Chapter 9: Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

Emotional Intelligence

A set of emotional abilities that enable individuals to process and adapt to emotional information.

Physical Education

Although physical activity supports many aspects of children's development, U.S. elementary schools have cut back on recess, and physical inactivity among school-age children is pervasive. Fewer than one-third of 6- to 17-year-olds are active enough for good health. Many experts believe that schools should not only offer more physical education classes but should also deemphasize competitive sports and focus on informal games and individual exercise.

Shadows of Our Evolutionary Past

Among children in many cultures, a form of friendly chasing and play-fighting called rough-and-tumble play emerges in the preschool years and peaks in middle childhood. Rough-and-tumble play, more common in boys, resembles the social behavior of many other young mammals and seems to originate in parents' physical play with babies, especially fathers' with sons. Rough-and-tumble play helps children form a dominance hierarchy—a stable ordering of group members that predicts who will win when conflict arises. As children reach puberty, individual differences in strength become apparent, and rough-and-tumble play declines.

IQ

Around age 6, IQ becomes more stable than it was earlier and correlates moderately well with academic achievement. As a result, it is often used in making educational decisions.

Classification

Between ages 7 and 10, children pass Piaget's class inclusion problem, indicating greater awareness of classification hierarchies.

Limitations of Concrete Operational Thought

Children at the concrete operational stage think in an organized, logical fashion only when dealing with concrete information that they can perceive directly. Their mental operations work poorly when applied to abstract ideas. School-age children master Piaget's concrete operational tasks step by step; they work out the logic of each problem separately instead of coming up with general logical principles that they apply to all relevant situations.

bilingual development

Children can become bilingual by acquiring both languages at the same time in early childhood or learning a second language after mastering the first. Children who learn both languages in infancy and early childhood attain early language milestones according to a typical timetable. When school-age children acquire a second language after they already speak a first language, they generally take five to seven years to attain speaking and writing skills on a par with those of native-speaking agemates. To attain full proficiency in a second language, mastery must begin sometime in childhood for most second- language learners. Children who are fluent in two languages outperform others on tests of selective attention, analytical reasoning, and concept formation.

Illnesses

Children experience a somewhat higher rate of illness during the first two years of elementary school than later because of exposure to sick children and an immune system that is still developing. The most frequent cause of school absence and childhood hospitalization is asthma. From 1980 to 1997, the prevalence of asthma among U.S. children more than doubled and then stabilized at 9 percent. Boys, African-American children, and children who were born underweight, whose parents smoke, or who live in poverty are at greatest risk.

The School-Age Child's Theory of Mind

Children's theory of mind, or metacognition—a set of ideas about mental activities—becomes more elaborate and refined during middle childhood. Older children regard the mind as an active agent that selects and transforms information. They have a much better understanding of cognitive processes and the impact of psychological factors on performance. School-age children realize that people can extend their knowledge by making mental inferences—an understanding that enables knowledge of false belief to expand, bringing a greater understanding of others' perspectives. Experiences that foster awareness of mental activities contribute to school-age children's more reflective, process-oriented view of the mind.

Seriation

Concrete operational children are capable of seriation—the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight. They can also seriate mentally, an ability called transitive inference.

Evaluation of the Concrete Operational Stage

Disagreement continues over whether children's cognitive development occurs as continuous improvement in logical skills or as discontinuous restructuring of children's thinking, as Piaget's stage idea assumes. During the school years, children's thought seems to change qualitatively, toward a more comprehensive grasp of the principles of logical thought.

Knowledge and Memory

During middle childhood, children's long-term knowledge base grows larger and becomes organized into increasingly elaborate, hierarchically structured networks. Knowing more about a topic makes new information more meaningful and familiar so it is easier to store and retrieve. Academically unsuccessful children fail to ask how previously stored information can clarify new material.

Gross-Motor Development

During middle childhood, running, jumping, hopping, and ball skills become more refined. Motor skill improvement reflects gains in flexibility, balance, agility, and force. More efficient information processing contributes to school-age children's capacity to react only to relevant information, and steady gains in reaction time occur.

Vocabulary

During the elementary school years, children learn about 20 new words a day, and vocabulary increases fourfold. Children continue to benefit from conversation with more expert speakers, and reading contributes enormously to vocabulary growth. School-age children think about and use words more precisely than preschoolers. As school-age children learn to grasp the double meanings of some words, they develop an understanding of metaphors and of riddles and puns.

