Physical and cognitive development in early childhood o Gross motor skills

 Running and jumping are ways in which a 3 year old

Reggio Emilia approach child can acquire pride and accomplishment
 Educational program for young children that was developed n the o Fine motor skills
northern Italian city of Reggio Emilia  Children developed their fine motor skills, especially
 Children of single parents and children with disabilities have priority their pincer grasp but they are still clumsy
in admission  Sleep
 Children are encouraged to learn by investigating and exploring o Young children should get 11 - 13 hours of sleep each night
topics that interest them o Children who had sleeping problems are more prone to
 At the core of Reggio Emilia approach is the image of children who developing depression + other related problems
are competent and have rights, especially right to outstanding care  Nutrition and exercise
and education A sensitive/responsive caregiver feeding style in which the
caregiver is nurturant, provides clear information about what is
Changes expected, and appropriately responds to children's cues is
recommended
1. Physical Changes o Forceful and restrictive caregiver behaviors are not
 Body Growth and Change recommended .
 Motor development o Guidelines recommend that preschool children engage in two
 Sleep hours of physical activity per day, one hour of structured activity
 Nutrition and Exercise and one hour of unstructured free play
 Illness and Death o Iron deficiency anemia - chronic fatigue - most common
nutritional problems
 Body Growth and Change  This problem results from the failure to eat adequate
 Child grows 2 1/2 inches in height and gains 5-7 pounds a year amounts of quality meats and dark green
during early childhood vegetables.
 By the end of preschool years, most children have lost their top-  Illness and death
heavy look o Vehicular accidents is the leading cause of death
among children
 Brain
o Parental smoking is another major danger
o By the time children reach 3 years of age, the brain is three- o Lead poisoning - lower intelligence, lower
quarters of its adult size. By age 6, the brain has reached achievement, ADHD, elevated blood pressure
about 95 percent of its adult size
o Continued myelination in early childhood provides children
with much better hand-eye coordination
o Dramatical change of local patterns within the brain. 2. Cognitive Changes
o Middle and late childhood, thickening occurs in the frontal  Piaget's Preoperational Stage
lobes which may be linked to improvements in language and  Vygotsky's theory
abilities such as reading, planning, organizing new actions,  Information Processing
maintaining attention to tasks
 Motor development  Piaget's Preoperational Stage
o Preoperational stage - lasts from approximately 2-7 years of  the awareness that altering an object’s
age, is the second Piagetian stage. or a sub- stance’s appearance does not
change its basic properties.
 children begin to represent the world with
words, images, and drawings.  In addition to failing to conserve
volume, preoperational children also fail to
 They form stable concepts and begin to
conserve number, matter, length, and area.
reason.
 Vygotsky's Theory
 the young child’s cognitive world is dominated
o In Piaget’s theory, children develop ways of thinking
by egocentrism and magical beliefs
and understanding by their actions and interactions with
 is the beginning of the ability to reconstruct in
the physical world. In Vygotsky’s theory, children are
thought what has been established in behavior more often described as social creatures than in Piaget’s
 Operations - reversible mental action theory. They develop their ways of thinking and
 divided into two substages: the symbolic understanding primarily through social interaction.
function substage and the intuitive thought o Zone of Proximal Development
substage.  is Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks that
o Symbolic function substage are too difficult for the child to master alone but
 first substage of preoperational thought, that can be learned with guidance and assistance
occurring roughly between the ages of 2 and 4 of adults or more-skilled children.
 the young child gains the ability to mentally  Thus, the lower limit of the ZPD is the level of
represent an object that is not present. skill reached by the child working independently.
 Scribbles that represent people, houses, cars The upper limit is the level of additional
 Egocentrism responsibility the child can accept with the
 is the inability to distinguish between assistance of an able instructor
one’s own perspective and someone else’s
perspective
 Animism
 is the belief that inanimate objects
have lifelike qualities and are capable of
action.
o Intuitive thought substage
 is the second substage of preoperational
thought, occurring between approximately 4 and 7
years of age.
 Children begin to use primitive reasoning and
want to know the answers to all sorts of questions
 The child’s questions signal the emergence of
interest in reasoning and in figuring out why things
are the way they are
o Centration and the limits of preoperational thought
 Centration
 a centering of attention on one
characteristic to the exclusion of all others
 Conservation
 o Scaffolding
 means changing the level of support.
 Over the course of a teaching ses- sion, a more-
skilled person (a teacher or advanced peer) adjusts
the amount of guidance to fit the child’s current
performance
o Language and thought
 children use speech not only to communicate socially
but also to help them solve tasks
 is further believed that young children use
It
language to plan, guide, and monitor their behavior
 This use of language for self-regulation is
called private speech.
 When children talk to themselves, they are using
language to govern their behavior and guide
themselves
o Tools of the Mind is an early childhood education curriculum
that emphasizes children’s development of self-regulation and
the cognitive foundations of literacy.
o Takes a social constructivist approach
 which emphasizes the social con- texts of learning
and the construction of knowledge through social
interaction.
 Information processing
o Attention
 focusing of mental resources on select
information.
 Executive attention
 involves action planning, allocating
attention to goals, error detection and
compensation, monitoring progress on tasks,
