kinds. The first kind is semantic knowledge, which includes factual information (“the Earth is round”), rules (“red lights mean stop”), and concepts (“an elephant is a large, gray animal”). The second kind is episodic knowledge, which refers to our knowledge of the events that we have experienced. When researchers ask children to recall their visit to a doctor’s office or when your supervisor asks you to describe a counseling session, they are asking about episodic knowledge. Episodic knowledge is organized around time and space—what happened in what order, where, and when. After we’ve had several experiences with one kind of event, such as being examined by a doctor, we begin to form a schematic representation of the typical features of such an event and the order in which they happen. This is called a script.

In addition to declarative knowledge, we have nondeclarative knowledge that we cannot adequately put into words and that may not even enter our awareness. For example, you may know how to shift the gears in a standard transmission vehicle, but you might have a difficult time explaining how to do it. Many physical skills are based on this kind of unconscious, nondeclarative knowledge, which we usually call procedural. You may remember that we have used the term procedural knowledge to describe what infants “know” about how to do things or what to expect from interpersonal interactions (see Chapter 5). Early working models of attachment are probably a kind of procedural knowledge. Much of what infants and toddlers know seems to be nondeclarative rather than declarative.

What Improves with Development?

Now that we have a vocabulary of memory terms, let’s take a look at how memory seems to work in middle childhood and what improves with age. Perhaps most importantly, working memory seems to expand. Because working memory expands, children’s capacity for learning and for retrieving information from long-term memory also expands. So understanding what contributes to working memory development will help us understand how memory in general grows.

Like Piaget, most observers, regardless of theoretical orientation, have noted that older children usually pay attention to more pieces of information at one time than younger children. Their performance on digit span tests illustrates this change in working memory capacity. You may recognize these tests as a typical part of most intelligence tests. A series of digits is presented to the test participant, who must immediately repeat them in the same order. A child of 2 years can usually reproduce about two digits accurately; by the time he is 7, he will probably be able to remember a five-digit string. Adults, on average, can recall about a seven-digit string.

What accounts for increases in working memory capacity with age? There could literally be, somehow, more “room” in the older child’s working memory (Cowan, 2016). But many other cognitive changes seem to contribute and may actually be more important. We will consider several of these.

Processing Speed.   The first cognitive change that contributes to memory improvement is that children can process information more quickly as they get older. How rapidly children can make a simple response (e.g., pushing a button) to a stimulus (e.g., the onset of a light on a computer screen) increases from early to middle childhood, and it continues to improve until about age 15 (e.g., Kail, Lervåg, & Hume, 2016; Spanoudis, Demetriou, Kazi, Giorgala, & Zenonos, 2015). Piaget attributed the decentering skill of school-aged children (their ability to pay attention to more than one thing at a time) to the speeding up of mental activities with practice, and modern research does support the idea that practice can accelerate information processing (Mackey, Hill, Stone, & Bunge, 2011). In addition, speed of processing can increase with physical maturation—that is, simply as a function of age (Toga et al., 2006). The upshot is that as children get older, they can do more with more information at one time (e.g., Demetriou et al., 2014).

Breadth and Depth of Knowledge.   The second cognitive change that affects memory improvement is that as children get older their knowledge about many things increases. They expand their knowledge base. Consider the study of children’s recall of a medical examination mentioned earlier. One reason that a 7-year-old might have recalled information more accurately than a 3-year-old is that the older child probably knew more about medical exams. By 7, a child has formulated a script of the typical medical exam. When an interviewer asks questions about a particular exam, even many weeks after it happened, the 7-year-old may not actually remember whether the doctor cut his hair, for example, but he knows that doctors don’t do that sort of thing in medical exams, and so he answers correctly. In general, older children know more about most events, and so they are more likely than younger children to be able to reconstruct accurately what probably happened in any given situation.

It should be noted that prior knowledge can also lead to false memories. For example, in a series of classic studies by Liben and colleagues, children were shown videos or pictures of people playing roles such as that of a doctor or a nurse (see Liben, Bigler, & Hilliard, 2014). Sometimes the gender of the adult was consistent with traditional expectations—such as a man playing the role of doctor—and sometimes the person’s gender and occupation were not traditionally consistent, such as a man playing the role of nurse. Children’s preexisting beliefs about gender and work roles—that is, their gender stereotypes—influenced what they later recalled about what they saw. In one particularly interesting study, Signorella and Liben (1984) found that elementary school children with strong gender stereotypes were more likely than children with less stereotyped beliefs to misremember who had played what role in the pictures they had seen when gender and occupation were not traditionally matched. So, for example, if they had seen a woman doctor, the children with strong stereotypes would be likely to remember that it was a man they had seen instead, or that the woman had been a nurse. (See Box 6.2 for other examples of how false memories can be induced.)

So prior knowledge affects your ability to reconstruct what you have experienced. In addition, the more you know about a particular subject, or domain of knowledge, the more easily you can learn new information in that domain and the better you will remember it later. If knowledge in most domains expands with age, then learning and retrieval of information in most domains should get better with age. But age is not what is most important—knowledge is. Suppose, for example, that you show an 8-year-old child a chessboard with chess pieces arranged as if in the middle of a chess game. Later, you ask the child to reconstruct the placement of all the pieces on an empty board—that is, to recall the layout of the pieces. If the child happens to be an “expert” chess player—someone who plays in competitions and is highly knowledgeable about the game—his performance on this recall task will be much better than that of an average adult “novice,” who knows how to play but who does not have extensive knowledge of the game. In other words, when children are more expert than adults in a domain of knowledge, they can remember more new information from that domain than adults can (e.g., Chi, 1978; Chi & Koeske, 1983). We will see later that other domains of knowledge, such as knowledge about others’ perspectives and feelings, improve at this age and enhance social relationships.

Box 6.2: Children’s Eyewitness Testimony

The following is an experience reported by Bill, a 4-year-old:

My brother Colin was trying to get Blowtorch [an action figure] from me, and I wouldn’t let him take it from me, so he pushed me into the woodpile where the mousetrap was. And then my finger got caught in it. And then we went to the hospital, and my mommy, daddy, and Colin [older brother] drove me there, to the hospital in our van, because it was far away. And the doctor put a bandage on this finger (indicating). (Ceci, Loftus, Leichtman, & Bruck, 1994, quoted in Ceci & Bruck, 1998, p. 749)

Bill appeared to have a clear memory of this scary event, and he was confident even about details such as where his father was at the time of the accident. But the experience Bill described so convincingly never happened! It was a false memory, induced by a researcher who had read brief descriptions of a set of pictures to Bill each week for 9 weeks. The description for one of the pictures had said, “Got finger caught in a mousetrap and had to go to the hospital to get the trap off.” The researcher then said, “Think real hard and tell me if this ever happened to you. Do you remember going to the hospital with a mousetrap on your finger?” In the first session, Bill said he had not had such an experience. By the tenth session, as you have seen, he seemed convinced that he had.

Preschoolers can have some difficulty with reality monitoring, distinguishing fantasies from realities. Young children can tell the difference between what is real and what is not and between what it feels like to only imagine something versus to actually experience it (e.g., Flavell, Flavell, & Green, 1987), but they have more difficulty with these distinctions than older children or adults (e.g., Tempel, Frings, & Mecklenbräuker, 2015). In particular, if they imagine an event, they are somewhat prone to say later that it actually happened. One charming and usually harmless example occurs when a child becomes devoted to an imaginary friend. But a young child’s problems with reality monitoring can make him more susceptible to suggestion than older children or adults, a serious concern when children serve as eyewitnesses. For example, in child sexual abuse cases, interviewers and therapists have sometimes used a technique called guided imagery as an aid to memory. A child might be asked to pretend that an event occurred, then create a mental picture of the event and its details (Ceci & Bruck, 1998; Gilstrap, 2004). Unfortunately, if an adult encourages a child to construct a fantasy about what might have happened, the child may eventually come to believe that it did happen, even if it did not.

In considering whether children should serve as eyewitnesses, the key issue is, how valid can children’s reports be expected to be? In the late 1600s, children’s testimony at the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, led to the execution of 20 defendants. Young girls testified convincingly that they had seen defendants doing fantastic things, like flying on broomsticks. Some of the testimony was later recanted, and the whole episode created such a negative view of children’s testimony that for three centuries child witnesses were not often seen in American court proceedings. Only in the 1980s did many states end restrictions on children serving as witnesses (see Ceci & Bruck, 1998).

Modern memory research has helped increase the acceptance of children’s testimony in America. Many studies indicate that what children remember can be accurate, although the number of details a child will recall and with what accuracy improves with age. But at any age, a witness’s memory for observed events could be incomplete or distorted or simply wrong, sometimes as a result of exposure to suggestion. And in most situations the younger the child, the more susceptible he is likely to be to suggestion (see Ceci, Hritz, & Royer, 2016).

We have seen that preschoolers’ difficulties with reality monitoring can be a source of suggestibility, and there are several other sources as well, many of which children might encounter in the course of being interviewed by parents, police, social workers, therapists, and other court officials. When interviewers are biased, they may guide children’s testimony, planting suggestions without realizing that they are doing so. So, for example, if an interviewer is already convinced that a child has been abused, she may encourage a child’s admission of abuse by asking leading questions, such as, “Where did he kiss you?” instead of open ended questions, such as “What did he do?” The interviewer might also ask the same question repeatedly if the child’s initial answers are not consistent with the interviewer’s belief. Studies of interview transcripts indicate that even the most well-meaning and concerned interviewers, including parents, use many such tactics to try to get at what they believe, or fear, is the truth (e.g., Bruck & Ceci, 2013). Unfortunately, they may be planting suggestions that can lead the child to reconstruct his memory of an event.

A study by Pettit, Fegan, and Howie (1990) is just one of many that illustrates how effective such suggestions can be with young children. Two actors visited a preschool classroom. They pretended to be park rangers and talked to the children about helping a bird find a nest for her eggs. In the middle of the discussion, one “ranger” knocked a cake off the top of a piano “by accident.” The cake was smashed, and there was silence for a few moments in the classroom, creating a rather distinctive event. Two weeks later, each of the children in the class was interviewed about the incident. Before the children were questioned, the researchers gave some of the interviewers an accurate account of what had happened. Others were provided with false information, and a third group was given no information at all. The interviewers’ instructions were to find out what had happened from each child, but without asking leading questions. Despite the instructions, the interviewers did ask leading questions—30% of the time—and half of these were misleading. Naturally, the interviewers who had false beliefs about the event asked the most misleading questions. And the children were often misled, agreeing with 41% of the misinformation suggested to them. Apparently, interviewers biased by false beliefs can unwittingly maneuver children into providing false information (see Bruck et al., 2006 for other experimental examples).

Elementary-school-aged children are generally less suggestible than preschoolers (Brown & Lamb, 2015; Ceci et al., 2016). For example, their reality monitoring is more adequate, and they are less affected by leading questions. But even older children and adults are not immune to suggestion (Ackil & Zaragoza, 1995; Loftus, 1979). Fortunately, witnesses of all ages can provide more accurate information if they are interviewed under conditions designed to minimize suggestion. Even traumatic experiences can be recalled well by young children under the right conditions. Research on children’s eyewitness testimony reveals a number of characteristics that may reduce the influence of suggestion in interviews (Ceci et al., 2016; Lamb, Malloy, Hershkowitz, & Rooy, 2015). Of course, interviewers should ask open ended questions, such as “What happened last night?” and “What happened next?” They should avoid leading questions, as we have seen, and they should keep both the repetition of questions and the number of interviews to a minimum. The interviewer’s tone should also be neutral, rather than urgent, aggressive, or accusatory. For example, an accusatory tone may be set by statements such as “Are you afraid to tell?” and “You’ll feel better once you’ve told.” In one study, when interviewers made such comments, even children who previously indicated no recall of an event sometimes agreed with questions that incorrectly suggested abuse (Goodman & Clarke-Stewart, 1991).

