Chapter 9: Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

How do pragmatics develop in middle childhood?

A more advanced theory of mind—in particular, the capacity for recursive thought—enables children to understand and use increasingly indirect expressions of meaning. Around age 8, children begin to grasp irony and sarcasm. Furthermore, as a result of improved memory and ability to take the perspective of listeners, children's narratives increase in organization, detail, and expressiveness. A typical 4- or 5-year-old's narrative states what happened: "We went to the lake. We fished and waited. Paul caught a huge catfish." Six- and 7-year-olds add orienting information (time, place, participants) and connectives ("next," "then," "so," "finally") that lend coherence to the story. Gradually, narratives lengthen into a classic form in which events not only build to a high point but resolve: "After Paul reeled in the catfish, Dad cleaned and cooked it. Then we ate it all up!" And evaluative comments rise dramatically, becoming common by ages 8 to 9: "The catfish tasted great. Paul was so proud!" Because children pick up the narrative styles of significant adults in their lives, their narratives vary widely across cultures. For example, instead of the topic-focused style of most European-American children, who describe an experience from beginning to end, African-American children often use a topic-associating style in which they blend several similar experiences. One 9-year-old related having a tooth pulled, then described seeing her sister's tooth pulled, next told how she had removed one of her own baby teeth, and concluded, "I'm a pullin-teeth expert . . . call me, and I'll be over". Like adults in their families and communities, African-American children are more attuned to keeping their listeners interested than to relating a linear sequence of events. As a result, their narratives are usually longer and more complex than those of white children. The ability to generate clear oral narratives enhances reading comprehension and prepares children for producing longer, more explicit written narratives. In families who regularly eat meals together, children are advanced in language and literacy development. Mealtimes offer many opportunities to relate personal stories.

Growing Pains

Nighttime "growing pains"—stiffness and aches in the legs—are common as muscles adapt to an enlarging skeleton.

Childhood obesity in China

Obesity rates have also risen in developing countries, as urbanization shifts the population toward sedentary lifestyles and diets high in meats and energy-dense refined foods. In China, for example, 20 percent of children are overweight and 8 percent obese, with two to three times as many boys as girls affected. In addition to lifestyle changes, a prevailing belief in Chinese culture that excess body fat signifies prosperity and health—carried over from a half-century ago, when famine caused millions of deaths—has contributed to this alarming upsurge. High valuing of sons may induce Chinese parents to offer boys especially generous portions of energy-dense foods.

Why do school-age children today spend less time engaged in informal outdoor play?

Parental concern about neighborhood safety, screen media, and adult-organized sports.

How does gross-motor activity contribute to cognitive development in middle childhood?

Physical fitness predicts improved executive function, memory, and academic achievement in middle childhood. Brain-imaging research reveals that structures supporting attentional control and memory are larger, and myelination of neural fibers within them greater, in better-fit than in poorly-fit children.

Average body growth in middle childhood

Physical growth during the school years continues at the slow, regular pace of early childhood. At age 6, the average North American child weighs about 45 pounds and is 3½ feet tall. Over the next few years, children will add about 2 to 3 inches in height and 5 pounds in weight each year.

Gross-Motor Development in middle childhood

1. Flexibility. Compared with preschoolers, school-age children are physically more pliable and elastic, a difference evident as they swing bats, kick balls, jump over hurdles, and execute tumbling routines. 2. Balance. Improved balance supports many athletic skills, including running, skipping, throwing, kicking, and the rapid changes of direction required in team sports.\ 3. Agility. Quicker and more accurate movements are evident in the fancy footwork of dance and cheerleading and in the forward, backward, and sideways motions used to dodge opponents in tag and soccer. 4. Force. Older youngsters can throw and kick a ball harder and propel themselves farther off the ground when running and jumping than they could at earlier ages

ADHD in children

5% of US school age children have ADHD. Involves inattention, impulsivity, and excessive motor activity resulting in academic and social problems. Boys are diagnosed two to three times as often as girls. However, many girls with ADHD seem to be overlooked, either because their symptoms are less flagrant or because of a gender bias: A difficult, disruptive boy is more likely to be referred for treatment. Children with ADHD cannot stay focused on a task that requires mental effort for more than a few minutes. They often act impulsively, ignoring social rules and lashing out with hostility when frustrated. Many, though not all, are hyperactive, exhausting parents and teachers and irritating other children with their excessive motor activity. For a child to be diagnosed with ADHD, these symptoms must have appeared before age 12 as a persistent problem. Because of their difficulty concentrating, children with ADHD score lower in IQ than other children, though the difference is mostly accounted for by a small subgroup with substantially below-average scores. Researchers agree that deficient executive function underlies ADHD symptoms. Children with ADHD are impaired in ability to inhibit distracting behaviors and irrelevant information and score low in working-memory capacity. Consequently, they have difficulty with sustained attention, planning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving in academic and social situations and often fail to manage frustration and intense emotion.

Obesity in middle childhood

A BMI above the 85th percentile for a child's age and sex is considered overweight, a BMI above the 95th percentile obese. During the past several decades, a rise in overweight and obesity has occurred in many Western nations. Today, 32 percent of U.S. children and adolescents are overweight, more than half of them extremely so: 17 percent are obese. Overweight rises with age, from 23 percent among U.S. preschoolers to 35 percent among school-age children and adolescents to an astronomical 69 percent among adults. Overweight preschoolers are five times more likely than their normal-weight peers to be overweight at age 12, and few persistently overweight adolescents attain a normal weight in adulthood.

Constructivist Classroom Philosophy

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

Rough-and-Tumble Play

A form of peer interaction involving friendly chasing and play-fighting that emerges in the preschool years and peaks in middle childhood. In our evolutionary past, it may have been important for developing fighting skill. Children use it as a safe context to assess the strength of peers so they don't challenge agemates they aren't well matched with. Begins in early childhood, peaks in middle childhood, and declines in adolescence. Adolescent rough and tumble is linked to aggression, cheating, and dominance.

Origins of ADHD

ADHD runs in families and is highly heritable: Identical twins share it more often than fraternal twins. Children with ADHD show abnormal brain functioning, including reduced electrical and blood-flow activity and structural abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex and in other areas involved in attention, inhibition of behavior, and other aspects of motor control. Also, the brains of children with ADHD grow more slowly and are about 3 percent smaller in overall volume, with a thinner cerebral cortex, than the brains of unaffected agemates. Several genes that disrupt functioning of the neurotransmitters serotonin (involved in inhibition and self-control) and dopamine (required for effective cognitive processing) have been implicated in the disorder. At the same time, ADHD is associated with environmental factors. Prenatal teratogens—such as tobacco, alcohol, illegal drugs, and environmental pollutants—are linked to inattention and hyperactivity. Furthermore, children with ADHD are more likely to have parents with psychological disorders and to come from homes where family stress is high. These circumstances often intensify the child's preexisting difficulties.

Interpersonal Intelligence

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

Intrapersonal Intelligence

Ability to discriminate complex inner feelings and to use them to guide one's own behavior; knowledge of one's own strengths, weaknesses, desires, and intelligences Person with detailed, accurate self-knowledge

Spatial Intelligence

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

Musical Intelligence

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

Naturalist Intelligence

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

bodily-kinesthetic intelligence

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

How many children have chronic diseases and conditions?

About 20 to 25 percent of U.S. children have chronic diseases and conditions (including physical disabilities). (Asthma is most common) About 2 percent of U.S. children have more severe chronic illnesses, such as sickle cell anemia, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, and AIDS. Painful medical treatments, physical discomfort, and changes in appearance often disrupt the sick child's daily life, making it difficult to concentrate in school and separating the child from peers. As the illness worsens, family and child stress increases. For these reasons, chronically ill children are at risk for academic, emotional, and social difficulties.