Executive Function

During the school years, executive function undergoes its most energetic period of development. Children handle increasingly difficult tasks that require the integration of working memory, inhibition, planning, and flexible use of strategies. Heritability evidence suggests substantial genetic influence on various aspects of executive function. But heredity combines with environmental contexts to influence executive function. For example, poverty and stressful living conditions can undermine executive function.

Grammar

During the school years, mastery of complex grammatical constructions improves. For example, English-speaking children use the passive voice more frequently, and they more often extend it from an abbreviated form into full statements. Another grammatical achievement of middle childhood is advanced understanding of infinitive phrases—the difference between "John is eager to please" and "John is easy to please." Appreciation of subtle grammatical distinctions is supported by an improved ability to analyze and reflect on language.

Educational Philosophies: Constructivist

Encourages students to construct their own knowledge. Many are grounded in Piaget's theory, which views children as active agents who reflect on and coordinate their own thoughts rather than absorbing those of others. Constructivist classrooms provide richly equipped learning centers and allow small groups and individuals to engage in problem solving. Students are evaluated in terms of their progress in relation to their own prior development. In the United States, the pendulum has swung back and forth between these two views. A trend back to traditional instruction has become pronounced as a result of the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which has led to a narrowed curricular focus so that schools can prepare students to take achievement tests. Although older elementary school children in traditional classrooms have a slight edge in achievement test scores, constructivist classrooms are associated with many benefits, such as gains in critical thinking and greater social and moral maturity. In preschool and kindergarten, teacher-directed instruction undermines academic motivation and achievement, especially in low-SES children.

Cultural Influences on IQ

Experts disagree over whether intelligence tests are biased. Communication Styles (1) Ethnic minority families often foster unique language skills that do not match the expectations of most classrooms and testing situations. (a) For example, an observational study in low-SES African-American homes revealed that the black parents rarely asked their children knowledge-training questions, which are typical of middle-SES white parents and of tests and classrooms. (b) Furthermore, many ethnic minority parents without extensive schooling prefer a collaborative style of communication when completing tasks with children. With increasing education, parents establish a hierarchical style of communication, like that of classrooms and tests (2) The sharp discontinuity between home and school practices may contribute to low-SES minority children's lower IQs and school performance. Knowledge: Exposure to the knowledge and ways of thinking valued in classrooms has a sizable impact on children's intelligence test performance. Stereotypes (1) Stereotype threat—the fear of being judged on the basis of a negative stereotype—can trigger anxiety that interferes with performance. (2) Over middle childhood, children—especially those from stigmatized groups—become increasingly conscious of ethnic stereotypes. Reducing Cultural Bias in Testing (1) Many experts acknowledge that IQ scores can underestimate the intelligence of children from ethnic minority groups, and there is a special concern about incorrectly labeling minority children as slow learners. (2) In an innovative testing approach called dynamic assessment, which is consistent with Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, an adult introduces purposeful teaching into the testing situation to find out what the child can attain with social support. (3) Children's receptivity to teaching and capacity to transfer what they have learned to novel problems contribute substantially to gains in test performance. (4) Testing remains important to aid educational decisions, but intelligence tests need to be interpreted with sensitivity to cultural influences on performance.

Fine-Motor Development

Fine-motor development also improves over the school years. Gains are especially evident in writing and drawing.

Grouping Practices

In many schools, pupils are assigned to homogeneous groups, a practice that can be a potent source of self-fulfilling prophecies. Widespread SES and ethnic segregation in U.S. schools consigns large numbers of low-SES minority students to a form of schoolwide homogeneous grouping. When schools increase classroom heterogeneity by creating multigrade classrooms, academic achievement, self-esteem, and attitudes toward school are usually more favorable than in single-grade classrooms.

Teaching Gifted Children

Gifted children display exceptional intellectual strengths, including creativity and talent as well as high IQ. Creativity and Talent (1) Creativity is the ability to produce work that is original yet appropriate. (2) Tests of creative capacity tap divergent thinking, the generation of multiple and unusual possibilities when faced with a task or problem, which contrasts with convergent thinking, which involves arriving at a single correct answer and is emphasized on intelligence tests. (3) Definitions of giftedness include talent—outstanding performance in a specific field. (4) Parents of talented children provide a stimulating home life, are devoted to developing their child's abilities, and provide models of hard work. Educating the Gifted (1) Gifted children fare well academically and socially when the special activities provided do not reinforce academic convergent thinking to the detriment of problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity. (2) Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences has inspired several model programs that provide enrichment to all students in diverse disciplines.