Sometimes in cases of suspected sexual abuse, investigators use anatomically detailed dolls or human figure drawings as props, encouraging children to show what happened or where they were touched. This technique has been seen as a way of helping children overcome limited language skills or feelings of embarrassment. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates that young children cannot easily use such props symbolically as was hoped (Lytle, London, & Bruck, 2015). Interviewers are now encouraged not to use these props with young children (Lamb et al., 2015). Interviewers should not use inducements such as telling children they can help their friends by making disclosures. In one criminal investigation, for example, investigators said things to children such as “Boy, I’d hate having to tell your friends that you didn’t want to help them” and “All the other friends I talked to told me everything that happened . . . . You don’t want to be left out do you?” (quoted in Ceci & Bruck, 1998, p. 745). Such pressure might have the effect of encouraging children to produce responses even when they do not recall the events in question. Another interview strategy to be avoided is stereotype induction, that is, slanting the interviewee’s view of an individual. Sometimes interviewers will encourage children to make revelations by indicating that the alleged perpetrator is a bad person or does bad things. But in studies where this strategy was implemented, young children were found to produce incorrect, negative recollections of such an individual’s behavior more often than children who were not exposed to the induction (see Bruck & Ceci, 2012).

As Ceci and Bruck (1998) emphasize, interviewers are motivated by concern about the welfare of the child: “[N]o interviewer sets out with the intention of tainting a child’s memory” (p. 730). But even with the best of intentions, an interviewer can elicit questionable testimony. An understanding of the ways in which memory is constructed and reconstructed can help investigators to make eyewitness testimony, especially in children, more trustworthy. To aid in this process, The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) has created a research-based protocol for investigators and interviewers working with children (Brown & Lamb, 2015). The protocol is available at NICHDProtocol.com.

Many studies suggest that as you amass knowledge of a subject, you understand new information in that domain more quickly and more completely. Knowledge is not just a list of separate pieces of information. A rich web of well-organized connections forms in long-term store (Marsh, Cantor, & Brashier, 2016). For example, a counselor’s concept of “therapy” might be part of a detailed web of stored information such as the one presented in Figure 6.3. We fit new information into this web, allowing us to retrieve it later through many routes and making it more accessible than if there were fewer connections. The processing speed for new information increases, and the depth of understanding is greater. All aspects of memory seem to be positively affected. Of course, ordinarily, the older you are, the more knowledgeable you are, and so the better you are at remembering, particularly in your area of expertise.

One advantage of a rich web of knowledge is that it allows chunking of information in working memory. Chunking links several pieces of information together into a single meaningful unit. For example, suppose you were given the following series of letters to remember: NCISIRSCIAFBI. You might notice that you could divide the series into four chunks that represent federal agencies in the United States: NCIS, IRS, CIA, FBI. If so, you would probably be able to remember all the letters because you converted them to just four pieces of information, which would not exceed your working memory capacity. The more extensive the webs of information in your long-term memory, the more likely you are to find ways to chunk information meaningfully in working memory (Cowan, Ricker, Clark, Hinrichs, & Glass, 2015).

Logical Thinking Skills.   A third cognitive change that contributes to memory improvement with age is advanced logical thinking. If older children can think more logically than younger children, they may have a better understanding of at least some of their experiences. Understanding better helps them to remember more about the experience later. Piaget’s own research on memory improvement with age focused heavily on the contribution of logical thinking (see Piaget & Inhelder, 1973). In a typical study, he showed children from ages 3 to 7 an array of sticks, arranged in serial order by size. One week later, he asked children to draw what they had seen as a test of their recall. They were also given an opportunity to put a series of sticks in order according to size. This seriation task is a lot like the conservation of number task. It looks simple, but children usually are not completely successful at it until about age 7. In other words, it seems to require the logical thinking of the concrete operational stage. Piaget found that if children did not have the logical thinking skills needed to seriate sticks themselves, they typically could not remember the serial pattern they had been shown a week earlier. Children who could seriate the sticks (mostly 6- and 7-year-olds) showed better memory for the serial pattern. Remarkably, though, when he tested children’s memory again at least 6 months later, many of the younger children were now more accurate in their memory drawings than they had been originally, depicting some aspects of the serial order. These findings have often been replicated, indicating that children’s memory for some experiences can actually improve over time! How could this happen?

The key here seems to be that memory is often reconstructive. That is, when we recall an experience, we integrate “what we currently experience, what we already know, and what we infer” (Kuhn, 2000a, p. 22). You have already seen that older children may use what they know about doctors’ examinations in general to reconstruct a particular doctor’s examination. This helps them recall more accurately than a younger child. It also appears that if a child’s logical understanding of an event improves from the time he first experiences it to the time his memory is tested, he may reconstruct it more accurately than he could have earlier. As the children in Piaget’s study got older, they could understand seriation better, and so when they “remembered” the original stick array, they often inferred that the sticks had been arranged according to size.

Language Skills.   A fourth cognitive change that can benefit memory with age is greater facility with language, especially improvements in narrative skill, the ability to tell a coherent story. Clearly, one way in which we mentally represent information is in words. As children’s vocabularies grow and their skill in describing events develops, their ability to store information about experiences in coherent verbal form also improves (see Reese et al., 2011). As we saw in Chapter 3, this aspect of memory improvement is enhanced by narrative interactions with adults. If parents encourage their children to talk out loud about their experiences, asking questions and helping them with facts about shared events, children are better storytellers. They also have better memory for autobiographical events. On the whole, language skills such as these improve with age and experience, and so older children’s memory for events can generally be expected to be better than that of younger children.

Memory Strategies.   A fifth cognitive change that can facilitate memory improvement with age is learning to use memory strategies. Strategies are “potentially conscious activities a person may voluntarily carry out” to remember something (Flavell et al., 1993, p. 235). Imagine that we asked you to remember all the names of the children in your class when you were in the fifth grade. After you finished groaning, you would probably take a strategic approach to this retrieval task. That is, you would follow some plan. Maybe you would try to remember all the girls and then all the boys; or maybe all your good friends and then all your enemies; or maybe all the popular kids, then the less popular ones; or maybe you would use a spatial organization strategy, trying to remember the kids in the front row first and work your way to the back of the classroom. Generally, adults approach memory tasks strategically, and when they do, they remember more than if their approach is haphazard. There are a host of strategies that we can call on. Some help us encode new material that we expect to have to remember later. Others help us retrieve information that is already stored. People who are really good at remembering names and phone numbers and other details of experience are generally well practiced at applying strategies.

But what about children? Preschoolers are usually considered nonstrategic in their memory efforts. An interesting example comes from a study of 3- to 8-year-olds who were shown rows of boxes that contained either toy animals or household objects. Boxes with animals had a picture of a cage on top; boxes with household objects had a picture of a house. Children were asked to remember either the locations of the animals or the household objects. The researchers carefully observed the children’s actions during a study period, and found that the younger children tended to open all the boxes, whereas the oldest children were more strategic, opening only the boxes with the items that they would have to remember later (animals or objects). In other words, older children selectively attended to the locations that they had to learn about. Younger children did not seem able to use selective attention to help them with the memory task (see Miller, 1994).

Selectively attending to one thing and not to another is very difficult for preschoolers, and so it is not a skill that 3- or 4-year-olds are likely to deploy to aid memory. But sometimes preschoolers seem to use other skills in ways that we might call “pre-strategic.” When they know that they will be asked to remember something later, sometimes they do things differently than they might otherwise. For example, researchers gave 4-year-olds a set of toys to play with. They told some children that later they would be asked to remember what some of the toys were. These children tended to play with the toys less and to name them more than children who were not given such instructions (Baker-Ward, Ornstein, & Holden, 1984). So, in other words, they seemed to act in ways that would help them remember.

Systematic use of strategies is much more likely in middle childhood. If you give a group of third graders the job of learning the names of all the states and their capitals, you will probably see them using rehearsal—repeating the names over and over. There are a variety of more complex strategies, but children usually do not use them spontaneously until the late elementary school years or even adolescence. For example, a child could use an organization strategy: sorting the items to be learned on some meaningful basis, such as grouping the names by region. Or he might use an elaboration strategy—finding or creating some kind of meaningful link between items. To help remember that Baton Rouge is the capital of Louisiana, he might make up a sentence like “Louise saw a bat,” or he might create a mental picture, visualizing a girl named Louise with a bat on her head. At about 9 or 10, children will use organization strategies spontaneously and to good effect. Not until adolescence are they likely to use elaboration without prompting. Strategies that are particularly useful for learning textual material, such as underlining and summarizing main ideas or key points, also emerge late, during adolescence (see Miller, 2014).

Developmental progress in children’s use of memory strategies is a bumpy affair. On one hand, children might at first use a strategy quite sporadically, often showing a production deficiency, meaning that they might fail to use it even in situations where it is ordinarily helpful. On the other hand, sometimes children use a strategy, but it does not seem to boost memory; in this case they are said to have a utilization deficiency. Although strategies usually do aid memory performance, when a child first uses a strategy spontaneously, it may be so much work that it takes up a lot of time and attention, minimizing its effectiveness for improving memory. Yet children still may use the strategy. As Siegler (1998) argued, it’s as though children intuitively understand the “law of practice”—that practice improves efficiency in the long run—even if there is no immediate profit!

We have been describing the development of children’s spontaneous use of memory strategies, but effective use of strategies also can be taught. Children whose parents or teachers instruct them on how to use a strategy are likely to use it on the tasks where they were taught to do so. However, they typically do not generalize the use of a strategy to new situations, and it takes considerable practice to use such strategies efficiently (see Clerc, Miller, & Cosnefroy, 2014).

Metacognitive Skills.   The discussion of memory strategies leads us to a sixth, and final, cognitive change that seems to affect memory. It is the development of metacognition, knowledge of our own mental processes and the ability to reflect on those processes. You learned in Chapter 3 that preschoolers have some awareness of mental processes. Four- to 5-year-olds have a theory of mind that includes understanding that their own thoughts, beliefs, and desires often differ from those of other people, as we have seen. They also have some beginning skills at judging what they know. For example, if we show a 4- or 5-year-old a classmate’s picture, even if the child cannot spontaneously recall the classmate’s name, he will be able to accurately judge whether he would know the name if he heard it (e.g., Cultice, Somerville, & Wellman, 1983). This kind of self-monitoring and understanding of what you can and cannot accomplish cognitively, and how to accomplish it, improves dramatically across the elementary school years.

Consider changes in children’s understanding of their memory processes, which is called metamemory. In a classic study, researchers compared aspects of metamemory in kindergartners and fifth graders (Kreutzer, Leonard, & Flavell, 1975). Fifth graders understood that remembering the gist of a story is easier than remembering it word for word; only half of the kindergartners understood this point. Kindergartners understood some things about memory, such as the value of writing things down if you want to remember them, but not until fifth grade did children realize that there are differences in memory ability from one person to another or from one situation to another. Many researchers have found that whereas preschoolers are usually overly optimistic about how much they are likely to remember about some material, such as a list of words, older children’s estimates are usually much more realistic.

Children use memory strategies more, and also more effectively, as they grow in understanding of how their memories work (see Miller, 2014; Schneider & Ornstein, 2015). In one study (Grammer, Purtell, Coffman, & Ornstein, 2011), researchers measured first graders’ metamemory skills. For instance, children had to say who would have the hardest time remembering a story about a town: Would it be a person who had never been to the town, a person who had been there two years ago, or a person who had been there 4 weeks ago? Some first graders had better insights into how memory works than others. They realized, for example, that recent visitors to the town might find it easier to remember the story. All of the children were also given training on how to use an organizational strategy to help with recall of a set of picture cards. Over the next year, the children were repeatedly tested on their spontaneous use of the strategy they had been taught. The children with the best scores on the metamemory test at the beginning of first grade were most likely to increase their use of the organizational strategy by the beginning of second grade.

You can see that metacognitive awareness makes it more likely that children will regulate their own learning strategically. But there is a lot to learn about our own cognitive processes, and some of it is difficult for kids in middle childhood. For example, suppose you are trying to learn the information in this chapter for your next exam. You probably understand that keeping track of what you have already learned by testing yourself (monitoring your memory) will help you to allocate your study time well. This is one bit of metacognitive awareness that shows little development through elementary school, at least with challenging material. Elementary-school-aged children don’t often spontaneously monitor their learning. In fact, one of the better ways to help children in this age range use memory strategies more effectively is to train them to explicitly monitor what they have learned through techniques such as self-testing (Pressley & Hilden, 2006). In other words, teaching children to keep track of what they have learned seems to be an important element in teaching them how to learn. An important side-benefit to self-testing is that the retrieval practice it provides can actually improve later recall (e.g., Jaeger, Eisenkraemer, & Stein, 2017; Jones et al., 2016).