Cognitive Self-Regulation and middle childhood

Although metacognition expands, school-age children frequently have difficulty putting what they know about thinking into action. They are not yet good at cognitive self-regulation, the process of continuously monitoring progress toward a goal, checking outcomes, and redirecting unsuccessful efforts. Cognitive self-regulation develops gradually because monitoring and controlling task outcomes is highly demanding, requiring constant evaluation of effort and progress. Throughout elementary and secondary school, self-regulation predicts academic success. Explaining the effectiveness of strategies is particularly helpful because it provides a rationale for future action. Children who acquire effective self-regulatory skills develop a sense of academic self-efficacy—confidence in their own ability, which supports future self-regulation. Unfortunately, some children receive messages from parents and teachers that seriously undermine their academic self-esteem and self-regulatory skills.

Reducing cultural bias in testing

Although not all experts agree, many acknowledge that IQ scores can underestimate the intelligence of children from ethnic minority groups. A special concern exists about incorrectly labeling minority children as slow learners and assigning them to remedial classes, which are far less stimulating than regular school experiences. To avoid this danger, test scores need to be combined with assessments of children's adaptive behavior—their ability to cope with the demands of their everyday environments. The child who does poorly on an intelligence test yet plays a complex game on the playground or figures out how to rewire a broken TV is unlikely to be intellectually deficient. In addition, flexible testing procedures enhance minority children's performance. In an approach called dynamic assessment, an innovation consistent with Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, the adult introduces purposeful teaching into the testing situation to find out what the child can attain with social support. Dynamic assessment seemed to evoke skills and understandings that children readily applied to a very different and demanding type of math.

What are ethnic IQ differences?

American black children and adolescents score, on average, 10 to 12 IQ points below American white children, although the difference has been shrinking over the past several decades. Hispanic children fall midway between black and white children, and Asian Americans score slightly higher than their white counterparts—about 3 points

Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Successful Intelligence

Analytical Intelligence: -Apply strategies -Acquire task-relevant and metacognitive knowledge -Engage in self-regulation Creative Intelligence: -Solve novel problems -Make processing skills automatic to free working memory for complex thinking Practical Intelligence: -Adapt to... -Shape ... and/or -Select... -environments to meet both personal goals and the demands of one's everyday world

Analytical Intelligence

Analytical intelligence consists of the information-processing skills that underlie all intelligent acts: executive function, strategic thinking, knowledge acquisition, and cognitive self-regulation. But on intelligence tests, processing skills are used in only a few of their potential ways, resulting in far too narrow a view of intelligent behavior.

How do community athletic teams affect children?

Increase self esteem. Children who view themselves as good at sports continue to play in adolescence and are more active in adulthood. Sports can overemphasize competition and have too much adult control, causing emotional difficulties.

How does fine-motor development change in middle childhood?

Around 9 to 10 years, the third dimension is clearly evident through overlapping objects, diagonal placement, and converging lines. Furthermore, school-age children not only depict objects in considerable detail but also better relate them to one another as part of an organized whole.

IQ in middle childhood

Around age 6, IQ becomes more stable than it was at earlier ages, and it correlates moderately with academic achievement, typically around .50 to .60. And children with higher IQs are more likely to attain higher levels of education and enter more prestigious occupations in adulthood.

Working Memory in the school years (information processing)

As Case's theory emphasizes, working memory profits from increased efficiency of thinking. Time needed to process information on a wide variety of cognitive tasks declines rapidly between ages 6 and 12 in diverse cultures. A faster thinker can hold on to and operate on more information at once. Still, individual differences in working-memory capacity exist, and they predict intelligence test scores and academic achievement in many subjects. Observations of elementary school children with limited working memories revealed that they often failed at school assignments that made heavy memory demands. They could not follow complex instructions and lost their place in tasks with multiple steps. The children could not hold in mind sufficient information to complete assignments. Children from poverty-stricken families are especially likely to score low on working-memory tasks. In one study, years of childhood spent in poverty predicted reduced working memory in early adulthood. Childhood neurobiological measures of stress—elevated blood pressure and stress hormone levels, including cortisol—largely explained this poverty-working-memory association. Chronic stress can impair brain structure and function, especially in the prefrontal cortex and its connections with the hippocampus, which govern working-memory capacity. Scaffolding in which parents and teachers modify tasks to reduce memory loads is essential so these children can learn. Effective approaches include communicating in short sentences with familiar vocabulary, repeating task instructions, breaking complex tasks into manageable parts, and encouraging children to use external memory aids—for example, lists of useful spellings while writing or number lines while doing math.

Memory Strategies for middle childhood

As attention improves, so do memory strategies, deliberate mental activities we use to store and retain information. Rehearsal- repeating the information to herself. (This cumulative approach, in which neighboring words create contexts for each other that trigger recall, yields much better memory) Organization- grouping related items together (for example, all state capitals in the same part of the country), an approach that greatly improves recall. (Grouping taxonomically based on common properties using fewer categories is an efficient procedure yielding dramatic memory gains) The more strategies children apply simultaneously, the better they remember. Elaboration- By the end of middle childhood, children start to use elaboration—creating a relationship, or shared meaning, between two or more pieces of information that do not belong to the same category. This highly effective memory technique requires considerable effort and space in working memory. Because organization and elaboration combine items into meaningful chunks, they permit children to hold onto much more information and also to retrieve it easily by thinking of other items associated with it.

What are gender differences in physical growth in middle childhood?

Between ages 6 and 8, girls are slightly shorter and lighter than boys. By age 9, this trend reverses as girls approach the dramatic adolescent growth spurt, which occurs two years earlier in girls than in boys. Girls continue to have slightly more body fat and boys more muscle. After age 8, girls begin accumulating fat at a faster rate, and they will add even more during adolescence.

Class Inclusion in Concrete Operational Stage

Between ages 7 and 10, children pass Piaget's class inclusion problem. They are better able to inhibit their habitual strategy of perceptually comparing the two specific categories in favor of relating each specific category to its less-obvious general category. School-age children's enhanced classification skills are evident in their enthusiasm for collecting treasured objects.

Asthma

By far the most common—accounting for about one-third of childhood chronic illness and the most frequent cause of school absence and childhood hospitalization—is asthma, in which the bronchial tubes (passages that connect the throat and lungs) are highly sensitive. In response to a variety of stimuli, such as cold weather, infection, exercise, allergies, and emotional stress, they fill with mucus and contract, leading to coughing, wheezing, and serious breathing difficulties. 8% of children are affected by asthma. Heredity contributes, but also environment. Boys, African-American children, and children who were born underweight, whose parents smoke, or who live in poverty are at greatest risk. Pollution, stress, and lack of access to good healthcare can contribute.

Nutrition in middle childhood

Children need a well-balanced, plentiful diet to provide energy for learning and increased physical activity. With their increasing focus on friendships and new activities, many children spend little time at the table, and the number who eat dinner with their families drops sharply between ages 9 and 14. Yet eating an evening meal with parents leads to a diet higher in fruits, vegetables, grains, and milk products and lower in soft drinks and fast foods. In a longitudinal study of nearly 14,000 U.S. children, a parent-reported diet high in sugar, fat, and processed food in early childhood predicted slightly lower IQ at age 8, after many factors that might otherwise account for this association were controlled. Even mild nutritional deficits can affect cognitive functioning. Insufficient dietary iron and folate during the school years are related to poorer concentration and mental test performance.

Training Executive Function (information processing)

Children's executive function skills can be improved through training, with benefits for both academic achievement and social competence. To enhance control of attention and working memory, researchers often embed direct training in interactive computer games. Executive function can also be enhanced indirectly, by increasing children's participation in activities—such as exercise—known to promote it. Another indirect method is mindfulness training, which—similar to meditation- and yoga-based exercises for adults—encourages children to focus attention on their current thoughts, feelings, and sensations, without judging them. Mindfulness training leads to gains in executive function, school grades, prosocial behavior, and positive peer relations. The sustained attention and reflection that mindfulness requires seem to help children avoid snap judgments and distracting thoughts and emotions.

What are the limitations of concrete operational thought?