Explaining Individual and Group Differences in IQ

Group differences in IQ are large enough and of serious enough consequence that they cannot be ignored. a. American black children and adolescents score, on average, 10 to 12 IQ points below American white children, although this difference has been shrinking. b. The gap between middle- and low-SES children—about 9 points—accounts for some, but not all, of the ethnic differences in IQ. c. The IQ nature-nurture controversy escalated in the 1970s after the publication of a book maintaining that heredity is largely responsible for individual, ethnic, and SES variations in intelligence.

Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences proposes at least eight independent intelligences on the basis of distinct sets of processing operations that permit individuals to engage in a wide range of culturally valued activities. Gardner believes that each intelligence has a unique biological basis, but emphasizes that a lengthy process of education is required to transform any raw potential into a mature social role. Neurological evidence for the independence of Gardner's abilities is weak. However, Gardner's theory highlights intelligences not tapped by intelligence tests (such as interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences).

Working-Memory Capacity

Improved performance on working-memory tasks is supported by brain development, and working memory benefits from enhanced speed of thinking. Time needed to process information declines rapidly between ages 6 and 12. Still, individual differences in working-memory capacity exist and are of particular concern because they predict intelligence test scores and academic achievement in diverse subjects. Children with persistent learning difficulties in reading and math are often deficient in working-memory capacity. Compared to their economically advantaged agemates, children from poverty-stricken families are more likely to score low on working-memory tasks.

Pragmatics

Improvements in pragmatics, the communicative side of language, occur as children's conversational strategies become more refined. Children's narratives increase in organization, detail, and expressiveness, gradually lengthening into a classic form in which events build to a high point and then resolve. The form of children's narratives varies widely across cultures.

Educational Philosophies: Traditional

In a traditional classroom, the teacher is the sole authority for knowledge, rules, and decision making. Students are relatively passive and are evaluated in relation to a uniform set of standards.

Teacher-Student Interaction

In classrooms where teachers are caring, helpful, and stimulating, children make gains in motivation, achievement, and positive peer relations. Well-behaved, high-achieving students typically get more encouragement and praise, whereas unruly students have more conflicts with teachers and are criticized more. These attitudes can lead to educational self-fulfilling prophecies, in which children start to live up to their teachers' positive or negative views of them. Teacher expectations have a greater impact on low-achieving than high-achieving students.

How Well-Educated Are U.S. Children?

In international studies of reading, mathematics, and science achievement, U.S. students typically perform at or below the international average. According to international comparisons, instruction in the United States is less challenging, more focused on absorbing facts, and less focused on high-level reasoning and critical thinking than in other countries. The United States is far less equitable in the quality of education it provides to its low-income and ethnic minority students. Recommended strategies for improving U.S. education include providing intellectually challenging instruction with real-world applications and strengthening teacher education.

Consequences of Obesity

Obese youngsters are negatively viewed by both children and adults, and are often socially isolated in school. Obese children and adolescents report more emotional, social, and school difficulties, including peer teasing and consequent low self-esteem, depression, and suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.

Attention

In middle childhood, attention becomes more selective, adaptable, and planful. Selective attention improves sharply between ages 6 and 10, with gains continuing throughout adolescence. Older children are better at flexibly adapting their attention to task requirements. Planning improves greatly in middle childhood. (1) Parents can foster planning by encouraging it in everyday activities. (2) The demands of school tasks—and teachers' expectations of how to plan—also contribute to gains in planning. Some children have great difficulty paying attention. Learning and behavior problems sometimes can be attributed to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

body growth in middle childhood

In middle childhood, children add about 2 to 3 inches in height and 5 pounds in weight each year. Girls are slightly shorter and lighter than boys from ages 6 to 8, but by age 9, this trend reverses. Girls have slightly more body fat, and boys more muscle. After age 8, girls begin accumulating fat at a faster rate. During middle childhood, the bones of the body lengthen and broaden. As their bodies become stronger, many children experience a greater desire for physical activity. Between ages 6 and 12, all 20 primary teeth are lost and replaced by permanent ones, and the face gradually lengthens and mouth widens.

Games with Rules

Informally organized games with rules become common in middle childhood, when gains in perspective taking allow children to understand the roles of several players in a game. School-age children today spend less time engaged in informal outdoor play—a change that reflects, in part, competition for children's time from TV, video games, and the Internet. For most children, joining community athletic teams is associated with increased self-esteem and social skills. Among shy children, sports participation seems to foster self-confidence and a decline in social anxiety.

