Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

Chapter 12

Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

Page
Learning Objectives / 195
Key Terms and Concepts / 195
Chapter Outline / 196
Lecture Suggestions / 202
Intelligence: What is it? / 202
Do Rewards Affect Motivation and Learning?
Class Activities / 203
Supplemental Reading List / 204
Prentice Hall PowerPoints available online / 205
Multimedia Ideas / 205
Handouts / 207

Learning Objectives

After reading Chapter 12, students will learn:

• Discuss the Piagetian perspective of cognitive development during the school years.
• Explain the Vygotskian perspective of cognitive development during the school years.
• Evaluate the information-processing perspective of cognitive development during the school years.
• Describe the linguistic capabilities and limitations of school-age children.
• Discuss the personal, social, and educational benefits and challenges of bilingualism in America.
• Identify the major trends affecting schooling in North America and worldwide.
• Explain the development of reading skills during the school-age years.
• Describe some of the criticisms of home schooling.
• Discuss how teachers transmit their expectations to students and how these expectations affect student performance and teacher behavior.
• Define intelligence, discuss historical milestones in the area of intelligence testing, and identify the major tests used to measure intelligence.
• Discuss the controversies associated with the measurement and interpretation of intelligence test scores and review the research on the effect of IQ.
• Define mental retardation, identify the four major categories, and discuss the capabilities and limitations associated with each level.
• Define “gifted and talented” and discuss the primary approaches to educating children who fall outside the normal range of intelligence.

Key Terms and Concepts

195

concrete operational stage

decentering

memory

metamemory

metalinguistic awareness

bilingualism

multicultural education

chronological age

cultural assimilation model

pluralistic society model

bicultural identity

emotional intelligence

teacher expectancy effect

intelligence

mental age

intelligence quotient (IQ)

Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale

Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—

Fourth Edition (WISC—IV)

Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children,

Second Edition (KABC—II)

fluid intelligence

crystallized intelligence

triarchic theory of intelligence

mental retardation

mild retardation

moderate retardation

severe retardation

profound retardation

gifted & talented acceleration

enrichment

195

Chapter Outline

I.  Intellectual and Language Development

A.  According to Piaget, school-age children enter the concrete operational period and for the first time become capable of applying logical thought processes to concrete problems.

1. The school-age child enters the Concrete Operational Stage, the period of cognitive development between 7 and 12 years of age, which is characterized by the active, and appropriate use of logic.

a. Children at this stage can solve conservation problems.

b. Because they are less egocentric, they can take multiple aspects of a situation into account, a process known as Decentering.

c. They attain the concept of reversibility, realizing that a stimulus can be reversed, returning to its original form.

d. The ability to use concrete operations permits children to understand the concepts such as the relationship between time and speed.

e. However they are tied to concrete, physical reality and cannot understand abstract or hypothetical reasoning.

2. Piaget is criticized for underestimating children’s abilities and for exaggerating the universality of the progression through the stages.

3. Research suggest that in some ways Piaget was more right than wrong, especially in his argument that concrete operations were universally achieved during middle childhood.

4. When children are interviewed by researchers in their own culture, the children are more likely to display concrete operational thinking.

B. According to information-processing approaches, children’s intellectual development in the school years can be attributed to substantial increases in memory capacity and the sophistication of the “programs” children can handle.

1. Children become increasingly able to handle information because their memories improve.

2. Memory is the process by which information is initially encoded, stored, and retrieved.

a. Encoding is the process by which information is initially recorded in a form usable to memory.

b. The information must be stored, or placed and maintained in the memory system.

c. Information must be retrieved, located and brought into awareness.

d. Some developmental psychologists suggest that the difficulty children experience in solving conservation problems during the preschool period may stem from memory limitations.

3. During middle childhood, short-term memory capacity improves significantly.

4. Meta-memory, an understanding about the processes that underlie memory, emerge and improve during middle childhood.

a. Children use control strategies, conscious, intentionally used tactics to improve cognitive functioning.

b. Children can be trained to use control strategies.

c. Control strategies for memory include the keyword strategy, rehearsal, organization, and cognitive elaboration.