and dealing with novel or difficult
circumstances.
 Sustained attention
 is focused and extended engagement
with an object, task, event, or other aspect of
the environment.
 Preschool children are likely to pay attention
to stimuli that stand out, or are salient, even when
those stimuli are not rele- vant to solving a problem
or performing a task. After the age of 6 or 7,
children attend more efficiently to the dimensions
of the task that are relevant, such as the directions
for solving a problem.
  By com- parison, elementary school age
children are more likely to systematically com- pare
the details across the pictures, one detail at a time
o Memory
 Retention of information over time
 Central process in children's cognitive
development
 Developmental changes
 short-term memory
 individuals retain information for up to
30 seconds if there is no rehearsal of the
information.
 2 digits in 2- to 3-year-old children to
about 5 digits in 7-year-old chil- dren, yet
between 7 and 13 years of age memory span
increased only by 1 1⁄2 digit
 Preschoolers are the most suggestible
age group in comparison with older children
and adults
 Some preschoolers are highly resistant
to interviewers’ suggestions, whereas others
immediately succumb to the slightest
suggestion.
 Children are suggestible not just about
peripheral details but also about the central
aspects of an event
o Strategies of problem solving
 Strategies
 consist of deliberate mental activities
to improve the processing of information.
 . For example, rehearsing information
and organizing it are two typical strategies
that older children and adults use to
remember more effectively
 During early childhood, the relatively
stimulus-driven toddler is transformed into a
child capable of flexible, goal-directed
problem solving
 Researchers have found that at about
4 years of age, children acquire the concept of
perspectives, which allows them to appreciate
that a single stimulus can be described in two
different ways
 The Children's Theory of Mind
 Theory of mind
 refers to awareness of one’s
own mental processes and the mental
processes of others. Studies of theory of
mind view the child as “a thinker who is
trying to explain, predict, and
understand people’s thoughts, feelings,
and utterances”
 Perceptions
 a 2 y.o. child will
recognize that another person will
see what's in front of her own eyes
instead of what's in front of the
child's eyes
 by 3 years of age, the
child realizes that looking leads to
knowing what’s inside a container
 Emotions
 The child can distinguish
between positive (for example,
happy) and negative (sad, for
example) emotions.
 Desires
 Children also refer to
desires earlier and more frequently
than they refer to cognitive states
such as thinking and knowing
 Toddlers recognize that if
people want something, they will
try to get it.
 Between the ages of 3 to
5, children come to understand
that the mind can represent objects
and events accurately or
inaccurately.
 The realization that
people can have false beliefs—
beliefs that are not true—develops
in a majority of children by the time
they are 5 years old
 the false-belief task is a
complicated one that involves a
number of factors such as the
 characters in the story and all of
their individual actions
 Not until middle and late
childhood do children see the mind
as an active constructor of
knowledge or processing center
 Individual differences
 children who talk with
their parents about feel- ings
frequently as 2-year-olds show
better performance on theory of
mind tasks
 Executive function -
describes several functions (such as
inhibition and planning) that are
important for flexible, future oriented
behavior, also may be connected to
theory o mind development.
 Children who
perform better at exec- utive
function tasks seem also to
have a better understanding
of theory of mind
3. Language Development
 Understanding Phonology and Morphology
 Changes in Syntax and Semantics
 Advances in Pragmatics
 Young Children's Literacy
 Understanding phonology and morphology
o By the time children move beyond two-word
utterances, they demonstrate a knowledge of
morphology rules
o Children begin using the plural and possessive forms
of nouns
o Overgeneralization of the rules, as when a preschool
child says “foots” instead of “feet,” or “goed” instead of
“went.”
 Changes in syntax and semantics
o Preschool children also learn and apply rules of
syntax
o Gains in semantics also characterize early childhood.
Vocabulary development is dramatic
 Advances in Pragmatics
o Young children begin to engage in extended
discourse
o they learn culturally specific rules of conversation
and polite- ness and become sensitive to the need to
adapt their speech in different settings.
4. Early childhood education
 Variations in Early Childhood Education
 Education for Young Children Who Are Disadvantaged
 Controversies in Early Childhood Education
 Variations in Early Childhood Education
o The Child-centered Kindergarten
 which emphasizes the education of the whole
child and concern for his or her physical, cognitive,
and socioemotional development
 Instruction is organized around the child’s
needs, interests, and learning styles
 Emphasis is on the process of learning,
rather than what is learned
 Each child follows a unique developmental
pattern; young children learn best through
firsthand experiences with people and materials;
and play is extremely important in the child’s
total development.
o The Montessori Approach
 is a philosophy of education in which children
are given considerable freedom and
spontaneity in choosing activities.
 Montessori schools are patterned after the
educational philosophy of Maria Montessori, an
Italian physician-turned-educator, who at the
beginning of the 20th century crafted a
revolutionary approach to young children’s
education
 “By encouraging children to make decisions
from an early age, Montessori programs seek to
develop self-regulated problem solvers who can
make choices and manage their time effectively”
o Developmentally appropriate practice (DAP)
  which is based on knowledge of the typical
development of children within an age span (age-
appropriateness), as well as the uniqueness of
the child (individual-appropriateness).
 DAP emphasizes the importance of creating
settings that encourage children to be active
learners and reflect children’s interests and
capabilities