Concrete operational thinking suffers from one important limitation: Children think in an organized, logical fashion only when dealing with concrete information they can perceive directly. Their mental operations work poorly with abstract ideas—ones not apparent in the real world. Consider children's solutions to transitive inference problems. When shown pairs of sticks of unequal length, Lizzie easily engaged in transitive inference. But she had difficulty with a hypothetical version of this task: "Susan is taller than Sally, and Sally is taller than Mary. Who is the tallest?" Not until ages 11 or 12 can children typically solve this problem. Children master concrete operational tasks step by step. For example, they usually grasp conservation of number first, followed by length, liquid, and mass, and then weight. This continuum of acquisition (or gradual mastery) of logical concepts is another indication of the limitations of concrete operational thinking. Rather than coming up with general logical principles that they apply to all relevant situations, school-age children seem to work out the logic of each problem separately.

Talent

Consider these ingredients, and you will see why people usually demonstrate creativity in only one or a few related areas. Partly for this reason, definitions of giftedness have been extended to include talent—outstanding performance in a specific field. Case studies reveal that excellence in such endeavors as creative writing, mathematics, science, music, visual arts, athletics, and leadership has roots in specialized interests and skills that first appear in childhood. Highly talented children are biologically prepared to master their domain of interest, and they display a passion for doing so. But talent must be nurtured. Studies of the backgrounds of talented children and highly accomplished adults often reveal warm, sensitive parents who provide a stimulating home life, are devoted to developing their child's abilities, and provide models of hard work. These parents are reasonably demanding but not overly ambitious. They arrange for caring teachers while the child is young and for more rigorous master teachers as the child's talent develops. Although most are well-adjusted, many gifted children and adolescents experience social isolation, partly because of their highly driven, independent styles and partly because they enjoy solitude, which is necessary to develop their talents. Still, gifted children desire gratifying peer relationships, and some try to become better-liked by hiding their abilities. Finally, whereas many talented youths become experts in their fields, few become highly creative. Rapidly mastering an existing field requires different skills than innovating in that field. The world, however, needs both experts and creators.

Creativity

Creativity is the ability to produce work that is original yet appropriate—something others have not thought of that is useful in some way. A child with high potential for creativity can be designated as gifted. Tests of creative capacity tap divergent thinking—the generation of multiple and unusual possibilities when faced with a task or problem. Divergent thinking contrasts sharply with convergent thinking, which involves arriving at a single correct answer and is emphasized on intelligence tests. Because highly creative children (like high-IQ children) are often better at some tasks than others, a variety of tests of divergent thinking are available. A verbal measure might ask children to name uses for common objects (such as a newspaper). A figural measure might ask them to create drawings based on a circular motif. A "real-world problem" measure requires students to suggest solutions to everyday problems. Responses can be scored for the number of ideas generated and their originality. Yet critics point out that these measures tap only one of the complex cognitive contributions to creativity. Also involved are defining new and important problems, evaluating divergent ideas, choosing the most promising, and calling on relevant knowledge to understand and solve problems.

Educating the Gifted

Debate about the effectiveness of school programs for the gifted typically focuses on factors irrelevant to giftedness—whether to provide enrichment in regular classrooms, pull children out for special instruction (the most common practice), or advance brighter students to a higher grade. Overall, gifted children fare well within each of these models, as long as special activities promote problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity. Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences has inspired several model programs that provide enrichment to all students in diverse disciplines. Meaningful activities, each tapping a specific intelligence or set of intelligences, serve as contexts for assessing strengths and weaknesses and, on that basis, teaching new knowledge and original thinking. For example, linguistic intelligence might be fostered through storytelling or playwriting; spatial intelligence through drawing, sculpting, or taking apart and reassembling objects; and kinesthetic intelligence through dance or pantomime. Evidence is still needed on how well these programs nurture children's talents and creativity. But they have already succeeded in one way—by highlighting the strengths of some students who previously had been considered unexceptional or even at risk for school failure. Consequently, they may be especially useful in identifying talented low-SES, ethnic minority children, who are underrepresented in school programs for the gifted.

Magnet schools: equal access to high-quality education

Despite the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering schools to desegregate, school integration receded over the 1990s as federal courts canceled their integration orders and returned this authority to states and cities. Since 2000, the racial divide in American education has improved only modestly. When minority students attend ethnically mixed schools, they typically do so with other minorities. U.S. schools in inner-city, low-income neighborhoods are vastly disadvantaged in educational opportunities, largely because public education is primarily supported by local property taxes. Consequently, in inner-city segregated neighborhoods, dilapidated school buildings; inexperienced teachers; outdated, poor-quality educational resources; and school cultures that fail to encourage strong teaching are widespread. The negative impact on student achievement is severe. Magnet schools offer a solution. In addition to the usual curriculum, they emphasize a specific area of interest—such as performing arts, math and science, or technology. Families outside the school neighborhood are attracted to magnet schools (hence the name) by their rich academic offerings. Often magnets are located in low-income, minority areas, where they serve the neighborhood student population. Other students, who apply and are admitted by lottery, are bussed in—many from well-to-do city and suburban neighborhoods. In another model, all students—including those in the surrounding neighborhood—must apply. In either case, magnet schools are voluntarily desegregated. A Connecticut study comparing students enrolled in magnet schools with those whose lottery numbers were not drawn and who therefore attended other city schools confirmed that the magnet students showed greater gains in reading and math achievement over a two-year period. These outcomes were strongest for low-SES, ethnic minority students. By high school, the higher-achieving peer environments of ethnically diverse schools encourage more students to pursue higher education. In sum, magnet schools are a promising approach to overcoming the negative forces of SES and ethnic isolation in American schools.

Knowledge and Memory in middle childhood

During middle childhood, children's general knowledge base, or semantic memory, grows larger and becomes organized into increasingly elaborate, hierarchically structured networks. This rapid growth of knowledge helps children use strategies and remember. Knowing more about a topic makes new information more meaningful, so it is easier to store and retrieve. This superior organization at retrieval suggests that highly knowledgeable children organize information in their area of expertise with little or no effort. Consequently, experts can devote more working-memory resources to using recalled information for reasoning and problem solving. By the end of early childhood, extensive knowledge and use of memory strategies support each other. Children who are expert in an area are usually highly motivated. As a result, they not only acquire knowledge more quickly but also actively use what they know to add more. In contrast, academically unsuccessful children fail to ask how previously stored information can clarify new material. This, in turn, interferes with the development of a broad knowledge base.

The School-Age Child's Theory of Mind (Metacognition)

During middle childhood, children's theory of mind, or set of ideas about mental activities, becomes more elaborate and refined. Unlike preschoolers, who view the mind as a passive container of information, older children regard it as an active, constructive agent that selects and transforms information. Consequently, they have a much better understanding of cognitive processes and their impact on performance. For example, with age, elementary school children become increasingly aware of effective memory strategies and why they work. They also grasp relationships between mental activities—for example, that remembering is crucial for understanding and that understanding strengthens memory. Furthermore, school-age children's understanding of sources of knowledge expands. They realize that people can extend their knowledge not just by directly observing events and talking to others but also by making mental inferences. This grasp of inference enables knowledge of false belief to expand. By age 7, children are aware that people form beliefs about other people's beliefs ("Joe thinks Andy thinks the kitten is lost") and that these second-order beliefs can be wrong! Appreciation of second-order false belief helps children pinpoint the reasons that another person arrived at a certain belief. Notice how it requires the ability to reason simultaneously about what two or more people are thinking, a form of perspective taking called recursive thought. We think recursively when we make such statements as "Lisa believes that Jason believes the letter is under his pillow, but that's not what Jason really believes; he knows the letter is in the desk." As with other cognitive attainments, schooling contributes to a more reflective, process-oriented view of mental activities. In school, teachers often call attention to the workings of the mind by asking children to remember mental steps, share points of view with peers, and evaluate their own and others' reasoning.

Why are children unusually flexible?

During middle childhood, the bones of the body lengthen and broaden. However, ligaments are not yet firmly attached to bones. This, combined with increasing muscle strength, gives children the unusual flexibility needed to perform cartwheels and handstands.