Unintentional Injuries

Injury fatalities increase from middle childhood into adolescence, with rates for boys rising considerably above those for girls. Motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of injury, followed by bicycle accidents. Highly active, impulsive, risk-taking children, many of whom are boys, are especially susceptible to injury in middle childhood. Parents tend to be particularly lax in intervening in the dangerous behaviors of such children, especially under conditions of persistent marital conflict or other forms of mental distress.

Learning two languages

Many children grow up bilingual, learning two or more languages. An estimated 20 percent of U.S. children (10 million) speak a language other than English at home.

Educational Philosophies: New Philosophical Directions

New approaches to education, grounded in Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, capitalize on the rich social context of the classroom to spur children's learning, creating a social-constructivist classroom in which children participate in a wide range of challenging activities with teachers and peers, with whom they jointly construct understandings. Educational themes in social-constructivist classrooms include the following: (1) Teachers and children are partners in learning. (2) Children experience many types of symbolic communication in meaningful activities. (3) Teaching is adapted to each child's zone of proximal development. According to Vygotsky, more expert peers can spur children's learning. This approach is effective in the context of cooperative learning, in which small groups of classmates work toward common goals.

Memory Strategies

Memory strategies are the deliberate mental activities we use to store and retain information. Rehearsal involves repeating information to oneself. Gains in organization (grouping related items together) and elaboration (creating a relationship, or shared meaning, between two or more pieces of information that do not belong to the same category) permit older children to combine items into meaningful chunks, retain more information, and further expand working memory.

Culture, Schooling, and Memory Strategies

Memory strategies are usually used to remember information for its own sake. People in non-Western cultures who lack formal schooling rarely use or benefit from instruction in memory strategies. Development of such strategies depends, in part, on task demands and cultural circumstances.

Mathematics

Over the early elementary school years, children acquire basic math facts through frequent practice, reasoning about number concepts, and teaching that conveys effective strategies. A blend of two approaches—drill in computing and acquiring "number sense," or understanding—is most beneficial in teaching basic math.

Causes of Obesity

Overweight children tend to have overweight parents, and identical twins are more likely to share the disorder than are fraternal twins, but heredity accounts for only a tendency to gain weight. Low-SES youngsters in industrialized nations, especially ethnic minorities, are more likely to be obese because of lack of knowledge about healthy diet and family stress. Parents of obese children tend to overfeed, to pressure their children to eat, or to use unhealthy food as a reward. Obese children are more responsive than their normal-weight peers to external stimuli associated with food and less responsive to internal hunger cues. Insufficient sleep is consistently associated with weight gain. Overweight children are less physically active than their normal-weight peers. Eating outside the home, such as in restaurants or at relatives' homes, increases children's overall food consumption, including high-calorie drinks, fast foods, and snacks.

Reading

Reading taxes all aspects of our information-processing systems, making use of many skills at once. Performing all these skills efficiently releases working memory for higher-level activities involved in comprehending the text's meaning. Until recently, researchers were involved in an intense debate over the best way to teach beginning reading. (1) Proponents of a whole-language approach argued that children should be exposed to text in its complete form so that they can appreciate the communicative function of written language. (2) Others favored a phonics approach, believing that children should first be coached on phonics—the basic rules for translating written symbols into sounds. d. Many studies show that children learn best with a mixture of both approaches.

Follow-Up Research on Concrete Operational Thought

Recent evidence indicates that specific cultural and school practices have much to do with children's mastery of Piagetian tasks. Information-processing research helps explain the gradual mastery of logical concepts in middle childhood. The Impact of Culture and Schooling a. In tribal and village societies, where children rarely attend school, even basic conservation tasks are often delayed until age 11 or later. b. This suggests that participating in relevant everyday activities helps children master conservation and other Piagetian problems. c. Specifically, the very experience of going to school seems to promote mastery of Piagetian tasks. d. Some researchers conclude that the forms of logic required by Piagetian tasks do not emerge spontaneously but are heavily influenced by training, context, and cultural conditions.

Applications of Information Processing to Academic Learning

Researchers are identifying the cognitive ingredients of skilled performance, tracing their development, and pinpointing differences in cognitive skills between good and poor learners. They hope, as a result, to design teaching methods that will improve children's learning.