C. Vygotsky recommends that students focus on active learning through child–adult and child–child interactions that fall within each child’s zone of proximal development.

1. His approach has been influential in the development of several classroom practices based on the concept that children should actively participate in their own education and that activities should involve interactions with others.

a. Cooperative learning, in which children work together in groups.

b. Reciprocal teaching, in which students work with teachers as well as other students to develop reading skills.

2. Argues that significant cognitive advances can be achieved through active learning.

D.  The language development of children in the school years is substantial, with improvements in vocabulary, syntax, and pragmatics. Children learn to control their behavior through linguistic strategies, and they learn more effectively by seeking clarification when they need it.

1. Vocabulary continues to increase during the school years.

2. School-age children’s mastery of grammar improves.

3. Children’s understanding of syntax, the rules that indicate how words and phrases can be combined to form sentences, grows during childhood.

4. Certain phonemes, units of sound, remain troublesome (j, v, h, z).

5. School-age children may have difficulty decoding sentences when the meaning depends on intonation, or tone of voice.

6. Children become more competent in their use of pragmatics, the rules governing the use of language to communicate in a social context.

7. Language helps children control their behavior.

8. One of the most significant developments in middle childhood is the increase in Metalinguistic Awareness, an understanding of one’s own use of language.

a. Metalinguistic awareness helps children achieve comprehension when information is incomplete or ambiguous.

b. They learn that the miscommunication may not be attributable to themselves only, but to the people communicating.

c. They then become more likely to ask for clarification or further information.

9. The growing sophistication of language helps school-age children control their behavior.

E. Bilingualism can be beneficial in the school years. Children who are taught all subjects in their first language with simultaneous instruction in English appear to experience few deficits and several linguistic and cognitive advantages.

1. English is a second language for more than 32 million Americans and this number is increasing annually.

2. Being bilingual may have cognitive advantages.

a. Greater cognitive flexibility

b. Greater metalinguistic awareness

c. May improve scores on IQ tests

3. One approach to educating non-English speakers is bilingual education, in which children are taught in their native language, while at the same time learning English.

4. The effectiveness of language immersion programs where subjects are taught in a foreign language show mixed results.

5. Bilingual students often understand the rules of language more explicitly and may even score higher on intelligence tests.

6. Because of the benefits of learning language, many educations believe that second-language learning should be a regular part of elementary schooling for all children.

II.  Schooling: The Three R’s (and more) of Middle Childhood

A.  School marks the time when society formally attempts to transfer its body of knowledge, beliefs, values, and accumulated wisdom to new generations.

1. In the U. S., a primary school education is both a universal right and a legal requirement.

2. More than 160 million of the world’s children will not have access to education.

3. Schooling, which is available to nearly all children in most developed countries, is not as accessible to children, especially girls, in many less developed countries.

4. Recent research suggests that delaying school entry by a year for younger children is not advantageous, and in some cases may be harmful.

5. School readiness is more tied to overall developmental readiness, not age.

B. Reading: Learning to Decode the Meaning Behind Words

1. Reading develops in several broad, frequently overlapping stages.

a. Stage O, from birth to first grade, involves identifying the alphabet, writing name, reading a few familiar words.

b. Stage 1 is largely phonological recoding skills, sounding out words by blending the letters together and learning the names of letters and sounds that go with them.

c. Stage 2 is when children learn to read aloud with fluency.

d. Stage 3, extends from fourth to eighth grade, and reading becomes a way to learn.

e. In Stage 4, children are able to read and process information that reflects multiple points of view.

C. Educators debate the most effective means of teaching reading.

1. Proponents of code-based approaches to reading believe that reading emphasizes the components of reading, such as the sounds of letters and the combinations—phonics—and how sounds are combined to make words.

2. Educators who promote whole-language approaches to reading view reading as a natural process, similar to the acquisition of oral language, that uses trial-and-error strategies to decipher meaning of swords from context.