It’s important to note that metacognition is the target of many clinical and educational practices that are collectively known as self-instruction or self-monitoring (Meichenbaum, 1986) and are a major part of cognitive therapies for children and youth (Kendall, 1993; see Elliott, Gresham, & Witt, 1988). The general goal of such practices is to effect some behavior change (such as control of impulsivity or improvement in test-taking skills) by helping children attend to, regulate, and sometimes change their cognitions. As you will see in the Applications section, interventions can target improvement in three kinds of knowledge: declarative, or knowledge about facts, rules, or oneself as a learner; procedural, or knowledge about how to apply rules and strategies effectively; and conditional, or knowledge of when to apply the rules or strategies (Schraw & Moshman, 1995). Consider 10-year-old Amelia, who, having missed a day of school, calls a classmate to get her homework assignments. Does she know that if she doesn’t write down the page numbers, she won’t remember them later (declarative)? Does she rehearse her spelling words both by writing them out and repeating the letters aloud (procedural)? Does she do her science homework first because it is the most difficult for her (conditional)?

This review of memory improvement through middle childhood has, of necessity, touched on many aspects of cognitive development, including advances in processing speed, growth of knowledge, development of logical thinking and language skills, growth of selective attention and other strategic skills, and metacognitive developments. It is clear that “to study memories is to study much of . . . cognition and cognitive development” (Kuhn, 2000a, p. 22).

But memory is more than the product of the cognitive system. It is also influenced by affective and social factors. To illustrate, consider that adult interactions with children seem to figure critically into the development of memory skill. You have just seen that teaching children strategies for learning new material improves children’s memory performance. Encouraging children to narrate their experiences helps them develop better autobiographical memories. In other words, scaffolding by adults, in the Vygotskian sense (see Chapter 3), contributes substantially to memory development and to all aspects of cognitive achievement. Let’s take a look now at the relationship between cognitive development and education: What do adults do that matters?

Cognitive Development and Formal Schooling

There is a synergy between cognitive development and schooling: Children’s cognitive abilities, all of the processes we have been describing, have a major impact on children’s academic performance. For example, children’s performance on measures of executive functions as they enter kindergarten predicts their academic achievement throughout their schooling (Bull & Lee, 2014; Morgan et al., 2017). At the same time, the experiences children have in school make critical contributions to their cognitive development. Teachers’ interactions with children are the proximal source of educational influence (Caro, Lenkeit, & Kyriakides, 2016), but these interactions are shaped partly by the school environment, by the broader community and culture, and by government policies and structures (Rindermann & Ceci, 2009; Rindermann & Thompson, 2014). These contexts are of course affected by (and affect) many economic and social forces, from wealth and wealth distribution to degree of modernization (e.g., access to electricity, motorized forms of transportation, telecommunications, and so on; Gauvain & Munroe, 2012). In Table 6.1 you will see a list of some characteristics that researchers have repeatedly found to predict cognitive competence and academic achievement across countries and regions of the world.

No single factor operates alone, including those listed in Table 6.1. Multidimensional processes are at work, with the impact of each moderated by several others. Student/teacher ratios are a good example. Generally, lower ratios (smaller classes) support better outcomes when other variables are well controlled (e.g., Fredriksson, Öckert, & Oosterbeek, 2013). Having fewer students in a class allows more individual interactions between teachers and students, more oral participation by children, and a greater likelihood that children’s learning problems or other special needs will be recognized and addressed. However, the potential advantages of small class size can be reduced by poor teaching or ineffective class management. And the disadvantages of large classes can be offset as well. In many East Asian countries, where class size tends to be rather large, children perform very well academically in comparison to many other countries. The negative effects of high student/teacher ratios appear to be balanced by other characteristics, including strong cultural (and family) expectations that children will be self-disciplined and diligent in school (see Box 6.3). Also, it is often customary in East Asian countries to enroll children in private “cram schools” that offer late day and weekend classes, increasing the amount of instruction and learning time children experience. Interestingly, cram school enrollment in East Asian countries goes up as class size in public schools increases (for cross-country comparisons, see Burhan, Yunus, Tovar, & Burhan, 2017; Caro et al., 2016; Rindermann & Ceci, 2009).

Box 6.3: Children of Immigrant Families

In the middle of the school year, Elena’s family arrived at their new home. On the first day at her new school, Elena’s mother left her with the principal, who walked her to her second grade classroom. Her new teacher introduced her to the class, assigned her to a desk, and asked Jenna, who sat in the seat next to her, to help Elena when she had questions. Elena had just turned 8 years old. She was ordinarily shy, and in this classroom she felt nearly paralyzed. Everyone was a stranger. The classroom routine was different from that of her old school, from the order of daily activities to the books used for reading instruction. The teacher was doing a unit on plants with lessons on science and on geography that the class had been working on for 2 weeks, a topic that Elena had never confronted in school before. Only when a math worksheet was distributed with familiar addition and subtraction problems did Elena feel like she might be able to breathe.

Changing schools is hard on any child. But Elena has just arrived in the United States with her family from Mexico and she speaks only Spanish. Asking questions of Jenna, even if Jenna sympathizes with Elena’s predicament, might not help much with the transition. Elena has become one of the 4.6 million English-language-learner (ELL) students enrolled in U.S. classrooms. The majority of these children are in grades K to 5, and they speak more than 350 different native languages (McFarland et al., 2017). Even though many are born in the United States, they often have little exposure to English or to American culture prior to the start of school.

A child is considered to be from an immigrant family if at least one parent was born outside of the country of residence (Crosnoe & Fuligni, 2012). In the United States, over 40% of such children are Hispanic, their parents having migrated largely from Mexico and Central America. Another 14% have parents who migrated from East or South Asia or the Pacific Islands (Jung, Fuller, & Galindo, 2012). Clearly, these children are a diverse group in many ways besides country of origin and native language. Some are the “1.5 generation,” meaning they themselves have immigrated, and others are “second generation,” born after their parents arrived in the host country; their parents differ in education and job training; for some, both parents have immigrated, for others only one parent; some have a history of exposure to war, famine, or other disasters in their country of origin, others do not; some have legal status in their host country, others do not.

Immigration is not unique to the United States. It contributes most of the population growth to developed countries around the world, so the needs and developmental progress of immigrant children is a topic of international concern. Leading researchers in this field argue that “international migration is shaping the nature of child development as powerfully as it is changing the nature of the societies involved” (Crosnoe & Fuligni, 2012, p. 1475).

How do children of immigrant families fare? Are they especially vulnerable to academic or social problems because of an accumulation of risk factors (the immigrant risk model)? Or, are they relatively more successful than other children because immigrant families have strengths or protective factors that moderate the risks (the immigrant paradox model)? In fact, researchers find evidence for both models, and they are beginning to untangle the factors that contribute to vulnerability versus advantage. The circumstances that lead to migration are important. Children whose families enter the new country legally, perhaps seeking new opportunities or pursuing re-unification with other members of their families, may have many fewer problems than children whose families are fleeing violence and/or whose legal status is uncertain. For example, recent migrations from war- or gang-ravaged regions into European and North American countries have often created traumatic circumstances for children. These could lead to life-long cognitive and emotional problems, especially for children who have experienced lengthy separations from their primary caregivers (Bouza et al., 2018). See the discussion of the long-term consequences of chronic stress in Chapter 2.

Other important factors include the characteristics of the country of origin and of the family (e.g., religious values, family size and structure, parents’ education). In addition, the family’s circumstances once they are settled in the host country are important, such as their socioeconomic status, job opportunities, social supports, available schools, diversity within schools and communities, and racial/ethnic tolerance and discrimination patterns. Let’s consider how some of these factors relate to children’s outcomes, especially their cognitive and academic outcomes.

Children’s Health

Children’s health is a key element in their cognitive development, so understanding whether immigrant status impacts health and health care is important. In the United States, when children from Hispanic immigrant families are compared to native children they are often advantaged in physical and mental health, a paradoxical outcome given they are more likely to be socioeconomically disadvantaged (Marks, Ejesi, & García Coll, 2014). Children born to immigrant Hispanic mothers in the United States have fewer birth problems (e.g., lower infant mortality rates, less frequent low birth weight) and fewer acute and chronic illnesses (e.g., asthma). Among the family differences that might account for these health advantages are higher rates of breastfeeding among foreign born mothers, a greater tendency to fully immunize their children, and lower smoking rates (Jackson, Kiernan, & McLanahan, 2012). Interestingly, one study found many similar health advantages for children of immigrant families in the United Kingdom, even though they tended to migrate from different parts of the world (Jackson et al., 2012). However, in the United States at least, the continuing health of children varies depending on the immigration status of the parents even when comparing only low-income families (Ziol-Guest & Kalil, 2012). Children of naturalized citizens tend to do quite well; children whose parents are non-naturalized (either permanent or non-permanent residents) are less likely to be in very good or excellent health as reported by their mothers. This difference corresponds to the likelihood that children are receiving regular dental or medical care. It appears that non-naturalized parents are less likely to have health insurance or to take advantage of health care programs even though their children may be entitled to them. This could happen for many reasons. Language barriers may make it difficult for parents to access information or find suitable health care providers; parents may misunderstand the consequences of seeking assistance for eligible children (e.g., worrying that it might affect their efforts to become citizens or to attain permanent residency); or if some householders do not have legal status, parents may be reluctant to call attention to themselves (Yoshikawa & Kalil, 2011).

Results are mixed on mental health. Some studies have reported better outcomes for children of low-income immigrant families compared to children of low-income native families (Crosnoe, 2006), but others have not. It may depend on the kind of behavioral outcomes that are examined. One study found fewer externalizing problems but more internalizing problems for immigrant children (Jackson et al., 2012). More in-depth longitudinal studies have also found that the most resilient immigrant children in the United States adapt by learning American cultural values, but they also demonstrate high ethnic pride and continue to endorse essential values of their culture of origin in adolescence and beyond (Cruz, King, Cauce, Conger, & Robins, 2017).

Family Function

Much of what you have read in earlier chapters demonstrates that how families function, including their parenting practices, can affect every area of child development. Family functioning varies widely among immigrant families. Differences in migration and demographic history and related cultural practices are important influences. For example, among immigrants to the United States, births to unmarried mothers are much more common for Mexicans (46% of births in 2006) than for Asians (11% in 2006). South Asian parents are more likely than Mexican parents to have completed high school and to be fluent in English. These and other differences influence the likelihood that families will live in poverty once in the United States. Approximately 33% of Mexican families but only 8% of South Asian families live in poverty (Jung et al., 2012).

You are already aware of how problematic the stress of poverty can be for children’s development in many domains. Yet immigrant families may buffer the negative effects of poverty on children in some ways. For example, “core socialization norms” in many Hispanic families emphasize “good comportment and respectful communication . . . cooperation and caring for peers . . . and the children’s contribution to the collective interest of the family . . . ” (Galindo & Fuller, 2010, p. 581). Immigrant Hispanic mothers also tend to describe themselves as mentally healthy (e.g., reporting low levels of depression), perhaps in part because they often feel that they have good social support (either from fathers or other family members) (Jung et al., 2012). Children from such families enter school with academically useful social competencies, such as self-control and low levels of aggressiveness. Kindergarten teachers tend to rate the social-emotional functioning of children from Hispanic immigrant families somewhat lower than children from White native families, but the differences are quite small (Galindo & Fuller, 2010). Different cultural expectations rather than problematic parenting seem to account for the slightly lower ratings. Hispanic children, who are taught not to pose questions to elders as part of respectful behavior, may seem less socially competent to U.S. teachers who value more verbal engagement and inquisitiveness.

Immigrant families are quite divergent with regard to practices that specifically prepare children for formal schooling. Country of origin makes a big difference here (Koury & Votruba-Drzal, 2014). One large study found that Mexican immigrant mothers read to their preschool children less frequently than native White mothers, but Chinese mothers read more often than the native White mothers (Jung et al., 2012). Differences in parents’ education might be key to this finding, because only 33% of the Mexican mothers had more than a high school education, whereas 93% of Chinese mothers did. However, even if Asian parents have very little education, their cultural beliefs and practices appear to be especially helpful for their children’s academic lives (Ng, Sze, Tamis-LeMonda, & Ruble, 2017). They tend to view intellectual achievements as a function of hard work, whereas many other groups (e.g., native White families) see intelligence as a fixed capacity. In Chinese and other South Asian groups, a “learning model” is typically the highest cultural value, meaning that learning is seen as bringing “honor, respect, and everything good in life” (Li, Holloway, Bempechat, & Loh, 2008, p. 12).