Sternberg's Triarchic Theory

Robert Sternberg's triarchic theory of successful intelligence expands the componential approach into a comprehensive theory that regards intelligence as a product of both inner and outer forces. Sternberg's theory identifies three broad, interacting intelligences: analytical intelligence, information-processing skills; creative intelligence, the capacity to solve novel problems; and practical intelligence, the application of intellectual skills in everyday situations. Analytic Intelligence (a) Analytic intelligence consists of the information-processing components that underlie all intelligent acts: applying strategies, acquiring task-relevant and metacognitive knowledge, and engaging in self-regulation. (b) On mental tests, processing skills are used in only a few of their potential ways, resulting in far too narrow a view of intelligent behavior. Creative Intelligence (a) People who are creative think more skillfully than others when faced with novelty. (b) Although all of us are capable of some creativity, only a few individuals excel at generating novel solutions. Practical Intelligence (a) Intelligence is a practical, goal-oriented activity aimed at adapting to, shaping, or selecting environments. (b) Practical intelligence reminds us that intelligent behavior is never culture-free. In Sternberg's theory, intelligent behavior involves balancing these three intelligences to succeed in life.

Cognitive Self-Regulation

School-age children are not yet good at cognitive self-regulation, the process of continuously monitoring progress toward a goal, checking outcomes, and redirecting unsuccessful efforts. Monitoring and controlling task outcomes is cognitively demanding, requiring constant evaluation of effort and progress. Throughout elementary and secondary school, self-regulation predicts academic success. Parents and teachers play vital roles in promoting children's self-regulation. Children who acquire effective self-regulatory skills develop a sense of academic self-efficacy—confidence in their own abilities.

Language Development

School-age children develop language awareness, which supports many complex language skills.

Spatial Reasoning

School-age children's understanding of space is more accurate than that of preschoolers. b. This is evident from children's cognitive maps—mental representations of familiar large-scale spaces, such as their neighborhood. (1) Drawing a map of a large-scale space requires considerable perspective-taking skill because the entire space cannot be seen at once. (2) Around ages 8 to 10, children's maps show landmarks along an organized route of travel. By the end of middle childhood, children form an overall view of a large-scale space. In many non-Western societies, people rarely use maps for way-finding and children walk more often. As a result, children's maps differ from those of their U.S. agemates.

Sex Differences in Motor Development and Play

Sex differences in motor skills extend into middle childhood and, in some instances, become more pronounced. Girls have an edge in fine-motor skills of handwriting and drawing and in gross-motor capacities that depend on balance and agility, but boys outperform girls on all other gross-motor skills. School-age boys' genetic advantage in muscle mass is not large enough to account for their gross-motor superiority; the social environment plays a larger role.

Class size in school

Small-class size predicts academic progress even after diverse measures of teacher quality have been controlled.

An Information-Processing View of Concrete Operational Thought

Some neo-Piagetian theorists argue that the development of operational thinking can best be understood in terms of gains in information-processing speed rather than a sudden shift to a new stage. With practice, cognitive schemes demand less attention and become more automatic, freeing up space in working memory so children can focus on combining old schemes and generating new ones. Once the schemes of a Piagetian stage are sufficiently automatic, enough working memory is available to integrate them into an improved representation, and children acquire central conceptual structures—broadly applicable principles that result in increasingly complex, systematic reasoning.

Recent Efforts to Define Intelligence

Some researchers combine the mental testing approach to defining intelligence with the information-processing approach. These investigators conduct componential analyses of children's mental test scores to look for relationships between components of information processing and children's scores. A disadvantage of the componential approach is that it regards intelligence as entirely due to causes within the child, disregarding cultural and situational factors that affect children's thinking.

Piaget's Theory: Concrete Operational Thought Stage

Spans the years from 7 to 11. Compared with early childhood, thought is far more logical, flexible, and organized.

Conservation

The ability to pass conservation tasks provides clear evidence of operations—mental actions that obey logical rules. Children at this stage are capable of decentration—the ability to focus on several aspects of a problem and relate them, rather than centering on just one. They also demonstrate reversibility—the ability to think through a series of steps in a problem and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point.

bilingual education

The advantages of bilingualism provide strong justification for bilingual education programs in schools. In Canada, about 7 percent of elementary school students participate in language immersion programs and become proficient in both French and English. In the United States, disagreement exists over how best to educate ethnic minority children with limited English proficiency. (1) Some believe that time spent communicating in the child's native tongue detracts from English language achievement. (2) Others are committed to developing minority children's native language while fostering mastery of English, and note that this approach prevents inadequate proficiency in both languages— which is believed to lead to high rates of school failure and dropout among low-SES Hispanic youngsters. Currently, U.S. public opinion and educational practice favor English-only instruction. However, when both languages are integrated into the curriculum, minority children are more involved in learning and acquire the second language more easily.