How does more efficient information processing contribute to improved motor performance?

During middle childhood, the capacity to react only to relevant information increases. And steady gains in reaction time occur, including anticipatory responding to visual stimuli, such as a thrown ball or a turning jump rope. Ten-year-olds react twice as quickly as 5-year-olds.

Is children's cognitive development continuous or discontinuous in the concrete operational stage?

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

Language and Communication Styles are cultural influences on IQ test bias

Ethnic minority families often foster unique language skills. African-American English is a complex, rule-governed dialect used by most African Americans in the United States. Nevertheless, it is often inaccurately viewed as a deficient form of standard American English rather than as different from it. The majority of African-American children entering school speak African-American English, though they vary in the extent to which they use it. Greater users, who tend to come from low-SES families, quickly learn that the language they bring from home is devalued in school. Teachers frequently try to "correct" their use of African-American English forms, replacing these with standard English. Because their home discourse is distinctly different from the linguistic knowledge required to learn to read, children who speak mostly African-American English generally progress slowly in reading and achieve poorly. Many African-American children learn to flexibly shift between African-American English and standard English by third grade. But those who continue to speak mostly their African-American dialect through the later grades fall further behind in reading and in overall achievement. These children have a special need for school programs that facilitate mastery of standard English while respecting their home language in the classroom. Research also reveals that many ethnic minority parents without extensive education prefer a collaborative style of communication when completing tasks with children. They work together in a coordinated, fluid way, each focused on the same aspect of the problem—a pattern of adult-child engagement observed in Native-American, Canadian Inuit, Hispanic, and Guatemalan Mayan cultures. With increasing education, parents establish a hierarchical style of communication, like that of classrooms and tests. The parent directs each child to carry out an aspect of the task, and children work independently. This sharp discontinuity between home and school communication practices likely contributes to low-SES minority children's lower IQs and school performance.

Treating Obesity

Family-based interventions focused on changing weight-related behaviors. In these types of programs, the more weight parents lost, the more their children lost. Children maintain their weight loss more effectively than adults. Early intervention is important. Obesity prevention in schools was more successful in reducing 6- to 12-year-olds' BMIs than programs delivered in other community settings.

How active are children in middle childhood and adolescence?

Fewer than 30 percent of 6- to 17-year-olds engage in at least moderate-intensity activity for 60 minutes per day, including some vigorous activity (involving breathing hard and sweating) on three of those days—the U.S. government recommendations for good health.

Practical Intelligence

Finally, intelligence is a practical, goal-oriented activity aimed at adapting to, shaping, or selecting environments. Intelligent people skillfully adapt their thinking to fit with both their desires and the demands of their everyday worlds. When they cannot adapt to a situation, they try to shape, or change, it to meet their needs. If they cannot shape it, they select new contexts that better match their skills and goals. Practical intelligence reminds us that children with certain life histories do well on intelligence tests and adapt easily to the testing conditions. Others, with different backgrounds, may misinterpret or reject the testing context. Yet such children often display sophisticated abilities in daily life—for example, engaging in complex artistic activities or interacting skillfully with other people.

Emotional Intelligence (Gardner)

For example, his interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences include a set of skills for accurately perceiving, reasoning about, and regulating emotion known as emotional intelligence. Among school-age children and adolescents, measures of emotional intelligence are positively associated with self-esteem, empathy, prosocial behavior, cooperation, leadership skills, and academic performance and negatively associated with internalizing and externalizing problems. These findings have increased teachers' awareness that coaching students in emotional abilities can improve their adjustment.

Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales

For individuals from age 2 to adulthood. In addition to general intelligence, it assesses five intellectual factors, each of which includes a verbal mode and a nonverbal mode of testing (Roid, 2003; Roid & Pomplun, 2012). The nonverbal mode is useful when assessing individuals with limited English or communication disorders. The knowledge and quantitative reasoning factors emphasize culturally loaded, fact-oriented information, such as vocabulary and arithmetic problems. In contrast, the visual-spatial processing, working-memory, and basic information-processing factors are assumed to be less culturally biased.

Games with rules in middle childhood

Games with rules become common. Children invent informally organized games like tag, hopscotch, and red rover. Gains in perspective taking—in particular, the ability to understand the roles of several players in a game—permit this transition to rule-oriented games. This contributes to emotional and social development. Games involve simple physical skills and luck, so this allows them to try out styles of cooperating, competing, winning, and losing with little personal risk.

What are the sex differences in motor development for middle childhood?

Girls- Better fine motor skills of handwriting and drawing. Better balance and agility. The more girls believe females are incompetent at sports, the poorer they actually perform. Boys- Better at all other gross-motor skills. This is due to higher parental expectations. Educating parents about the minimal differences between school-age boys' and girls' physical capacities and sensitizing them to unfair biases against promotion of girls' athletic ability may help increase girls' self-confidence and participation in athletics. Greater emphasis on skill training for girls, along with increased attention to their athletic achievements, is also likely to help. As a positive sign, compared with a generation ago, many more girls now participate in individual and team sports, though their involvement continues to lag behind boys'.

Individually administered intelligence tests

Given more often than group tests. Best suited for identifying highly intelligent children and diagnosing children with learning problems. During an individually administered test, a well-trained examiner not only considers the child's answers but also observes the child's behavior, noting such reactions as attention to and interest in the tasks and wariness of the adult. These observations provide insight into whether the test results accurately reflect the child's abilities. Two individual tests—the Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler—are used especially often.

What factors contribute to obesity?

Heredity contributes to risk. Lower SES in industrialized nations has higher obesity, especially in minorities. Could be because of lack of knowledge about healthy diet, buying cheap unhealthy foods, and stress. Children will likely eat what the parents eat. Some parents anxiously overfeed children, and some overly restrict food access to children. These undermine children's ability to regulate their own food intake. Insufficient sleep increases time available to eat and makes children too fatigued for physical activity. Screen Media- In a study that tracked children's TV viewing from ages 4 to 11, the more TV children watched, the more body fat they added.

Executive Function, Genetics, and Environment (information processing)

Heritability evidence suggests considerable genetic contribution to executive function. And molecular genetic analyses are identifying specific genes related to severely deficient executive function components, such as inhibition and flexible thinking, which (as we will soon see) contribute to learning and behavior disorders, including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But in both typically and atypically developing children, heredity combines with environmental contexts to influence executive function. As we turn now to the development of executive function components in middle childhood, our discussion will confirm once more that supportive home and school experiences are essential.

Consequences of Obesity

High blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, respiratory abnormalities, insulin resistance, and inflammatory reactions appear in early school years. These symptoms are predictors of heart disease, circulatory difficulties, type 2 diabetes, gallbladder disease, sleep and digestive disorders, many forms of cancer, and premature death. Stereotypes- lazy, sloppy, ugly, stupid, self-doubting, and deceitful. Socially isolated. More emotional social, and school difficulties. Bullying and low self esteem. Childhood obesity predicts anxiety, depression, defiance, aggression, and suicide.

General Intelligence

IQ, a score of overall intelligence. Often represented by intelligence tests. But intelligence is a collection of many capacities, not all of which are represented on currently available tests.

Stereotypes are cultural influences on IQ test bias

Imagine trying to succeed at an activity when the prevailing attitude is that members of your group are incompetent. Stereotype threat—the fear of being judged on the basis of a negative stereotype—can trigger anxiety that interferes with performance. Mounting evidence confirms that stereotype threat undermines test taking in children and adults. For example, researchers gave African-American, Hispanic-American, and European-American 6- to 10-year-olds verbal tasks. Some children were told that the tasks were "not a test." Others were told they were "a test of how good children are at school problems." Among children who were aware of ethnic stereotypes (such as "black people aren't smart"), African Americans and Hispanics performed far worse in the "test" condition than in the "not a test" condition. European-American children, in contrast, performed similarly in both conditions. From third grade on, children become increasingly conscious of ethnic stereotypes. By early adolescence, many low-SES minority students start to say that doing well in school is not important to them. Self-protective disengagement, sparked by stereotype threat, may be responsible. This weakening of motivation can have serious, long-term consequences. Research shows that self-discipline—effort and delay of gratification—predicts school performance, as measured by report card grades, better than IQ does

Traditional Classroom Philosophy

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

Creative Intelligence

In any context, success depends not only on processing familiar information but also on generating useful solutions to new problems. People who are creative think more skillfully than others when faced with novelty. Given a new task, they apply their information-processing skills in exceptionally effective ways, rapidly making these skills automatic so that working memory is freed for more complex aspects of the situation.