Typically, Chinese immigrant parents with little education or income are especially focused on promoting their children’s learning opportunities. For example, they may work extra jobs and longer hours so that their children can attend Chinese school on weekends. They correspondingly expect their children to work hard; commitment to academic excellence is “nonnegotiable” (e.g., Ng et al., 2017). Interestingly, low-income Chinese parents are unlikely to be involved in their children’s school activities (such as helping with homework) because of long work hours and/or lack of the necessary language or academic skills, but they frequently designate an “anchor helper” for that purpose, such as an older sibling or other relative. They also encourage their children to emulate peers who are academically successful, holding them up as role models. And extended family members are expected to “co-parent,” reinforcing the value of school achievement, checking up on grades, offering assistance, even if they do not live nearby. As one child of Chinese immigrants said, “My grandparents call a lot; they always ask me how I’m doing in school . . . my entire family, I think they’re the most concerned about grades, cause whenever they call, it’s always about school . . . They call twice a week from Australia” (Li et al., 2008, p. 21). Perhaps because of the emphasis on learning in their culture, children of Chinese immigrants often perform better in school on average than native White children in the same socioeconomic circumstances.

Supporting Immigrant Children in Schools and Communities

Let’s focus now specifically on the academic achievement of the children of immigrant families. You have just seen that the cultural values of the country of origin are important for children’s school performance. You have also seen that parenting practices that ready children for school success, like reading to young children, are often related to parents’ education. Not surprisingly, parents’ education before migration is strongly related to children’s academic achievement in the host country (Pong & Landale, 2012). Cultural valuing of academic success and parent education are protective factors, buffering or moderating the impact of more negative factors such as low income.

One negative factor for children of some immigrant groups is the pattern of prejudice and discrimination they might face in the host country. Discrimination is the experience of negative treatment because of group membership, and it can be from peers (e.g., teasing or exclusion), from teachers (e.g., expecting poor performance, grading unfairly, treating children as troublemakers, ignoring or isolating them), or from community members (e.g., preferring residential segregation). Children who perceive discriminatory behavior by teachers and/or peers are often less likely to stay interested in school and to perform at their best (António & Monteiro, 2015). “Weak relations with teachers diminish students’ motivation to pursue academic work, and in turn lower teachers’ expectations in a self-perpetuating cycle of academic disengagement and under-achievement” (Tienda & Mitchell, 2006, p. 85). Conversely, when teachers maintain high academic expectations for all their students and value multiculturalism in the classroom, freely discussing cultural differences and creating an environment of respect, children perceive less discrimination not only from their teachers, but also from their peers, and they are more likely to succeed in school (Brown & Chu, 2012).

Having a strong sense of their own ethnic identity is a protective factor for children, even buffering the negative effects of perceived discrimination (García Coll & Marks, 2012). Positive ethnic identity includes seeing your ethnicity as a central aspect of who you are and positively valuing that aspect of yourself (Fuligni & Tsai, 2016; see Chapter 9 for a more in depth discussion). From elementary school onward, children with positive ethnic identities are more academically motivated and more likely to do well in school. This is especially important in schools where children from immigrant families are in the minority. In schools where immigrant children are in the majority, such as predominantly Hispanic schools in parts of the United States, perceived discrimination and positive ethnic identity are not especially predictive of academic outcome (Brown & Chu, 2012; Greene, Way, & Pahl, 2006).

This brings us to a central, and contentious, factor in immigrant children’s academic success: language. Many children from immigrant families are ELL students. In the United States, they may enter school with no knowledge of English or they may have some facility in English in addition to their native language. Generally, ELL students, especially from Hispanic families, perform more poorly academically than native White children when they begin school in the United States. Common sense suggests that helping these children become proficient in English, the language of the classroom and of most tests, should be a high priority. But should they be immersed in all-English classes? Should their families encourage them to speak only English at home?

The most recent research suggests that ELL children are most academically successful when schools and families encourage their bilingualism, helping them to learn English while maintaining or building fluency in the family’s native language. What is most effective is teaching children in both their native language and English at school, and encouraging them to use their native language at home. First, there are important cognitive advantages to bilingualism, as you have seen, including greater cognitive flexibility and better executive functioning. Second, children who continue to use their native language maintain strong connections with their families and ethnic communities, supporting a positive ethnic identity, which we have just seen is important for academic motivation. “Language congruence may enhance the parent-child relationship, and, in turn . . . have great implications for children’s motivation to succeed academically” (Han, 2012, p. 301). Bilingual education in schools has the best track record across immigrant groups and academic competencies in promoting ELL students’ performance. One study reviewed the records of 700,000 U.S. students, comparing outcomes of ELL children in a wide range of programs (e.g., English as a Second Language [ESL] programs, pullout programs, transitional bilingual education, and so on). Four to seven years of bilingual education and support yielded the best results by far, with early academic gaps tending to disappear and children outperforming their native English-speaking peers over time (Collier & Thomas, 2004).

In general, educational factors that promote children’s cognitive and academic growth seem to fall into three broad categories: quantity, stimulation/engagement, and valuing. First, there is quantity. More time in educational settings is valuable, especially early education in preschool and kindergarten. Another such factor is having access to extra learning opportunities, such as reading or math specialists or tutors, or cram schools. Factors that increase the amount of classroom time that is actually dedicated to instruction and learning, such as good classroom management, are also helpful.

Second, more stimulating, engaging environments are important, so that factors like educational level of the family and society matter. Minimal use of grade retention helps to reduce boredom, and small classes make it more likely that each child can be engaged in learning activities that meet his needs, with challenging input and individually tailored feedback. Receiving increased amounts of instruction at school is more stimulating than doing lots of homework alone. Positive teacher–child relationships also help motivate children’s engagement.

Finally, valuing learning and valuing the child as learner is of great importance. Factors that fit this category include prioritizing education in the culture and in the family; having high expectations of each child and believing that challenge and hard work are the keys to success (as opposed to native ability); providing supports for self-regulation; and respecting the value of different backgrounds and interests among learners.

What Proximal Interactions Are Most Effective?

Let’s now take a look specifically at the kinds of proximal interactions—between teachers and children—that seem to promote children’s cognitive development and academic achievement.

General Teacher Factors.   Take a moment to examine the “teacher factors” in Table 6.1. We will look closely at two of these: teacher warmth and high expectations (or demandingness) for each child. These are the ingredients of authoritative teaching, similar to authoritative parenting. Teacher warmth is defined much like parental warmth ( Chapter 5). Warm teachers establish a positive emotional climate in the classroom for all students. They are caring and respectful, engaging their students in the process of setting individual goals, listening to them and explaining requests. They also are mindful of children’s peer relationships and friendships, requiring that children work cooperatively and treat each other respectfully. Such classroom climates help motivate children’s compliance and enthusiasm for learning tasks. Children who see their teachers as warm tend to perform better (see Caro et al, 2016; Rubie-Davies & Rosenthal, 2016).

Teachers who have high expectations encourage each child to exceed his current level of skill by providing challenging work. They are also likely to give the child “tailored” feedback and practice, another factor that promotes learning. Children whose teachers have high expectations make substantially greater academic progress than other children. Unfortunately, teachers’ expectations may vary with different children, sometimes depending on a child’s socioeconomic status, race, or ethnicity. Lower expectations are correlated with lower warmth, although teachers usually believe that they treat all of their students equally (see Rubie-Davies & Rosenthal, 2016; Sandilos, Rimm-Kaufman, & Cohen, 2017).

People, including teachers, have different mindsets about intelligence. Mindsets are beliefs about whether intelligence or some ability is a fixed asset or is malleable (see Dweck, 2017). If you think that some people perform well because they are just smart, or math geniuses, or very musically talented, then you have an “ability” mindset. You will have limited expectations for some children, especially those you think have done poorly in the past in some skill area. Having high expectations of all students is easier for teachers who believe that intelligence and academic performance can be nurtured and modified. This is a “growth” mindset. Teachers with this view believe their students can overcome poor performance with hard work and practice on appropriately challenging tasks. We will have more to say about mindsets in future chapters.

How Teachers Teach and Children Learn.   Research on children’s progress in math will help us illustrate how some proximal processes work in the classroom to advance children’s academic success. We hope you can see the bidirectionality of these processes: A child’s current level of skill, and what he does spontaneously, influences (or should influence) teacher behavior; and a teacher’s scaffolding influences the child.

In the early preschool years, the typical U.S. child has several number skills. For example, he can count, he knows there is a one-to-one relationship between number word and item when he counts, and he understands that the order in which items are counted is irrelevant (see Chapter 3). By late preschool, he has informal arithmetic skills such as adding and subtracting small numbers by using counting strategies, like the counting all strategy. For example, given two red blocks and three green ones, he will probably count all the blocks to find out the sum. As children in elementary school are introduced to more formal arithmetic, with its written numbers and standard, stepwise processes (or algorithms) for computation and recording, they continue to use their informal strategies. They also devise more and more strategies, some invented, some derived from what they are taught (Siegler & Braithwaite, 2017). For example, given a simple addition problem such as 3 + 4, they might use a strategy called the counting on strategy, starting with the first number and counting four more numbers from there. Soon, this strategy is likely to be modified so that the child usually “counts on” from the larger number. A decomposition strategy may be used sometimes when children know one sum and use it to construct another. For example, if they know 5 + 2 = 7, to figure out 5 + 3, they might just add 1. As children are exposed repeatedly to addition and subtraction facts, they begin to use the most efficient procedure of all: a retrieval strategy, pulling the answer automatically from memory.

Acquiring a store of memorized facts, or a knowledge base, is not only efficient, it helps children advance in math problem solving. When a small set of facts in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division is learned so well that retrieval is automatic (e.g., 2 + 2 = 4), more complex problems become easier to solve, because little or no working memory space needs to be allocated to calculating answers to the simple problems that are always embedded within the harder problems (Willingham, 2009/10).

Some researchers in the information processing tradition have closely followed young school children’s progress in discovering and utilizing math strategies. They have found interesting trends that seem to occur across cultures. First, most children use most of the strategies, sometimes using one, sometimes another. Second, children often use a particular strategy on problems where it is especially effective, and more efficient strategies gradually become more predominant. Third, however, even older children (and adults) sometimes use less efficient strategies (Siegler & Braithwaite, 2017). Thus, it appears that cognitive development moves gradually toward greater efficiency but that less efficient strategies are not entirely abandoned. “Bumpy” progress in strategy use seems to characterize the development of many skills, as we have seen already in memory development. As in memory development, the shift toward using more adequate math strategies, more often, seems to depend partly on metacognitive development—the child’s growing understanding of his own strategies and his increasing awareness of how effective those strategies are (Kuhn, 2000b). Figure 6.4 shows typical patterns of change in math strategy use as children move through the elementary school years.

As math learning moves beyond the simplest of problems, teachers help children acquire effective strategies by teaching them step-by-step solution procedures (e.g., in adding two-digit numbers, if the sum of the first column is a two-digit number, carry the tens digit from that sum to the tens column). Children might sometimes construct these more complex procedures themselves, but teaching them these strategies helps children progress more efficiently (Willingham, 2009/10).

However, learning the procedures is not enough. When children assimilate the procedures to a limited understanding of mathematics, they sometimes invent strategies that produce errors. In the information processing tradition, flawed strategies are referred to as “bugs.” An example would be a boy who does not yet truly understand the base 10 system, but who thinks that one should always subtract the smaller from the larger number. When he is given the problem he subtracts the 1 from the 5 and comes up with 24 (Ginsburg, 1989).

In the Piagetian tradition, some research specifically explores developmental changes in what children understand about what they are taught about mathematics. Children’s progress in understanding the base 10 system provides a good illustration of the extent to which their mathematical knowledge is constructed (e.g., Kamii, 1986, 1990; Mix, Smith, Stockton, Cheng, & Barterian, 2017). If we ask a first grader to count a set of 13 blocks and then write down the answer, he will probably be able to comply. But if we circle the “3” and then ask, “Does this part of your 13 have anything to do with how many blocks there are?” a first grader might say, “No.” He hinks that only the whole number 13 tells about the number of blocks. When he’s in second grade, he might say that the “3” represents a certain three blocks. When in third grade, he may talk about ones and tens, but is likely to say that the “1” in 13 represents one single item, not 10. By fourth and fifth grades, about half of children recognize that the “1” represents a 10 (example from Kamii, 1990). Thus, although a child typically hears about the base 10 system from first grade onward, he seems to assimilate it to concepts that are not correct and only gradually constructs its true meaning.