3. A growing body of data suggests that code-based approach to reading instruction is superior to the whole-language approaches.

4. It is imperative for educators, parents and siblings to understand that most children suffering from dyslexia cannot use phonics as way to learn to read. Their brains do not allow them to separate word sounds the way other child can.

D.  Educational Trends: Beyond the Three Rs

1. U.S. schools are experiencing a definite return to the educational fundamentals embodied in the traditional three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic).

2. Elementary school classrooms today stress individual accountability for teachers and students.

3. Alternatives to traditional schools have begun to spring up, including home schooling.

E. Multiculturalism and diversity are significant issues in U.S. schools where the melting pot society, in which minority cultures were assimilated to the majority culture, is being replaced by the pluralistic society, in which individual cultures maintain their own identities while participating in the definition of a larger culture.

1. Culture is a set of behaviors, beliefs, values, and expectations shared by members of a particular society.

2. Subcultural groups are particular racial, ethnic, religious, socio-economic or gender groups within a given culture.

3. In recent years the goal has been to establish Multicultural Education to help minority students develop competence in the culture of the majority group while maintaining positive group identifies that build on their original culture.

4. Multicultural education is based on several models.

a. The Cultural Assimilation Model fosters the view of the American society as the proverbial melting pot.

b. More recent trends are based on the Pluralistic Society Model, which is the concept that American society is made up of diverse, coequal cultural groups that should preserve their individual cultural features.

c. Today, most educators recommend that children develop a Bicultural Identity by maintaining their original cultural identity while integrating into the dominant culture.

(1) The traditional “melting-pot” technique involves immersing children in classes taught in English and providing English instruction.

(2) Most contemporary approaches emphasize a bicultural strategy, in which children are encouraged to maintain simultaneous membership in more than one culture.

(3) Successful bicultural programs attempt to bring aspects of multiple cultures into the context of everyday social interactions.

5. Expectation Effects: How teachers’ expectancies influence students.

a. Evidence makes it clear that the expectations of teachers are communicated to their students and can bring about the expected performance.

b. The phenomenon is known as the Teacher Expectancy Effect, the cycle of behavior in which a teacher transmits an expectation about a child and brings about the expected behavior.

c. The teacher expectancy effect is a special case of a broader concept known as the self-fulfilling prophecy, in which a person’s expectation is capable of bringing about an outcome.

d. Children also develop their own expectations about their teacher’s competence and convey their expectations to the teacher.

F. Teaching Emotional Intelligence

1. Emotional Intelligence is the set of skills that underlie the accurate assessment, evaluation, expression, and regulation of emotions.

2. Psychologist Daniel Goleman argues that emotional literacy should be a standard part of the school curriculum.

3. Programs meant to increase emotional intelligence have not been met with universal acceptance, but most people consider emotional intelligence to be something that is worthy of nurturance.

III.  Intelligence testing has traditionally focused on factors that differentiate successful academic performers from unsuccessful ones. The intelligence quotient (IQ) reflects the ratio of a person’s mental age to his or her chronological age. Other conceptualizations of intelligence focus on different types of intelligence or on different aspects of information processing.

A.  Alfred Binet’s pioneering efforts in intelligence testing left three important legacies.

1. He defined intelligence pragmatically as that which his test measured

2. Intelligence tests should be reasonable indicators of school success.

3. The intelligence quotient (IQ) reflects the ratio of a person’s mental age to his or her chronological age: (MA ÷ CA X 100 = IQ).

a. Mental Age is the typical intelligence level found for people at a given chronological age.

b. Chronological (Or Physical) Age is the actual age of the child taking the intelligence test.

c. Scores today are deviation IQ scores, so that the degree of deviation from the average (100) permits a calculation of the proportion of people who have similar scores.

(1) Two-thirds of all people fall within 15 points of the average.

(2) As scores rise and fall beyond this range, the percentage of people falls significantly.

d. The question of whether there are cultural and/or ethnic differences in IQ is highly controversial. Recent research offers that if there are any differences, they may be associated with socioeconomic, environmental and nutritional factors and not ability.