When are children from economically advantaged homes healthiest?

In middle childhood, full of energy and play. Growth in lung size permits more air to be exchanged with each breath, so children are better able to exercise vigorously without tiring. The cumulative effects of good nutrition, combined with rapid development of the body's immune system, offer greater protection against disease.

How have US classroom philosophies changed?

In the United States, the pendulum has swung back and forth between these two views. In the 1960s and early 1970s, constructivist classrooms gained in popularity. Then, as concern arose over the academic progress of children and youths, classrooms returned to traditional instruction—a style that has become increasingly pronounced as a result of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, followed by its 2015 replacement, the Every Child Succeeds Act. These policies, by placing heavy pressure on teachers and school administrators to improve achievement test scores, have narrowed the curricular focus in many schools to preparing students to take such tests. Although older elementary school children in traditional classrooms have a slight edge in achievement test scores, constructivist settings are associated with many other benefits—gains in critical thinking, greater social and moral maturity, and more positive attitudes toward school. When teacher-directed instruction is emphasized in preschool and kindergarten, it actually undermines motivation and achievement, especially in low-SES children.

Impact of Culture and Schooling on Concrete Operational Thought

In village societies, conservation is often delayed. Among the Hausa of Nigeria, who live in small agricultural settlements and rarely send their children to school, even basic conservation tasks—number, length, and liquid—are not understood until age 11 or later. This suggests that participating in relevant everyday activities helps children master conservation and other Piagetian problems. The experience of going to school promotes mastery of Piagetian tasks. When children of the same age are tested, those who have been in school longer do better on transitive inference problems. Opportunities to seriate objects, to learn about order relations, and to remember the parts of complex problems are probably responsible. Yet certain informal nonschool experiences can also foster operational thought. Around ages 7 to 8, Zinacanteco Indian girls of southern Mexico, who learn to weave elaborately designed fabrics as an alternative to schooling, engage in mental transformations to figure out how a warp strung on a loom will turn out as woven cloth—reasoning expected at the concrete operational stage. North American children of the same age, who do much better than Zinacanteco children on Piagetian tasks, have great difficulty with these weaving problems. On the basis of such findings, some investigators have concluded that the forms of logic required by Piagetian tasks are heavily influenced by training, context, and cultural conditions.

Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences

In yet another view of how information-processing skills underlie intelligent behavior, Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences defines intelligence in terms of distinct sets of processing operations that permit individuals to engage in a wide range of culturally valued activities. Dismissing the idea of general intelligence, Gardner proposes at least eight independent intelligences. Linguistic, Logico-mathematical, Musical, Spatial, Bodily-kinesthetic, Naturalist, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Gardner believes that each intelligence has a unique neurological basis, a distinct course of development, and different expert, or "end-state," performances. At the same time, he emphasizes that a lengthy process of education is required to transform any raw potential into a mature social role. Cultural values and learning opportunities affect the extent to which a child's intellectual strengths are realized and the ways they are expressed. Gardner's list of abilities has yet to be firmly grounded in research. Neurological evidence for the independence of his abilities is weak. Nevertheless, Gardner calls attention to several intelligences not tapped by IQ scores.

How well educated are US children?

Many factors—both within and outside schools—affect children's learning. Societal values, school resources, quality of teaching, and parental encouragement all play important roles. These multiple influences are especially apparent when schooling is examined in cross-cultural perspective. In international studies of reading, mathematics, and science achievement, young people in China, Korea, and Japan are consistently top performers. Among Western nations, Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland are also in the top tier. But U.S. students typically perform at or below the international averages. Why do U.S. students fall behind in academic accomplishment? 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. Furthermore, countries with large socioeconomic inequalities (such as the United States) rank lower in achievement, in part because low-SES children tend to live in less favorable family and neighborhood contexts. But the United States is also far less equitable than top-achieving countries in the quality of education it provides its low-SES and ethnic minority students. U.S. teachers, for example, vary much more in training, salaries, and teaching conditions. Finland is a case in point. Its nationally mandated curricula, teaching practices, and assessments are aimed at cultivating initiative, problem solving, and creativity. Finnish teachers are highly trained: They must complete several years of graduate-level education at government expense. And Finnish education is grounded in equal opportunity for all—a policy that has nearly eliminated SES variations in achievement. In-depth research on learning environments in Asian nations, such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, also highlights social forces that foster strong student learning. Among these is cultural valuing of effort. Whereas American parents and teachers tend to regard native ability as the key to academic success, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese parents and teachers believe that all children can succeed as long as they try hard. Asian children, influenced by interdependent values, typically view striving to achieve as a moral obligation—part of their responsibility to family and community. As in Finland, all students in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan receive the same nationally mandated, high-quality instruction, delivered by teachers who are well-prepared and far better paid than U.S. teachers. The Finnish and Asian examples underscore the need for American families, schools, and the larger society to work together to upgrade education. Recommended strategies, verified by research, include: supporting parents in attaining economic security, creating stimulating home learning environments, and monitoring their children's academic progress investing in high-quality preschool education, so every child arrives at school ready to learn strengthening teacher education providing intellectually challenging, relevant instruction with real-world applications vigorously pursuing school improvements that reduce the large inequities in quality of education between SES and ethnic groups.

Knowledge is a cultural influence on IQ test bias

Many researchers argue that IQ scores are affected by specific information acquired as part of majority-culture upbringing. In one study, researchers assessed black and white community college students' familiarity with vocabulary taken from items on an intelligence test. When verbal comprehension, similarities, and analogies items depended on words that the white students knew better, the whites scored higher than the blacks. When the same types of items involved words that the two groups knew equally well, the two groups did not differ. Prior knowledge, not reasoning ability, fully explained ethnic differences in performance. Even nonverbal test items, such as spatial reasoning, depend on learning opportunities. For example, playing video games that require fast responding and mental rotation of visual images increases success on spatial test items. Low-income minority children may lack opportunities to use games and objects that promote certain intellectual skills. Furthermore, the sheer amount of time children spend in school predicts IQ. In comparisons of children of the same age who are in different grades, those who have been in school longer score higher in verbal intelligence. Taken together, these findings indicate that children's exposure to the knowledge and ways of thinking valued in classrooms has a sizable impact on their intelligence test performance.

Applications of Information Processing to Academic Learning MATHEMATICS

Mathematics teaching in elementary school builds on and greatly enriches children's informal knowledge of number concepts and counting. Written notation systems and formal computational procedures enhance children's ability to represent numbers and compute. Over the early elementary school years, children acquire basic math facts through a combination of frequent practice, experimentation with diverse computational procedures (through which they discover faster, more accurate techniques), reasoning about number concepts, and teaching that conveys effective strategies. Eventually children retrieve answers automatically and apply this knowledge to more complex problems. Arguments about how to teach mathematics resemble those in reading, pitting drill in computing against "number sense," or understanding. Again, a blend of both approaches is most beneficial. In learning basic math, poorly performing students use cumbersome, error-prone techniques or try to retrieve answers from memory too soon. They have not sufficiently experimented with strategies to see which are most effective and to reorganize their observations in logical, efficient ways—for example, noticing that multiplication problems involving the number 2 (2 × 8) are equivalent to addition doubles (8 + 8). This suggests that encouraging students to apply strategies and making sure they understand why certain strategies work well are essential for solid mastery of basic math. In one study, the more teachers emphasized conceptual knowledge, by having children actively construct meanings in word problems before practicing computation and memorizing math facts, the more children gained in math achievement from second to third grade. In Asian countries, students receive a variety of supports for acquiring mathematical knowledge and often excel at math computation and reasoning. Use of the metric system helps Asian children grasp place value. The consistent structure of number words in Asian languages (ten-two for 12, ten-three for 13) also makes this idea clear. And because Asian number words are shorter and more quickly pronounced, more digits can be held in working memory at once, increasing speed of thinking. Furthermore, Chinese parents provide their preschoolers with extensive practice in counting and computation—experiences that contribute to the superiority of Chinese over U.S. children's math knowledge even before school entry. Finally, as we will see later in this chapter, compared with lessons in the United States, those in Asian classrooms devote more time to exploring math concepts and strategies and less to drill and repetition.