Findings such as these on children’s understanding of math concepts are a reminder of an important tenet of Piaget’s view of education: Teaching children facts or procedures is not sufficient for developing the kind of understanding they will need to truly advance in a subject, as was the case in the round Earth study (Vosniadou & Mason, 2012). Teachers need also to probe children’s comprehension. It helps to ask questions such as “Does the ‘3’ have anything to do with how many blocks there are?” Such questions both aid teachers in evaluating what kinds of supports a child might need to understand better and may help children begin to recognize inconsistencies in the meanings they have constructed. This kind of probing can also help teachers establish adequate placements for their students.

Care should also be taken in choosing curricular materials and in structuring assessments of students’ learning. Without practice and elaboration, advanced or accelerated programs of study may outstrip the abilities of many children and lead them to shallow or rote memorization of facts and procedures instead of deep conceptual understanding. Knowledge of facts and procedures without conceptual understanding is associated with slower, less accurate problem solving even in the early stages of math learning (Rittle-Johnson, 2017).

Thus, education in math requires, simultaneously, practice that promotes memorization of facts, exposure to efficient procedures or strategies, and help discovering the conceptual structure of math that makes the facts and procedures what they are. You have just seen that teachers who keep track of what the child can and cannot do are able to then tailor instruction or suggestion to the child’s “region of sensitivity” or zone of proximal development—one step beyond the level at which the child is currently performing. Effective teaching also tends to engage children in activities of many different kinds to promote the kind of conceptual understanding that is needed (e.g., McNeil, Fyfe, Petersen, Dunwiddie, & Brletic-Shipley, 2011). For example, it helps to give children many different and familiar examples from their experience (e.g., for fractions, sharing an apple by cutting it into equal parts). As children advance, providing familiar examples might become more difficult, but it is often possible to show them familiar situations that are analogous to a concept (e.g., an equation is analogous to a balance scale; if you do the same thing to each side, it stays balanced) (Willingham, 2009/10). Using familiar examples and analogous situations is important because, as Piaget argued, children build new knowledge by starting with what they already know. It is also important to understand that approaching the same concept from many different angles is not about catering to “learning styles.” Researchers have found no evidence for the popular concept that different people learn differently (e.g., some visually, some kinesthetically, some verbally), although they might have different preferences for how information is presented (Willingham, Hughes, & Dobolyi, 2015).

This discussion of proximal processes between teachers and children has focused on teaching math skills. Children learn other academic subjects and skills in similar ways. Consider learning to read, for example. Here too, teachers are most effective when they bring up-to-date knowledge of the skills that are most important for reading acquisition to their teaching, and when they probe their students to determine what children are bringing to the task. Then teachers can provide their students the most effective scaffolding. For instance, you saw in Chapter 3 (Box 3.2, Early Childhood Education: Helping All Children Succeed) that oral language skills are critical for reading. These skills include phonological awareness and a good vocabulary (which reflects good general knowledge). Problems in oral language development can slow down reading progress substantially, and they are key contributors to dyslexia, severe reading disability (e.g., Snowling & Melby-Lervag, 2016; Taylor, Duff, Woolams, Moaghan, & Ricketts, 2015). With careful probing, a teacher can identify whether a child has any weaknesses in oral language skills and can provide extra opportunities for practice of the needed skills to facilitate the child’s appropriate progress.

Social Cognition

One day, Malik and Benj (from the beginning of this chapter) find themselves in conflict over a rule change in their daily game of “tag.” Benj insists on keeping the rule the same, but Malik keeps arguing that changing the rule would make the game more fun. Benj, who is usually quiet and calm, stamps his foot with frustration and anger, and he looks perilously close to crying. Malik starts to walk away, but he wants to play and he wants things to be okay, so he finally gives in with a shrug. Later, as they are lining up to go back to class, Malik tells Benj about something crazy his little brothers did the night before, and they troop back to their classroom laughing.

Malik is surprised and hurt by Benj’s strong negative reaction to his suggestion. The boys change the rules of their game almost daily, usually without problems. But Malik is able to control his own emotional reaction to Benj’s unexpected behavior. He also has a notion that Benj could be having a bad day for reasons he has not shared with Malik, and that this time it’s better not to press his point. That guess leads Malik to “cave” for now and to try to lighten the mood between them. Malik’s capacity to control his own emotions and to take into account his friend’s mental state is an important ingredient in the maintenance of his friendship with Benj.

Just as children’s knowledge about the physical world and about logical-mathematical concepts becomes more sophisticated with time, so does their understanding of other people. This latter domain, referred to as social cognition, focuses primarily on the ways people think about other people and how they reason about social relationships.

You have already learned a lot about the foundations of social cognition. As you will recall from earlier chapters, infants and toddlers begin to understand social relationships within the context of the attachments they form. The discriminations infants make between objects and people, their diligent attention to caregivers, their capacity for imitation and social referencing, and their early attempts at communication presage knowledge about people and human psychology. Toddlers try to change the behaviors of others, empathize with others’ distress, and use emotion words indicating that they have explicit knowledge of others’ mental states. These skills suggest that infants and young children are in the process of learning about social interactions almost from birth (see Carpendale & Lewis, 2015).

Studies of the young child’s theory of mind focus on key aspects of social cognition, addressing questions such as “When does the child come to understand that the other has a mind?” and “How does the child use information about mental states to understand people and social relationships?” You have already seen that by their fifth birthday most children realize that others often have different thoughts and beliefs from their own. For example, they now succeed on false belief tasks in which they must anticipate that a person who has not had the opportunity to see an object moved from its original hiding place to a new location might have a false belief about the object’s whereabouts (see Chapter 3). Preschoolers’ success on false belief tasks has been related to reciprocal communication with peers and to the ability to communicate about internal mental states with friends. As cognitive understanding of mental processes in self and others progresses, children are better able to function in social relationships.

Even though a typical 5-year-old can usually understand that beliefs and other mental experiences can differ from one person to another, he has much to learn about how to interpret others’ thoughts, feelings, and desires. This skill, as you learned in Chapter 3, is called perspective taking. Studies of social cognition in middle childhood often focus on how perspective taking develops, and how it affects children’s friendships, methods of conflict resolution, and appreciation for social rules and conventions. In this chapter, we will focus on how social cognitive skills, especially perspective taking, are related to friendship development.

The Importance of Friendships

No one has to convince helping professionals that the dynamics of social relationships are important ones to understand. Although not every social relationship can be considered a friendship, the special relationships we have with friends teach us about human relationships in general.

During the middle childhood years, friendships take on enormous importance. Long-term studies have found that having at least one mutual friend in middle childhood is an important predictor of mental health in adulthood (Fink et al., 2015). For school-aged children being reared in difficult circumstances, having a good friend serves as a protective factor, moderating some environmental risks. For example, in the Virginia Longitudinal Study of Child Maltreatment (Bolger & Patterson, 2003), 107 children who were abused or neglected were identified through state social service records from a larger sample of 1,920 public school children. Most of the maltreated children were at risk in other ways as well. For example, 92% had low enough family incomes that they qualified for federal food subsidies of some kind. During the course of the study, children were asked whether they had a best friend, and their friend choices were compared to verify that they were reciprocated. Among the measures collected over time were assessments of the children’s self-esteem. Children also rated their own competence in a variety of domains. As you might expect, maltreated children perceived themselves as less competent than children who had no history of abuse or neglect. But maltreated children with a reciprocal friend showed substantial gains in self-esteem from grade 3 to grade 5, gains that were maintained through grade 7, and on average they were doing about as well on self-esteem as other children. Unfortunately, maltreated children who did not have a best friend showed declines in self-esteem across the years of middle childhood.

Any child’s difficulties in making and keeping friends can consume much of a helping professional’s time because of the far-reaching consequences of poor peer relationships and inadequate conflict resolution skills on emotional well-being, academic achievement, and behavior. What is important for helpers to understand is that the skills of friendship are not just behavioral but are heavily dependent on cognitive development. In this section, we will introduce some major theoretical approaches to friendship development that have a basis in cognitive developmental theory. In Chapter 7, the research on larger peer group interaction and peer group status will be reviewed.

How Perspective Taking Develops in the Middle Years of Childhood

The cognitively complex skill of perspective taking develops gradually as children mature, much in the same way that other cognitive abilities change and improve (see Miller, 2012, for a review of research). What contributes to the improvement? First, this ability is tied to other cognitive advances, such as the development of executive functions, and especially working memory. You saw in Chapter 3 that very young children seem trapped in their own perspective; Piaget called it preoperational egocentrism. He theorized that the ability to decenter, to hold in mind more than one piece of information at a time, helps children become less egocentric. Modern theorists, like neoPiagetians and theory theorists, see growth of working memory capacity as critical to this development. Children’s performance on executive function tests, especially working memory tests, is correlated with their performance on tests of theory of mind (perspective taking) in preschool (Devine & Hughes, 2014) and in elementary school (Devine, White, Ensor, & Hughes, 2016). In fact, in a study of 9- to 10-year-olds, the size of working memory at age 9 predicted growth in theory of mind test performance at age 10 (Lecce, Bianco, Devine, & Hughes, 2017).

Piaget also theorized that growth in perspective taking skill was critically dependent on interaction with peers. He believed that about the time children enter elementary school in industrialized cultures, they are forced to consider other children’s viewpoints to survive the normal give-and-take of the classroom community structure. Before then, children may have been able to rely on parents’ or other family members’ willingness to meet their egocentric needs and to understand their egocentric communication. Peers are typically less willing and able to do so. The child in elementary school, or even before, is forced to clarify his thoughts and adopt better communication skills in order to be accepted by peers. Piaget saw the major and minor conflicts that accompany this process as essential to a developing awareness of perspectives other than one’s own (Flavell, 1963; Piaget, 1928).

Modern research shows that many different kinds of social experiences help children improve their perspective taking skills, not just peer interactions. Parent–child relationships play a role. When children form secure attachments to parents, they are likely to make more rapid progress in perspective taking, although why this takes place is not clear. One reason may be that securely attached dyads engage in more talk about people’s thoughts and feelings, both their own and those of others (McElwain, Booth-LaForce, & Wu, 2011), and there is evidence that such talk promotes perspective taking. Another possibility is that securely attached children approach interactions with other children in positive ways, because they have trusting, positive expectations (working models) of social relationships. If that means they have more opportunities to interact with peers, they may (as Piaget theorized) get more practice in perspective taking than children who are less engaging (see Carpendale & Lewis, 2015; Furman & Rose, 2015).

Interactions with siblings also benefit perspective taking skills, at least in Western countries. (This “sibling effect” has not yet been found in non-Western countries; see Hughes & Devine, 2015.) Children with siblings often perform better on tests of perspective taking than children without siblings. “The juxtaposition of love and hate is a common (and rather unique) feature of sibling relationships” (Hughes & Devine, 2015, p. 16). So brothers and sisters might influence each other’s theory-of-mind abilities either through their positive interactions (their close collaboration and support) or through their more negative interactions (teasing and conflict) or both (Carpendale & Lewis, 2015). Imagine a younger sibling hearing this mocking assessment of her play from an older sister: “Yeah it’s stretching; really, really, interesting. You know in fact I am amazed. I wonder if I’ll ever, ever, see this again. No I don’t think I will because it’s just so, so rare, so amazing. Wow, I think I’m going to faint” (Hughes & Devine, 2015, p. 16). Not only is the target of this diatribe getting exposure to the fact that not everyone assesses her behavior as benignly as she does herself, but she is getting a lesson in how someone can say one thing and mean another. Interaction with peers, especially friends, is also associated with advances in perspective taking, just as Piaget proposed. For example, young children are more likely to talk about mental states—feelings and thoughts—with fith friends than even with parents. And such conversations are correlated with advances in interpreting others’ mental states, like understanding false beliefs (see Hughes & Devine, 2015).