Nutrition

The cumulative effects of good nutrition and rapid development of the body's immune system work together to protect school-age children against disease. Poverty continues to be a powerful predictor of ill health during the school years. 1. School-age children need a well-balanced, plentiful diet to provide energy for successful learning in school and increased physical activity. 2. Even mild nutritional deficits can affect cognitive functioning. 3. Malnutrition that persists from infancy or early childhood into the school years usually leads to permanent physical and mental damage.

Information Processing

The information-processing perspective focuses on separate aspects of thinking rather than overall cognitive change. Working-memory capacity continues to increase in middle childhood. And school-age children make great strides in executive function, yielding significant advances in attention, planning, memory, and self-regulation.

Vision and Hearing

The most common vision problem in middle childhood is myopia, or nearsightedness; heredity and experience play a role in its development. During middle childhood, the Eustachian tube becomes larger, narrower, and more slanted, preventing fluid and bacteria from traveling so easily from the mouth to the ear. As a result, middle-ear infections become less frequent than in early childhood. About 3 to 4 percent of school-age children, and as many as 20 percent of low-SES children, develop permanent hearing loss as a result of repeated untreated middle-ear infections.

Treating Obesity

The most effective interventions are family-based and focused on changing behaviors. Schools can help by serving healthier meals, ensuring regular physical activity, and offering weight reduction programs. Because obesity is expected to rise further without broad prevention strategies, many U.S. states and cities have passed obesity-reduction legislation.

Nature versus Nurture and IQ

The most powerful evidence on the heritability of IQ involves twin comparisons. On the basis of this and other kinship evidence, researchers estimate that about half the differences in IQ among children can be traced to their genetic makeup. However, heritabilities risk overestimating genetic influences and underestimating environmental influences. The IQ gains of black children "reared in the culture of the tests and schools" are consistent with a wealth of evidence that poverty severely depresses the intelligence of ethnic minority children. A dramatic secular trend in mental test performance—a generational rise in average IQ in both industrialized and developing nations—supports the role of environmental factors.

Overweight and Obesity

Today, 32 percent of U.S. children and adolescents are overweight, and 17 percent suffer from obesity, a greaterthan-20-percent increase over healthy weight, based on body mass index (BMI). A rise in overweight and obesity has occurred in many Western nations over the past several decades, and obesity rates are also increasing rapidly in developing countries. Obese children are at risk for lifelong health problems, and an estimated 70 percent of affected teenagers become overweight adults.

Teaching Children with Learning Difficulties

U.S. legislation mandates that schools place children who require special supports for learning in the "least restrictive" environments that meet their educational needs. In inclusive classrooms, students with learning difficulties learn alongside typical students in the regular educational setting for all or part of the school day. Some students in inclusive classrooms have mild mental retardation, but the largest number have learning disabilities—great difficulty with one or more aspects of learning, usually reading. Some students benefit academically from inclusion, but many do not. Special needs students often do best when they receive instruction in a resource room for part of the day and in the regular classroom for the remainder.

Defining and Measuring Intelligence

Virtually all intelligence tests provide an overall score (the IQ), which represents general intelligence, or reasoning ability, along with an array of separate scores measuring specific mental abilities. Intelligence is a collection of many mental capacities, not all of which are included on currently available tests. Test designers use a statistical technique called factor analysis to identify the various abilities that intelligence tests measure. The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition, is for individuals from age 2 to adulthood. a. It assesses general intelligence and five intellectual factors: general knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, working memory, and basic information processing. b. Although some of the factors emphasize culturally loaded, fact-oriented information, others are assumed to be less culturally biased. The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV) is the fourth edition of a test for 6- through 16-year-olds that measures general intelligence and four broad factors: verbal reasoning, perceptual (visual-spatial) reasoning, working memory, and processing speed. a. Designers of the WISC-IV consider it the most "culture-fair" intelligence test available because only one factor (verbal reasoning) emphasizes culturally dependent knowledge. b. The WISC was the first test to be standardized on children representing the total U.S. population, including ethnic minorities.