Maladaptive eating habits in obese children

More responsive to external stimuli associated with food than internal hunger cues. Stressful family life can diminish self regulation and amplify uncontrolled eating.

Spatial Reasoning in concrete operational stage

Piaget found that school-age children's understanding of space is more accurate than that of preschoolers. To illustrate, let's consider children's cognitive maps—their mental representations of spaces such as a classroom, school, or neighborhood. Drawing or reading a map of a large-scale space (school or neighborhood) requires considerable perspective-taking skill. Because the entire space cannot be seen at once, children must infer its overall layout by relating its separate parts. Preschoolers and young school-age children include landmarks on the maps they draw of a single room, but their arrangement is not always accurate. They do better when asked to place stickers showing the location of furniture and people on a map of the room. But if the map is rotated to a position other than the room's orientation, they have difficulty. Seven-year-olds are aided by the opportunity to walk through the room. As they experience landmarks from different vantage points, they form a more flexible mental representation. With respect to large-scale outdoor environments, not until age 9 can many children accurately place stickers on a map to indicate landmarks. Children who spontaneously use strategies that help them align the map with their current location in the space—rotating the map or tracing their route on it—show better performance. Around this age, the maps children draw of large-scale spaces become better organized, showing landmarks along an organized route of travel. At the end of middle childhood, most children can form an accurate overall view of a large-scale space. And they readily draw and read maps, even when the orientation of the map and the space it represents do not match). Ten- to 12-year-olds also grasp the notion of scale—the proportional relation between a space and its representation on a map.

Piaget's Concrete Operational Stage

Piaget's third stage of cognitive development, extending from about 7 to 11 years, during which thought becomes logical, flexible, and organized in its application to concrete information, but the capacity for abstract thinking is not yet present.

Planning in school years (information processing)

Planning on multistep tasks improves over the school years. On tasks with multiple parts, older children make decisions about what to do first and what to do next in a more orderly fashion. By the end of middle childhood, children engage in advance planning—evaluating an entire sequence of steps to see if it will get them to their goal. Nine- and 10-year-olds can project ahead, predicting how early steps in their plan will affect success at later steps and adjust their overall plan accordingly. Children learn much about planning from collaborating with more expert planners. With age, they take more responsibility in these joint endeavors, such as suggesting planning strategies and organizing task materials. The demands of school tasks—and parents' and teachers' explanations of how to plan—contribute to gains in planning.

Processing Speed and IQ

Processing speed, assessed in terms of reaction time on diverse cognitive tasks, is moderately related to IQ. Individuals whose nervous systems function more efficiently, permitting them to take in more information and manipulate it quickly, have an edge in intellectual skills. And not surprisingly, executive function strongly predicts general intelligence. We have seen that the components of executive function are vital for success on a great many cognitive tasks.

Applications of Information Processing to Academic Learning READING

Reading makes use of many skills at once, taxing all aspects of our information-processing system. Children must perceive single letters and letter combinations, translate them into speech sounds, recognize the visual appearance of many common words, hold chunks of text in working memory while interpreting their meaning, and combine the meanings of various parts of a text passage into an understandable whole. Because reading is so demanding, most or all of these skills must be done automatically. If one or more are poorly developed, they will compete for space in our limited working memories, and reading performance will decline. As children make the transition from emergent literacy to conventional reading, phonological awareness continues to facilitate their progress. Other information-processing skills also contribute. Gains in processing speed foster children's rapid conversion of visual symbols into sounds. Visual scanning and discrimination play important roles and improve with reading experience. Performing these skills efficiently releases working memory for higher-level activities involved in comprehending the text's meaning. Until recently, researchers were involved in an intense debate over how to teach beginning reading. Those who took a whole-language approach argued that from the beginning, children should be exposed to text in its complete form—stories, poems, letters, posters, and lists. Other experts advocated a phonics approach, believing that children should first be coached on phonics—the basic rules for translating written symbols into sounds. Only after mastering these skills should they get complex reading material. Many studies confirm that children learn best with a mixture of both approaches. In kindergarten, first, and second grades, teaching that includes phonics boosts reading scores, especially for children who lag behind in reading progress. Learning letter-sound relationships enables children to decode, or decipher, words they have never seen before. Yet too much emphasis on basic skills may cause children to lose sight of the goal of reading: understanding. Children who read aloud fluently without registering meaning know little about effective metacognitive reading strategies—for example, that they must read more carefully if they will be tested than if they are reading for pleasure and that explaining a passage in their own words is a good way to assess comprehension. Teaching aimed at increasing awareness and use of reading strategies enhances reading performance from third grade on.

Recent Philosophical Directions in classrooms

Recent approaches to education, grounded in Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, capitalize on the rich social context of the classroom to spur children's learning. In these social-constructivist classrooms, children participate in a wide range of challenging activities with teachers and peers, with whom they jointly construct understandings. As children acquire knowledge and strategies through working together, they become competent, contributing members of their classroom community and advance in cognitive and social development. Vygotsky's emphasis on the social origins of complex mental activities has inspired the following educational themes: -Teachers and children as partners in learning. A classroom rich in both teacher-child and child-child collaboration transfers culturally valued ways of thinking to children. -Experiences with many types of symbolic communication in meaningful activities. As children master reading, writing, and mathematics, they become aware of their culture's communication systems, reflect on their own thinking, and bring it under voluntary control. -Teaching adapted to each child's zone of proximal development. Assistance that both responds to current understandings and encourages children to take the next step helps ensure that each child makes the best progress possible. According to Vygotsky, besides teachers, more expert peers can spur children's learning, as long as they adjust the help they provide to fit the less mature child's zone of proximal development. Mounting evidence confirms that peer collaboration promotes development under certain conditions. A crucial factor is cooperative learning, in which small groups of classmates work toward common goals—by considering one another's ideas, appropriately challenging one another, providing sufficient explanations to correct misunderstandings, and resolving differences of opinion on the basis of reasons and evidence. When teachers explain, model, and have children role-play how to work together effectively, cooperative learning results in more complex reasoning, greater enjoyment of learning, and achievement gains across a wide range of subjects.

Inhibition in school years (information processing)

School-age children become better at deliberately attending to relevant aspects of a task and inhibiting irrelevant responses. One way researchers study this increasing selectivity of attention is by introducing irrelevant stimuli into a task and seeing how well children attend to its central elements. Performance improves sharply between ages 6 and 10, with gains continuing throughout adolescence. Older children are also better at flexibly shifting their attention in response to task requirements. When given rule-use tasks that require frequent switching of the rules used to sort picture cards containing conflicting cues, schoolchildren gain steadily with age in the complexity of rules they can keep in mind and in the speed and accuracy with which they shift between rules. Recall that flexible shifting benefits from gains in inhibition and expansion of working memory. In sum, selectivity and flexibility of attention become better controlled and more efficient. These skills contribute to more organized, strategic approaches to challenging tasks.

What do experts recommend for physical education?

Schools should offer more physical education and reduce emphasis on competitive sports (which exclude the less fit). Emphasize informal games and individual exercise. Active children become active adults who have greater physical strength, resistance to illnesses, enhanced psychological well-being, and a longer life.