Perspective Taking and Friendship Development

The healthiest friendships are marked by mutual give-and-take, allowing both partners to feel affirmed, understood, and respected. This kind of give-and-take both requires good perspective taking skills and helps to sharpen these skills. It also both requires and provides practice at managing conflicts. Think for a moment about your own close friendships. Regardless of how overtly agreeable or conflictual these relationships may be, there is always a tension between “what is good for me versus what is good for us” (Barr, 1997, p. 32). No friendship is immune to this underlying dynamic, which surfaces from time to time over the course of the relationship. To sustain friendships, friends must be able to coordinate both individuals’ needs and resolve the inevitable conflicts that arise in ways that are mutually agreeable. Any imbalance, such as too much coercion from one partner and too little assertiveness from the other, can undermine the friendship in the long run. In other words, ineffective management of the desynchrony between the needs of the individual and the needs of the pair puts the friendship at risk.

Even in adulthood, friendships are always “works in progress” that require mutual coordination of perspectives and ongoing balancing of needs. Imagine how short-lived a friendship would be if you typically perceived your friend’s momentary insensitivity or inability to participate in some shared activity as a personal insult directed toward you. Your understanding that he might be overextended and thus under stress can help you take a more empathic perspective, despite your own disappointment. Children find this harder to do because they are essentially practicing their perspective taking and other friendship skills. Hurts, betrayals, and conflicts will almost inevitably accompany their friendship development as they struggle to learn to compromise, compete, and cooperate in a civil way. Without this sometimes painful experience, however, children may not learn the intimacy and autonomy strategies they need to reap the benefits of satisfying friendships throughout their lifetimes. Helping professionals who are knowledgeable about the nature of friendship development are in a unique position to facilitate children’s progress in this area.

Selman’s Stages of Friendship Development

Building on a Piagetian framework, Robert Selman (1980, 2008) identified five stages in the development of perspective taking, beginning at preschool age and continuing through adolescence. Each level of perspective taking skill is linked to a different level of friendship or shared experience, as well as to a different level of conflict resolution (see Table 6.2). Selman’s theory highlights the tight interconnections among a child’s ability to understand others (perspective taking), his needs for intimacy in relationship (friendship), his skill in balancing personal needs without sacrificing the relationship (autonomy), and his ability to solve conflicts (conflict resolution). A number of studies provide support for aspects of Selman’s account (e.g., Diazgranados, Selman, & Dionne, 2016).

As with other stage theories, the age ranges are only rough approximations. What is most important is the sequence and nature of the developmental change. Stage 0, or the “Undifferentiated/Egocentric” stage, is typically manifested in preschool children before about age 5, when perspective taking capacity is quite limited. Youngsters at Stage 0 have little appreciation for the thoughts and feelings of either themselves or others. Friendship is defined in very concrete terms, without an understanding of the other person’s psychology. For example, a preschool child might define a friend as someone who lives next to you, who gives you gifts, who shares toys with you, or who likes you. Young children typically establish friendships with children who are like themselves in concrete ways, such as age, gender, race, and ethnicity (see Rubin, Bukowski, & Bowker, 2015). Conflicts between friends are not perceived as disagreements that occur between two parties with two different and legitimate points of view but are viewed as struggles to get one’s own way. Lacking much ability to consider another’s perspective, children typically resort to flight (“Go away!”) or fight (“I’ll get you!”) strategies to resolve conflicts as they seek to preserve their interests.

In Stage 1, the “Differentiated/Subjective” stage, children from about 5 to about 9 come to understand that others have viewpoints that are different from their own, but they are generally not able to coordinate these perspectives simultaneously. In other words, they can’t maintain their own perspective and that of someone else at the same time. So even though they understand that their peers have different points of view, they still may act as though their own perspective or that of an “authority” is correct. They are able to understand, for example, that they can be the subject of another’s thoughts, but they generally do not have the capacity to judge how their behavior is being evaluated by that other person. Dyami, for instance, might understand that his friend Kono has a viewpoint or a perspective on him, but Dyami has little insight into what Kono’s view of him is really like. We might say that interpersonal perspective at this age is unilateral or one-way. Yet during this period children do become better able to infer the thoughts and feelings of others, especially when they are encouraged to reflect on them. The child’s understanding of physical experience, however, is another thing altogether. In the behavioral realm, two-way reciprocity (“You hit me and I hit you back”) is readily understood.

On the psychological level, friendship is still largely a one-way proposition. The child at Stage 1 may understand his own psychological perspective but may fail to do the same for his friend. In other words, friendships may be defined by the behavioral and psychological rewards they provide for the individual child and not in terms of the mutual satisfaction afforded both members of the dyad. Seven-year-old Pavla might describe a friend as someone who helps her with her homework, doesn’t fight with her, and doesn’t walk away from her when she’s upset. Notice the mix of behavioral (homework help) and psychological (social support) characteristics that are directed toward the benefit of one person. Conflicts are also viewed as one-way propositions. The responsibility to resolve a conflict is in the hands of the person who was perceived to have initiated it. There is little understanding of problem solving by mutual consensus.

At Stage 2, the “Reciprocal/Self-Reflective” stage, older children master a critical developmental task. During this period, between late childhood and early adolescence (about 8 to 12), children’s friendships become more intense. Children show a more focused interest in same-sex age-mates or “chums.” Their “chumships” teach children that the needs and perspectives of other persons must be considered as carefully as their own. Malik shows signs of this kind of social understanding when he considers that Benj may be having a bad day and may need some special consideration.

Children become more cognizant of the perspectives of others and learn to put themselves in another’s place as a way of evaluating intentions and actions. Children begin to assume the psychological position of the other, and they start to reflect on their own behavior and motivation as perceived by someone else. Eleven-year-old Keisha, who doesn’t really want to go swimming at her friend Amber’s house because she’d prefer to spend the afternoon watching TV, might agree to go anyway. Keisha, seeing Amber as a person who is rather easily hurt, reasons that if she declines the invitation, Amber might think that Keisha doesn’t like her or that she doesn’t want to be her friend. This more sophisticated level of perspective taking ability reflects two-way reciprocity (“I think; you think”).

At this stage, children can grasp more highly differentiated patterns of motivations and emotions and make finer discriminations between thoughts and feelings. They can conceive of the fact that people, including themselves, can experience conflicting motives and feelings and can feel one thing but act in a completely different way. In our earlier example, Keisha wants to spend some time alone but she also wants to preserve her friendship with Amber. She may simultaneously feel liking and impatience toward her friend. She may decide to go swimming and cover up her true feelings of disinterest in the activity. Conflict resolution between children at this stage reflects the growing awareness that both parties must give a little to reach a solution.

At Stage 3, the “Mutual/Third-Person” stage, adolescents of about 10 to 15 learn to view each other’s perspectives simultaneously and mutually. Rather than simply viewing each other’s perspective in a back-and-forth approach (“first me, then you”), adolescents can mentally step back to take the perspective of a “third-party observer” even as they themselves remain a member of the pair. This allows a more detached view of the proceedings, somewhat like the way a disinterested spectator might construe a social interaction. Egocentrism is further reduced insofar as the adolescent can view the interchange between himself and his friend and reflect on it from the outside looking in.

Friendship at this stage is characterized by mutual support and shared intimacy and is not seen just as a means of obtaining what either party desires as an individual. Consequently, conflict resolution strategies are marked by more attention to the mutuality of the relationship. There is an awareness that problems do not always reside within one of the participants but instead that they are the responsibility of both parties to address. Harmonious resolution of the conflicts that are inevitable in relationships is perceived to strengthen both parties’ commitment to that relationship. Adolescents at this stage are more capable of understanding that a friendship could break down because “it just didn’t work out between us” rather than because “she wasn’t nice to me.”

Finally, at Stage 4, the “Intimate/In-Depth/Societal” stage, older adolescents and adults learn to adopt the perspective of the larger society. Perspective taking ability becomes more abstract and complex. Now the individual can assume the perspective of people beyond the limits of the dyad, namely that of a larger social group. This achievement makes possible the understanding of cultural and other group differences and the increasing appreciation of relativity—that no one person’s or individual group’s perspective is necessarily the only correct one regardless of how deeply valued it might be. Relationships are marked by the individual’s increasing ability to balance his needs for intimacy and autonomy while still preserving the friendship. With each new level of perspective taking skill, understanding of friendship improves, interpersonal values are clarified, and social and conflict resolution skills are refined.

Selman’s Framework for Friendship

Perspective taking is an important part of social relatedness, but it is not the only determinant. Let’s briefly consider how the understanding of others’ perspectives is integrated with other skills and characteristics of the child and with features of the child’s environment. Selman and his colleagues (e.g., Selman, Levitt, & Schultz, 1997) argue that many layers of interacting influences affect children’s success in making and keeping friends (see Table 6.2). Selman’s theoretical framework lends itself to clinical applications that are developmentally sensitive. An understanding of the elements of this model can help you assess relative strengths and weaknesses in a child’s social relatedness and help you choose relevant interventions.

First, the child brings to the task a variety of biologically based characteristics, from temperament (e.g., fearful versus fearless) to neuropsychological maturation (e.g., of motor abilities). Second, the family and neighborhood culture matter. For example, is the family home a place where friends are welcome and comfortable? Does the child live in a safe neighborhood where there are other children to play with, who accept the child’s ethnicity, and so on? These factors provide a backdrop to children’s social functioning, but they may only have strong, direct effects on children’s friendships in more extreme (atypical) cases. For example, a child might be so intensely fearful that he never responds positively to the overtures of other children. Or chronic parental discord in a child’s home might make it impossible for him to bring friends home. Or a child might lack friends if he lives in a dangerous neighborhood with no nearby peers, and his parents have no time or resources to arrange play dates with children who live elsewhere. Malik is fortunate that his classmate Benj lives right next door; otherwise he might have few opportunities to interact with children outside of school.

At the core of friendship success is a set of processes that make up psychosocial development. Selman defines these as “the internal psychological processes of interpersonal understanding, skills, and values that comprise an individual’s capacity for interpersonal relationships, including friendships” (Selman et al., 1997, p. 35). Friendship understanding refers to a child’s changing knowledge of what friendship implies. Friendship skills are behavioral skills, such as appropriate assertiveness, good communication, and conflict resolution that maintain and enhance friendships. Friendship valuing describes the emotional attachment or investment that the child makes in a friendship. Developmental changes in the child’s perspective taking abilities are crucial for growth in each of these three components of psychosocial development. In other words, competence in these three areas will be delimited by a child’s cognitive understanding of interpersonal relationships.

To work effectively, helpers need to appreciate what can be reasonably expected from children at each stage of their development. Teaching appropriate social skills, such as making eye contact and communicating effectively, may be irrelevant for children whose level of friendship understanding is very egocentric or for a child who is not particularly interested in being friendly toward another member of his class. On the other hand, learning how to solve conflicts effectively may be very helpful for a child who is invested in a friendship. All three dimensions need to be considered therapeutically so that interventions can be targeted accurately.

There is one other important factor in Selman’s analysis of friendship. This is the child’s interpersonal orientation, or the way the child characteristically interacts on a social level. The most mature interpersonal style is characterized by a flexible balance between intimacy and autonomy strivings. Less effective orientations, as identified by Selman, are “other-transforming” and “self-transforming” social interaction styles.

A child with an other-transforming style characteristically tries to dominate or coerce a friend into meeting his needs. He acts to change or transform the other and can be bullying, aggressive, or manipulative. A child with a self-transforming style typically gives in to reduce the level of tension. He changes his own behaviors or feelings to conform. Selman and Schultz (1990) found that very young children or socially immature older children tend to behave in these extreme ways. Such children are both more labile than other children, sometimes moving from victim to victimizer position depending on the relationship, and more rigid, refusing to compromise their position once established, even at the risk of losing the friendship.

What does it mean for a child to be bossy, impulsive, stubborn, passive, or withdrawn? On its face, each label might prescribe a certain kind of intervention: self-control training for the impulsive child, assertiveness training for the shy one, and so forth. Selman’s theoretical model gives us the means to go beyond this level of understanding to unpack the fundamental psychosocial competencies that the child depends on to engage in any social interaction. From this perspective, the bully and the victim can be functioning at the same developmental level of friendship knowledge, skills, and valuing, only using different personal orientations. Assessment of the fundamental properties that underlie friendship expression can be a helpful means of addressing interpersonal problems. We will revisit the topic of peer relationships and the processes that govern them multiple times in subsequent chapters.

Applications

The middle years of childhood are marked by major advances in reasoning, in memory, and in the comprehension of many domains, including social relationships. From infancy, the child has been navigating the social world, moving from early attachment relationships to the gradually enlarging network of peers in the school setting. There are some fundamental linkages between these early relationships and children’s later social interactions. For example, encouraging preschool children to take notice of others’ perspectives has been related to empathy, good social problem solving, and perspective taking at school age (Webster-Stratton & Reid, 2004). Success in relating to others rests on having a positive internal working model for social responding, having access to peers in settings that promote mutual respect, and knowing how to resolve conflicts, among other things. And, as we have seen in this chapter, cognitive developments contribute importantly to children’s social success at this time. During the school years, children need to be successful in the classroom as well as on the playground. Some general implications related to learning may be useful to helpers.

Knowledge acquisition is a constructive process, built on the foundation of prior learning and experience. Children benefit from instruction that organizes information, relates it to previously learned material, and stresses its meaningfulness. Too many children, critics have noted, are taught in ways that reflect an emphasis on rote memorization of facts without any fundamental understanding of concepts. Therefore, instruction should include some basic elements: gaining the child’s attention and motivation; activating what the child already knows about the material to be taught using familiar examples or analogies; presenting the new material in many ways; providing adequate, meaningful, and interesting practice to ensure retention; and giving task-specific feedback that scaffolds the child’s progress. Students can also benefit from techniques such as cooperative learning, if teachers or group leaders offer them opportunities to learn how to work effectively together. Cooperative methods should also incorporate some form of individual accountability as well as group recognition for goals achieved (Slavin, 1995).

Keep in mind that normal cognitive development is uneven. Theories of development have suffered, to some degree, from their emphasis on stages. This emphasis can lead to thinking that development proceeds in a rigid series of steps. In the real world, children as well as adults are much more variable. As you have seen, even though Piaget described stage-wise development, he also recognized that variation in skill exists within stages. Specifically, he found that logical skills were applied to some contents (such as number conservation) before other contents (such as weight conservation). This variability in skill level is clearly evident in any classroom. Some students may excel in reading and language arts, yet find math a chore. Others may be gifted athletes who remember detailed plays but who have difficulty remembering facts in social studies. Isn’t such unevenness characteristic of adults as well? Most people’s panorama of abilities reflects a mix of relative strengths and weaknesses. Teachers can provide opportunities for students to demonstrate abilities in creative ways as a supplement to more traditional forms of teaching and assessment. For example, developing skits, creating poetry or pictures, designing experiments, establishing classroom government, or running a school store are all activities that tap creative and practical intelligence (Sternberg, 1985), which may be areas of relative strength or interest for students.

Understanding and Strengthening the Tools of Learning

If you take the time to examine schools’ mission statements, even a cursory review would show a list of goals that repeat themselves across the country: academic excellence, critical and reflective thinking, life-long learning, social responsibility, and so on. What are the mechanisms by which schools achieve these goals? Do such outcomes materialize automatically by virtue of 12 or 13 years of schooling? Can we declare “mission accomplished” or are we able to improve upon outcomes with more fine-grained understanding of the processes involved?

Enter cognitive neuroscience, which promises to help educators unravel some beneath-the-surface processes that contribute to the realization of these goals. As you have been reading, executive functions (EFs) are prime candidates to explain the operations by which children succeed (Zelazo, Blair, & Willoughby, 2017). They are the building blocks we use to learn and self-regulate: working memory, inhibitory control, and mental flexibility. Think about trying to remember what you want to add to a rapid-fire discussion while you ponder others’ comments and, quite possibly, allow them to reshape your own. Consider, as well, how you manage the anxiety or irritation you might feel while awaiting your turn to speak. Your eventual comments might be different from the ones you initially had. Your brain does the “work” of holding something in mind as it flexibly accommodates new information, all the while inhibiting distractions and regulating affective states that might interfere with your intended goal: to contribute your ideas to the discussion. This is one example of executive functions in action.

Currently, research is not advanced enough to tell us precisely what kinds of training might strengthen this network of skills. Nor do we know how much practice is needed, nor what types of practice generalize best to tasks beyond the specific skills involved in the training activity. Despite many unanswered questions, there are some clues about what are useful principles of intervention, what might impair EFs, and where the field needs to go next (see Blair, 2017).

Current EF activities and interventions come in many varieties: cognitive training like computer games, physical training like yoga and martial arts, aerobics and other kinds of exercise, and so on. A review of well-conducted research by Diamond and Ling (2015) takes a critical look at current practices to separate those that work from those that do not. Some conclusions from their summary include the following points.

 In general, widespread effects from specific training (like computerized memory training) have not been found to generalize to other domains. For example, playing a computer game that requires the same kind of response over and over can make you better at that response, but it may have no effect on other real-world problems. People do get better at the skills they practice, but typically these skills remain in their narrow lane.

 There is some evidence for dosage effects. That is, the more you practice something, the better your performance becomes. Yet some research indicates that smaller doses of practice are optimal for certain types of skills, presumably because repetition can cause boredom.

 Skills, unlike diamonds, do not last forever. You need to challenge yourself continuously to retain and further develop the skills. Just as you wouldn’t expect to stay fit and trim without continued physical exercise, you shouldn’t expect the same kinds of EF results without cognitive practice. Simply staying in your comfort zone is apparently not enough. Tackling more and more challenging cognitive tasks seems to be the answer. Once practice stops, benefits decline.

· benefits decline.

· Contrary to conventional wisdom, aerobic exercise or resistance training, on their own, do not impact executive functions. Once again, the key to EF improvement appears to be some kind of challenging cognitive component. Thus, the marriage of exercise with some mental challenge (planning, teamwork, problem solving, remembering rules, etc.) has shown beneficial effects. Although research on sports and EFs is sparse, this is a fertile ground for future study because success in many team sports depends on the exercise of EF skills. Some school-based programs discussed earlier (like Tools of the Mind) demonstrate the potential of certain educational approaches and structured play to boost executive functions because they support self-regulation, require decision making and planning, and are motivating.

Executive functions, while primarily localized in the brain’s prefrontal cortex (PFC), are connected via neural networks to areas that process emotional and motivational information (like the amygdala). Their cross talk is accomplished by means of neurotransmitters, which greatly affect how well EFs operate. If a child (or an adult, for that matter) is emotionally upset, aroused, or stressed, these affective states signal and can ultimately overwhelm the PFC. Then, EFs suffer. When the adult or child is unmotivated or bored, signaling is too low for healthy EF activity. Thus, a well-modulated and moderately strong level of input in this circuitry supports peak EF functioning. Stress, boredom, poor health, lack of sleep, etc. compromise working memory, attention, and cognitive flexibility because they interfere with the brain’s feedback loop (Blair, 2017).

It makes sense, then, for helpers to address the factors that can compromise EF efficiency. Stress is a likely suspect. Mindfulness meditation (more in Chapter 14), which may have great benefits for EFs because of its ability to reduce mental and physical tension, has been making inroads into educational settings (Zelazo & Lyons, 2012). Similarly, interventions that promote social acceptance and belonging, physical fitness, restorative sleep, and health can support cognitive functions. Increasing recess time may be another avenue. Schools in the United States, compared to many other countries, have increasingly reduced recess time in the service of academics, and a majority of U.S. elementary schools still allow withholding recess as punishment for behavioral or academic infractions (Turner, Chriqui, & Chaloupka, 2013). A 2011 study found that U.S. children got an average of 26 minutes of combined recess, snack, and lunchtime (Bornstein, 2011). In Finland, by comparison, students get 75 minutes of recess plus a break of 15 minutes after lessons. In Shanghai, students get 10 minutes of recess for each 40-minute instruction period in addition to lunch and “rest” periods (Chang & Coward, 2015). Students in these countries are academically successful, perhaps because of regular breaks that take their physiology into consideration, help reduce stress, reboot concentration, and support social and emotional skills. Diamond and Ling remind us that “if a program focuses only on trainig EFs and does nothing to decrease how stressed an individual feels, increase joy, enhance feelings of social connectedness and social support, improve sleep or increase physical fitness, then unmet emotional, social, or physical needs, we predict, will work to oppose any improvement in EFs from the program” (2016, p. 41).

As we have stated previously, buyer beware. There is a burgeoning market for “mind training” tools, many of which are supported by dubious claims. As always, some discernment is probably called for. Not all claims are true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we should throw out the whole idea of strengthening EFs. Finding the best route to this end remains the task for research in the years ahead.

Social and Emotional Learning: The Time Has Come

Would you be impressed with an intervention that improved students’ achievement scores by 11 percentile points without even mentioning academics? This is precisely what was found in a large-scale study of social-emotional learning (SEL) programs in schools (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011). SEL is defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL, www.casel.org) as “the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions” (http://www.casel.org/faqs/). The beneficial academic effects mentioned earlier were demonstrated in a meta-analysis of over 270,000 students who participated in SEL programs in their schools. Improvements in prosocial attitudes and behaviors were also found. Not only were these gains evident in the short run, but a subset of programs studied six months to 18 years after programs ended revealed a pattern of protection resulting in subsequently higher achievement (13 percentile points), lower drug use, fewer conduct problems, and less emotional distress (Taylor, Oberle, Durlak, & Weissberg, 2017).

Programs that fall into the category of SEL are generally considered universal or primary prevention programs. They are integrated into the school day, so that all students participate. Social-emotional skills, such as empathy, self-management, decision making, etc., are considered just as important to school and life success as reading and math instruction, and research bears this out. Effective programs listed in the CASEL guides have some things in common: sequenced lessons, activities and practices focused on explicit social and emotional skills, and active learning techniques, all provided within a caring context that is sensitive to cultural conditions (see Jones et al., 2017). Recently, school districts, professional organizations, school boards, and even state governments are getting on board. The U.S. Department of Education “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA, https://www.ed.gov/essa) requires schools to take non-academic factors into account in the teaching–learning process. Perhaps future expansion of SEL programs will also be fueled by economic arguments such as the one offered by researchers from Columbia University (Belfield, Bowden, Klapp, Levin, Shand, & Zander, 2015). In their analysis, SEL programs showed a substantial economic benefit to society. For every dollar spent on these programs, $11 was returned on the investment.

One comprehensive SEL program with demonstrated effectiveness is Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS), a prevention program that includes 131 lessons for children in Grades K through 5 (Greenberg & Kusche, 2002). PATHS is founded on a holistic approach to the development of emotional well-being, and like good prevention programs, reaches out to include multiple levels of the system (peers, parents, and teachers). The primary goals include the promotion of emotional literacy, self-control, and social problem-solving skills in the context of a positive school environment. The benefits of this program have extended to children from a wide range of ethnic, racial, and social class backgrounds, to children with disabilities, and to children of both genders (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group [CPPRG], 1999; Greenberg & Kusche, 1998).

The interpersonal cognitive problem-solving portion of this program offers an example of the material we have been discussing in this chapter. This part of the curriculum includes 33 lessons (introduced in grades 3 or 4) that are presented after the units on emotional recognition, self-control, and communicating with others have been completed. The authors note that problem solving is not just an isolated cognitive activity but one that flows from a basic understanding of self and others. The lessons in the problem-solving unit are listed in Table 6.3. To generalize the skills and apply them to everyday life, children are encouraged to write out real problems from their life experience and put them into a “mailbox” on the teacher’s desk. These problems are discussed in regular problem-solving meetings. Teachers also build problem-solving practice into other areas, such as academic subjects.

Assessing and Teaching Metacognitive Skills

Despite typical age-related limitations in children’s abilities to reflect on their thinking, metacognitive advances do emerge during this period and open up a range of clinical possibilities (Elliott et al., 2013). The major elements of metacognition, which includes the ability to appraise and regulate one’s own thinking, have great relevance for educational and clinical efforts to improve skills like problem solving and perspective taking. The role of distorted cognitions in mental health problems is also very well known to clinicians, so understanding children’s self-statements can be important in this regard.

One component of metacognition is the ability to know what one is thinking. Several means of assessing cognition have been used in research, including asking people what they say to themselves while they are currently thinking about some task (called “self-talk”), asking them what they were thinking after they completed the task (called “thought-listing”), or, after videotaping an activity and replaying the video, asking them to “dub” the self-talk (called “video-mediated recall”). A self-talk instruction might be “When you read this short paragraph [or work on this problem], just remember to say out loud all the things that come into your head.” The use of self-talk can help the helper understand how the child understands a particular situation or problem, how he makes attributions about the problem, and how he goes about solving the problem.