Linguistic Intelligence

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

Logico-mathematical intelligence

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

Seriation in concrete operational stage

Seriation- The ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight. 6- to 7-year-olds create the series efficiently, moving in an orderly sequence from the smallest stick, to the next largest. The concrete operational child can also seriate mentally, an ability called transitive inference.

How does culture affect memory strategies?

Societal modernization—indicated by the presence of books, writing tablets, electricity, radio, TV, and other economically advantageous resources in homes—is broadly associated with performance on cognitive tasks commonly given to children in industrialized nations. In sum, the development of memory strategies is not just a product of a more competent information-processing system. It also depends on task demands, schooling, and cultural circumstances.

Gifted Children

Some children are gifted, displaying exceptional intellectual strengths. An IQ score above 130 is the standard definition of giftedness based on intelligence test performance. High-IQ children have an exceptional capacity to solve challenging academic problems. Yet recognition that intelligence tests do not sample the entire range of human mental skills has led to an expanded conception of giftedness.

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 expansion of information-processing capacity rather than a sudden shift to a new stage. For example, Robbie Case (1996, 1998) proposed that, with brain development and practice, cognitive schemes are applied more rapidly, gradually demanding less attention and becoming automatic. This frees 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, broadly applicable representation. As a result, children transition from concrete operations to the complex, systematic reasoning of formal operational thought, which enables them to think effectively in a wider range of situations. Case's theory, along with similar neo-Piagetian perspectives, helps explain why children's understandings appear in specific situations at different times rather than being mastered all at once. First, different forms of the same logical insight, such as the various conservation tasks, vary in their processing demands, with those acquired later requiring more space in working memory. Second, children's experiences with different types of tasks vary widely, affecting their performance. Compared with Piaget's theory, neo-Piagetian approaches better account for unevenness in cognitive development.

Sternberg's Triarchic Theory

Sternberg's triarchic theory of successful intelligence identifies three broad, interacting intelligences: (1) analytical intelligence, or information-processing skills; (2) creative intelligence, the capacity to solve novel problems; and (3) practical intelligence, application of intellectual skills in everyday situations. Intelligent behavior involves balancing all three intelligences to achieve success in life according to one's personal goals and the requirements of one's cultural community. The triarchic theory highlights the limitations of current intelligence tests in assessing the complexity of intelligent behavior. For example, out-of-school, practical forms of intelligence are vital for life success and help explain why cultures vary widely in the behaviors they regard as intelligent. In villages in Kenya, children regarded as cognitively competent are highly knowledgeable about how to use herbal medicines to treat disease. Among the Yup'ik Eskimo people of central Alaska, intelligent youths are those with expert hunting, gathering, navigating, and fishing skills. And U.S. Cambodian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Mexican immigrant parents asked to describe an intelligent first grader emphasized noncognitive capacities—motivation, self-management, and social skills. Intelligence tests, devised to predict achievement in school, do not capture the intellectual strengths that many children acquire through informal learning experiences in their cultural communities.

Treating ADHD

Stimulant medication is the most common treatment for ADHD. These drugs seem to increase activity in the prefrontal cortex, thereby reducing impulsivity and hyperactivity and improving attention for most children who take them. By itself, drug treatment is insufficient for helping children compensate for inattention and impulsivity in everyday situations. So far, the most effective treatments combine medication with interventions that provide training in executive function skills and that model and reinforce appropriate academic and social behavior. Family intervention is also vital. Inattentive, hyperactive children strain the patience of parents, who are likely to react punitively and inconsistently—a child-rearing style that strengthens defiant, aggressive behavior. In fact, in 50 to 75 percent of cases, these two sets of behavior problems occur together. ADHD is usually a lifelong disorder. Adults with ADHD continue to need help in structuring their environments, regulating negative emotion, selecting appropriate careers, and understanding their condition as a biological deficit rather than a character flaw.

How do teachers treat children differently?

Teachers do not interact in the same way with all children. Well-behaved, high-achieving students typically get more encouragement and praise, whereas unruly students have more conflicts with teachers and receive more criticism from them . Warm, low-conflict teacher-student relationships have an especially strong impact on the academic self-esteem, achievement, and social behavior of low-SES minority students and other children at risk for learning difficulties. But overall, higher-SES students—who tend to be higher-achieving and to have fewer learning and behavior problems—have more sensitive and supportive relationships with teachers.

Conservation in Concrete Operational Stage

The ability to pass conservation tasks provides clear evidence of operations—mental actions that obey logical rules. Capable of decentration- focusing on several aspects of a problem and relating them, rather than centering on just one. Achieve reversibility

Bilingual Education

The advantages of bilingualism provide strong justification for bilingual education programs in schools. In Canada, about 7 percent of elementary school students are enrolled in language immersion programs, in which English-speaking children are taught entirely in French for several years. This strategy succeeds in developing children who are proficient in both languages and who, by grade 6, achieve as well as their counterparts in the regular English program. In the United States, fierce disagreement exists over how best to educate dual language learning children. Some believe that time spent communicating in the child's native tongue detracts from English-language achievement. Other educators, committed to developing minority children's native language while fostering mastery of English, note that providing instruction in the native tongue lets minority children know that their heritage is respected. It also prevents inadequate proficiency in both languages. Minority children who gradually lose the first language as a result of being taught the second end up limited in both languages. This leads to severe academic difficulties and is believed to contribute to the high rates of school failure and dropout among low-SES Hispanic young people. At present, public opinion and educational practice favor English-only instruction. Many U.S. states have passed laws declaring English to be their official language, creating conditions in which schools have no obligation to teach minority students in languages other than English. Yet in classrooms where both languages are integrated into the curriculum, minority children are more involved in learning and acquire the second language more easily—gains that result in better academic achievement. In contrast, when teachers speak only in a language that children can barely understand, minority children display frustration, boredom, and escalating academic difficulties.

Reversibility

The capacity to think through a series of steps and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point.

What is the difference in IQ of SES groups?

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

How does executive function develop in the school years? (information processing)

The school years are a time of continued development of the prefrontal cortex, which increases its connections with more distant parts of the brain. Myelination of neural fibers rises steadily, especially in the prefrontal cortex and in the corpus callosum, which connects the two cerebral hemispheres. As interconnectivity between the prefrontal cortex and other brain areas strengthens, the prefrontal cortex becomes a more effective "executive," overseeing the integrated functioning of neural networks. Consequently, executive function undergoes marked improvement. Children handle increasingly difficult tasks that require the integration of working memory, inhibition, and flexible shifting of attention, which, in turn, support gains in planning, strategic thinking, and self-monitoring and self-correction of behavior.

How does vocabulary and grammar develop in middle childhood?

They develop language awareness. During the elementary school years, vocabulary increases fourfold, eventually reaching comprehension of 40,000 words. In addition to the word-learning strategies discussed in Chapter 7, school-age children add to their vocabularies by analyzing the structure of complex words. From happy and decide, they quickly derive the meanings of happiness and decision. They also figure out many more word meanings from context. As at earlier ages, children benefit from conversing with more expert speakers. But because written language contains a far more diverse and complex vocabulary than spoken language, reading contributes enormously to vocabulary growth. By second to third grade, reading comprehension and reading habits strongly predict later vocabulary size into high school. As their knowledge becomes better organized, older school-age children think about and use words more precisely: In addition to the verb fall, for example, they also use topple, tumble, and plummet. Word definitions also illustrate this change. Five- and 6-year-olds offer concrete descriptions referring to functions or appearance—knife: "when you're cutting carrots." By the end of elementary school, synonyms and explanations of categorical relationships appear—for example, knife: "something you could cut with. A saw is like a knife. It could also be a weapon" School-age children's more reflective and analytical approach to language permits them to appreciate the multiple meanings of words—to recognize, for example, that many words, such as cool or neat, have psychological as well as physical meanings: "Cool shirt!" or "Neat movie!" This grasp of double meanings permits 8- to 10-year-olds to comprehend subtle metaphors, such as "sharp as a tack" and "spilling the beans". It also leads to a change in children's humor. Mastery of complex grammatical constructions also improves. For example, English-speaking children use the passive voice more frequently, and they more often extend it from an abbreviated form ("It broke") into full statements ("The glass was broken by Mary"). Another grammatical achievement of middle childhood is advanced understanding of infinitive phrases—the difference between "John is eager to please" and "John is easy to please" (Berman, 2007; Chomsky, 1969). Like gains in vocabulary, appreciation of these subtle grammatical distinctions is supported by an improved ability to analyze and reflect on language.