The areas of study skills training, academic counseling, or tutoring also depend on a working knowledge of children’s cognition. Counselors can attempt to appraise thinking by informal assessment of memory as described in this chapter. In the case of underachievement, students may be helped to understand the study process through prompts such as: “Do you know that studying every night will help you master the material?” (declarative knowledge); “What do you do when you study for a test?” (procedural knowledge); and “When do you think you should memorize definitions and when should you practice problems?” (conditional knowledge). Once the thoughts are revealed, helpers can clarify misconceptions and help children learn more effective study skills. Table 6.4 presents a sampling of self-monitoring questions.

Another rationale for using self-talk procedures is to help children realize the existence of their self-talk, its relationship to their feelings and behaviors, and the ways they can modify it to make it more adaptive. This approach is critical to many cognitive-behavioral treatments for anxiety, depression, anger control, and ADHD (see Kendall, 1991). In this latter case, the content of the self-statements is as relevant as the process of self-instruction. In other words, teaching children (and adults, for that matter) to recognize negative self-statements is a necessary first step before instruction and practice in alternatives.

Meichenbaum and Goodman (1971), who pioneered self-instruction training, began by teaching self-control to impulsive children using guided modeling and self-talk procedures. Their approach included the following steps. First, the helping professional models effective self-talk while doing some task or dealing with some hypothetical scenario. Next, the child is asked to repeat the same process while the adult provides overt instruction. Then, the child is asked to redo the activity, first talking out loud by himself and then by subvocalizing (whispering) the instructions. Finally, the child practices using private (nonvocal) self-talk.

One can imagine a situation wherein therapy involves both learning the steps of self-instruction training and modifying the content of maladaptive cognitions. For example, once self-talk assessment has identified a person’s negative self-statements (“I can’t do math”), training in self-instruction can strengthen the frequency of positive alternatives (“I didn’t do well on this problem because I didn’t spend enough time studying”). Researchers report that it is not necessary, and is actually undesirable, for people to expect to have only positive thoughts. The ratio of 2 positive thoughts to 1 negative one appears optimal for healthy adjustment (Schwartz & Garamoni, 1989). Depressed individuals, for example, show an equal 1:1 balance (Kendall, 1991). Therefore, tipping the scales in favor of more positive thoughts appears to be a clinically important goal for adults and children alike (Kendall, 2011).

Focus on another element of metacognition, self-regulation of thinking—the “how well am I thinking?” part—helps the individual translate knowledge into action. As in self-instruction approaches, this provides the basis for cognitive problem-solving techniques, which are used to good effect in a variety of clinical and educational settings. Typical problem-solving steps include defining the problem or goal, selecting a plan to solve the problem or meet the goal, monitoring progress toward the goal, and revising goal-directed strategies, if needed.

Summary

Brain and Behavior

1. Changes in the brain both enable and are affected by cognitive and motor developments. In middle childhood, continuing brain growth is partially a function of ongoing myelination. Both gross motor and fine motor coordination benefit from continued myelination of the corpus callosum, connecting the left and right cortical hemispheres, and the cerebellum, as well as other brain maturation processes.

2. Some differences in cognitive and behavioral development among children are related to differences in brain development. For example, in about half of children diagnosed with ADHD, brain growth is delayed, especially in the frontal lobes, although most catch up by adolescence or early adulthood. Unevenness in brain development, both between and within children, is to be expected.

Cognitive Development

3. In Piaget’s theory, children at the concrete operational stage (6 to 12 years) can decenter, or think about more than one dimension or aspect of a situation at one time. This allows them the possibility of recognizing or constructing the relationships among the dimensions, which is important for logical thinking. Understanding reversible relationships, when one change reverses the effects of another, or one change compensates for the effects of another, is especially important. Recognizing the nature of the relationships among features of an event makes it possible for children to infer underlying realities.

4. At the concrete operational stage, children’s thinking is most logical when they are solving problems that relate to real, concrete events. They find it difficult to think logically about abstract contents, like their own thought processes. They find it difficult to distinguish between their own theories or assumptions and objective fact.

5.  Whether or not children are able to solve a problem logically in middle childhood depends on factors such as the particular materials or context of the problems. When children have a great deal of experience with a specific domain of knowledge (expertise), they are more likely to think logically about problems in that domain.

6.  In the information processing approach, cognition is compared to the functioning of a computer. The organization of the cognitive system stays the same across age, but there are age changes in the amount and efficiency of information flow. “Top-down” processes engage executive functions. They require focused attention and effort. “Bottom-up” processes seem to bypass executive functions, not requiring conscious effort to occur. With increasing age, executive functions improve, including control of emotions, attention, and problem solving. The pace of improvement varies somewhat across cultures, apparently depending on parents’ socialization practices.

7.  NeoPiagetians are theorists who try to integrate concepts from Piaget’s theory and from information processing theory to explain cognitive development. Theory theorists assume that children form theories about the physical, biological, and social world from infancy. Like Piaget and neoPiagetians, they are constructivists.

8.  Two kinds of remembering or retrieval are called recognition (realizing that information being experienced now is familiar) and recall (drawing information out of long-term memory and representing it to yourself). Our memories can store declarative knowledge, both semantic (about facts and concepts) and episodic (about events we have experienced). A schematic representation of a frequently experienced event is called a script. We also store nondeclarative knowledge, which is hard to verbalize and is often referred to as procedural, which is “knowing how” rather than “knowing that.” Infants’ and toddlers’ knowledge is largely nondeclarative.

9.  Working memory (one of the executive functions) increases in capacity with age, as indicated on digit span tests. This seems to be partly a result of faster information processing, perhaps due to practice, perhaps to maturation, or to both.

10.  Children’s knowledge base increases with age, and that helps children reconstruct events. They “remember” more accurately because they can infer what must have happened. An expanded knowledge base also helps children learn new information more easily, perhaps because they can fit the new information into a rich web of well-organized connections. Having an expanded knowledge base also benefits chunking in working memory.

11.  Advances in logical thinking can help children improve their memories. The better the child understands the original experience, the more likely he is to reconstruct it accurately.

12.  Increasing facility with language helps children store memories for events in coherent verbal form and seems to improve later retrieval of those events.

13.  Children also improve in the use of memory strategies with age from preschool through middle school. Rehearsal is an early strategy, with more effective strategies such as organization coming later. Children’s progress in strategy use is bumpy. They may exhibit either production deficiencies or utilization deficiencies.

14.  Children gradually improve their understanding of their own cognitive processes (metacognition), including memory abilities (metamemory), as they approach the end of middle childhood, partly accounting for improvements in strategy use with age.

15.  Memory is also influenced by affective and social developments, like motivation to learn and the amount of scaffolding available from adults.

16.  Formal schooling is the context in which a great deal of adult scaffolding of cognitive development occurs. Many factors contribute to children’s academic success at the country/culture level, the school level, and the proximal, teacher–child interaction level. These factors moderate each other’s effects, so that some factors matter more or less depending on the presence of other factors. Overall, effective educational factors fall into three categories: quantity (amount of instruction/practice), stimulation/engagement, and valuing (of learning and the learner).

17.  17. Teacher factors that contribute to effective teacher–child interactions are much like the most effective parenting factors: warmth and demandingness (high expectations). Teachers with a “growth” mindset see intelligence as malleable, and they are more likely to be demanding with all children regardless of past performance. Teachers with an “ability” mindset see intelligence as a fixed trait and are less likely to challenge children whom they expect to be poor performers.

18.  whom they expect to be poor performers.

19.  The kinds of proximal, teacher–child interaction processes that matter are illustrated by effective math education. Children usually begin school with informal mathematical skills, such as adopting simple counting strategies for adding and subtracting small numbers. In elementary school, they continue to invent their own strategies as well as adopting the formal procedures and strategies they are taught. Gradually, more efficient strategies win out over less efficient strategies, though again, development is bumpy.

20.  Helping children build a knowledge base of memorized math facts and procedures is useful but must be accompanied by support for conceptual understanding. Children assimilate formal procedures to their own concepts, and often misunderstand. Teachers can encourage mathematical development by exploring their students’ understanding and by working forward from what children already understand, such as by providing familiar examples of concepts or familiar analogies to more difficult concepts.

21. Children learn other academic skills via similar processes. For example, learning to read requires strong verbal language skills, such as phonological awareness and a good vocabulary. Teachers need to assess these skills and work forward from the child’s current capacities.

Social Cognition

22. Learning about social interactions, including how to make and keep friends, and acquiring a theory of mind begins in early childhood and is heavily dependent on cognitive developments. For example, children’s perspective taking improves as they acquire the ability to think about their own mental experiences and those of another person at the same time. Growth of executive functions, especially working memory capacity, makes an important contribution. Advances in perspective taking are also a function of experience in social interactions, with parents, with siblings, and with peers.

23.  In Selman’s five-stage theory of friendship development, improvements in perspective taking affect an individual’s friendship understanding, influence his friendship valuing, and affect the social and conflict resolution skills (friendship skills) he develops.

24.  In Selman’s view, a mature interpersonal orientation balances intimacy and autonomy strivings. Less effective orientations may be other-transforming or self-transforming, and are more characteristic of very young children and of socially immature older children. Both a bully and a victim may be functioning at a similar developmental level with regard to perspective taking skill. Assessing the properties of understanding that underlie relationship skill is a helpful approach to addressing social problems.

Case Study

Alex, the second child of Ernest and Isabel Palacio, a Cuban American couple, is a fourth grader at J. F. Kennedy Elementary School. He has one older sister, Paula, who is in fifth grade, and a younger brother, Thomas, who is 4 years old. Until recently, Alex appeared to be a happy child and a good student in school. Although somewhat reserved, he interacted well with peers, was athletic, and was popular among his classmates.

During the year Alex was in third grade, the Palacios’ marriage was seriously affected by Ernest’s close relationship with a female coworker. Despite an attempt at counseling, the couple could not resolve their differences. During the summer before his fourth-grade year, Alex’s parents separated. The children continued to live with their mother, but maintained a relationship with their father, seeing him every weekend in the apartment he rented nearby.

Both parents tried hard to make this arrangement work for the sake of their children, to whom both were devoted. The fourth-grade school year began fairly smoothly for Alex, who was happy to see his friends again after the summer vacation. His teacher, Mr. Williams, was regarded as tough but usually fair, and Alex seemed to make a good initial adjustment to his class. Ernest continued his employment with an advertising agency and paid for many of the family’s living costs. However, the expense of maintaining two residences quickly became burdensome. Isabel, formerly employed as a part-time library aide, needed to find a position that provided a larger income. She began a job as a secretary shortly after the children began school in September.

In December, Isabel fell ill and needed to be hospitalized. Primary care of the children fell to Isabel’s mother, the children’s grandmother. Ernest took over as much of the caretaking as his work schedule would permit, but he feared that if he took off too much time for family responsibilities, his job would be in jeopardy. Because of these changes in the family, all three children needed to adjust. It became much more difficult for an adult to transport the children after school to music lessons and games, so they had to drop out of some of their activities. As Isabel recuperated, she needed much more rest and general peace and quiet. She could no longer take the children on trips or allow groups of her children’s friends to have sleepovers in her home.

Toward the middle of his fourth-grade year, Alex’s grades started to slip, and he began to act up. Alex grew apathetic and sullen in class. Mr. Williams was a relatively young teacher in the school district. His first two years of teaching had been spent in the eighth grade of the district middle school. He liked teaching older students and reluctantly accepted the fourth-grade position because of his lack of seniority in the system. Mr. Williams, despite his youth, was a fairly traditional teacher. He believed in giving lots of homework and in placing high expectations for performance on his students. He ran a very disciplined classroom that was based on a system of winning and losing points for behavior. Because Alex did not participate actively in classroom exercises or turn in homework, he continually “lost points.”

On one particularly difficult day, Alex and one of his friends got into an argument. Alex accused his friend of picking on him and teasing him in the lunchroom. Mr. Williams tried to intervene by taking both boys out into the hallway and listening to each version of the problem. When the disagreement got louder, Mr. Williams told both boys that they would “just have to work it out.” He told them he would take away points and was sending them both to the principal’s office. Alex became very agitated and said to his teacher, “Sometimes I feel like throwing my chair at you.”

Mr. Williams began to see Alex as a threat and recommended to the principal that the incident be handled as a disciplinary matter. It was the teacher’s belief that Alex should be suspended and then referred for a psychological evaluation by the school psychologist because of his “aggressiveness.” He insisted that Alex not be returned to his classroom.