Bilingual Development

Throughout the world, many children grow up bilingual, and some acquire more than two languages. An estimated 22 percent of U.S. children—11.2 million in all—speak a language other than English at home. Children can become bilingual in two ways: (1) by acquiring both languages at the same time in early childhood or (2) by learning a second language after acquiring the first. Children of bilingual parents who teach them both languages in infancy and early childhood separate the language systems early on and attain early language milestones according to a typical timetable. When preschool and school-age children from immigrant families acquire a second language after they already speak the language of their cultural heritage, the time required to master the second language to the level of native-speaking agemates varies greatly, from 1 to 5 or more years. Influential factors include child motivation, knowledge of the first language (which supports mastery of the second), and quality of communication and of literacy experiences in both languages at home and at school. As with first-language development, a sensitive period for second-language development exists. Mastery must begin sometime in childhood for most second-language learners to attain full proficiency. But a precise age cutoff for a decline in second-language learning has not been established. Rather, a continuous age-related decrease from childhood to adulthood occurs. Children who become fluent in two languages develop denser synaptic connections in areas of the left hemisphere devoted to language. And compared to monolinguals, bilinguals show greater activity in these areas and in the prefrontal cortex during linguistic tasks, likely due to the high executive-processing demands of controlling two languages. Because both languages are always active, bilingual speakers must continuously decide which one to use in particular social situations, resisting attention to the other. This increase in executive processing has diverse cognitive benefits as bilinguals acquire more efficient executive function skills (Bialystok, 2011). Bilingual children and adults outperform others on tests of inhibition, sustained and selective attention, flexible shifting, analytical reasoning, concept formation, and false-belief understanding. They are also advanced in certain aspects of language awareness, such as detection of errors in grammar, meaning, and conventions of conversation (responding politely, relevantly, and informatively). And children transfer their phonological awareness skills in one language to the other, which enhances reading achievement.

Teaching children with learning difficulties

U.S. legislation mandates that schools place children who require special supports for learning in the "least restrictive" (as close to normal as possible) environments that meet their educational needs. In inclusive classrooms, students with learning difficulties learn alongside typical students in the regular educational setting for all or part of the school day—a practice designed to prepare them for participation in society and to combat prejudices against individuals with disabilities. Largely as the result of parental pressures, an increasing number of students experience full inclusion—full-time placement in regular classrooms. Students with mild intellectual disability are sometimes integrated into inclusive classrooms. Typically, their IQs fall between 55 and 70, and they also show problems in adaptive behavior, or skills of everyday living. But the largest number designated for inclusion—5 to 10 percent of school-age children—have learning disabilities, great difficulty with one or more aspects of learning, usually reading. As a result, their achievement is considerably behind what would be expected on the basis of their IQ. Often these deficits express themselves in other ways—for example, as deficiencies in processing speed, attention, and working memory, which depress both intelligence and achievement test scores. The problems of students with learning disabilities cannot be traced to any obvious physical or emotional difficulty or to environmental disadvantage. Instead, deficits in brain functioning are involved). In many instances, the cause is unknown. Although some students benefit academically from inclusion, many do not. Achievement gains depend on both the severity of the disability and the support services available. Furthermore, children with disabilities are often rejected by regular-classroom peers. Students with intellectual disability are overwhelmed by the social skills of their classmates; they cannot interact adeptly in a conversation or game. And the processing deficits of some students with learning disabilities lead to problems in social awareness and responsiveness. Does this mean that students with special needs cannot be served in regular classrooms? Not necessarily. Often these children do best when they receive instruction in a resource room for part of the day and in the regular classroom for the remainder. In the resource room, a special education teacher works with students on an individual and small-group basis. Then, depending on their progress, children join typically developing classmates for different subjects and amounts of time. Special steps must to be taken to promote peer relations in inclusive classrooms. Peer tutoring experiences in which teachers guide typical students in supporting the academic progress of classmates with learning difficulties lead to friendly interaction, improved peer acceptance, and achievement gains.

Educational Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Unfortunately, once teachers' attitudes toward students are established, they can become more extreme than is warranted by students' behavior. Of special concern are educational self-fulfilling prophecies: Children may adopt teachers' positive or negative views and start to live up to them. This effect is especially strong when teachers emphasize competition and publicly compare children, regularly favoring the best students. Low-achieving students are especially sensitive to self-fulfilling prophecies, which can be beneficial when teachers believe in them. But biased teacher judgments are usually slanted in a negative direction. In one study, African-American and Hispanic elementary school students taught by high-bias teachers (who expected them to do poorly) showed substantially lower end-of-year achievement than their counterparts taught by low-bias teachers. Recall our discussion of stereotype threat. A child in the position of confirming a negative stereotype may respond with especially intense anxiety and reduced motivation, amplifying a negative self-fulfilling prophecy. In many schools, students are assigned to homogeneous groups or classes in which children of similar ability levels are taught together. Homogeneous grouping can be a potent source of self-fulfilling prophecies. Low-group students—who are more likely to be low-SES, minority, and male—get more drill on basic facts and skills, engage in less discussion, and progress at a slower pace. Gradually, they decline in self-esteem and motivation and fall further behind in achievement. Widespread SES and ethnic segregation in U.S. schools consigns large numbers of low-SES, minority students to a form of schoolwide homogeneous grouping.

Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-V)

Widely used test for 6- through 16-year-olds. It measures general intelligence and an array of intellectual factors, five of which are recommended for a comprehensive evaluation of a child's intellectual ability: verbal comprehension, visual-spatial reasoning, fluid reasoning (tapping ability to apply rules in reasoning and to detect conceptual relationships among objects), working memory, and processing speed. The WISC-V was designed to downplay culture-dependent information, which is emphasized on only one factor (verbal comprehension). The goal is to provide a test that is as "culture-fair" as possible.

Middle Childhood

Years from 6 to 1. Children assigned new responsibilities. In industrialized nations, called the "school years" because its onset is marked by the start of formal schooling. Universally, mature members of society guide children of this age period toward real-world tasks that increasingly resemble those they will perform as adults.

Nature vs. Nurture of IQ

heritability estimate. The most powerful evidence on the heritability of IQ involves twin comparisons. The IQ scores of identical twins (who share all their genes) are more similar than those of fraternal twins (who are genetically no more alike than ordinary siblings). On the basis of this and other kinship evidence, researchers estimate that about half the differences in IQ among children can be traced to their genetic makeup. But heritabilities risk overestimating genetic influences and underestimating environmental influences. And heritability estimates do not reveal the complex processes through which genes and experiences influence intelligence as children develop. Adoption studies offer a wider range of information. When young children are adopted into caring, stimulating homes, their IQs rise substantially compared with the IQs of nonadopted children who remain in economically deprived families (Hunt, 2011). But adopted children benefit to varying degrees. In one investigation, children of two extreme groups of biological mothers—those with IQs below 95 and those with IQs above 120—were adopted at birth by parents who were well above average in income and education. During the school years, the children of the low-IQ biological mothers scored above average in IQ. But they did not do as well as children of high-IQ biological mothers placed in similar adoptive families. Adoption research confirms that heredity and environment jointly contribute to IQ. Adoption studies also shed light on the black-white IQ gap. In two investigations, African-American children adopted into economically well-off white homes during the first year of life scored high on intelligence tests, attaining mean IQs of 110 and 117 by middle childhood. 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. Dramatic gains in IQ from one generation to the next offer additional support for the conclusion that, given new experiences and opportunities, members of oppressed groups can move far beyond their current test performance.