Chapter 8: Socioemotional development in early childhood

1. Emotional and Personality Development
 Universal preschool education

 The self
 Emotional development
 Moral development

 The Self
o Initiative vs. guilt
 Erikson’s psychosocial stage associated with
early childhood is initiative versus guilt.
 By now, children have become convinced that
they are persons of their own; during early
childhood, they begin to discover what kind of
person they will become.
o Controversies in Early Childhood education
 They identify intensely with their parents, who
 Curriculum controversy most of the time appear to them to be powerful
and beautiful, although often unreasonable,
disagreeable, and sometimes even dangerous.
 The great governor of initiative is
conscience. Their initiative and enthusiasm may
bring them not only rewards but also guilt, which
lowers self-esteem.
o Self-understanding and understanding others
 Self understanding
  which is the representation of self, the
substance and content of self-conceptions
 They expressed this optimism because
they don’t yet distinguish between their
desired competence and their actual
competence, tend to confuse ability and effort
(thinking that differences in ability can be
changed as easily as can differences in effort),
 Understanding others
 Researchers have found that even 4-
year-olds under- stand that people may make
statements that aren’t true to obtain what
they want or to avoid trouble
 Emotional development
o Expressing emotions
 self-conscious emotions
 children must be able to refer to
themselves and be aware of themselves as
distinct from other
o Regulating emotions
 Depending on how they talk with their
children about emotion, parents can be described
as taking an emotion-coaching or an emotion-
dismissing approach
 Emotion-coaching parents
 monitor their children’s emotions,
view their children’s negative emotions as
opportunities for teaching, assist them in
labeling emotions, and
coach them in how to deal effectively with
emotions.
 emotion-dismissing parents
 view their role as to deny, ignore, or change
negative emotions
 Moral development
o involves the development of thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors regarding rules and conventions about what
people should do in their interactions with other people.
o Moral feelings
 Feelings of anxiety and guilt are central to the
account of moral development provided by Freud’s
psychoanalytic theory
 One important example is empathy, which is
responding to another person’s feelings with an
emotion that echoes the other’s feelings.
 Infants have the capacity for some purely
empathic responses, but empathy often requires
the ability to discern another’s inner psychological
states, or what is called perspective taking.
o Moral reasoning
 heteronomous morality
 4 to 7 years of age
 Children think of justice and
rules as unchangeable properties of the
world, removed from the control of
people.
 7 to 10 years of age
 children are in a transition
showing some features of the first stage
of moral reasoning and some stages of
the second stage, autonomous morality.
 autonomous morality.
 10 years of age and older
 They become aware that rules
and laws are created by people, and in
judging an action they consider the
actor’s intentions as well as the
consequences.
 Because young children are heteronomous
moralists, they judge the rightness or goodness of
behavior by considering its consequences, not the
intentions of the actor
 The heteronomous thinker also believes that
rules are unchangeable and are handed down by
all-powerful authorities
 The heteronomous thinker also believes in
immanent justice, the concept that if a rule is
broken, punishment will be meted out immediately
 also implies that if something
unfortunate happens to someone, the person
must have transgressed earlier
 Moral behavior
 When children are rewarded for
behavior that is consistent with laws and
social conventions, they are likely to repeat
that behavior.
  In the moral behavior view, the
situation also influences behavior.
 Social cognitive theorists also stress
that the ability to resist temptation is closely
tied to the development of self-control. To
achieve this self-control, children must learn
to delay gratification.
 Conscience
 refers to an internal regulation of
standards of right and wrong that involves an
integration of all three components of moral
development we have described so far—moral
thought, feeling, and behavior
 Parenting and young child's moral
development
o Gender
 Gender identity
 involves a sense of one’s own gender,
including knowledge, understanding, and
acceptance of being male or female
 Gender roles
 are sets of expectations that prescribe
how females or males should think, act, and
feel.
 Gender typing
 refers to acquisition of a traditional
masculine or feminine role
o Biological influences
The 23rd pair consists of a combina-
tion of X and Y chromosomes, usually two X
chromosomes in a female and an X and a Y in a
male.
 Males start to differ from females when genes on
the Y chromosome in the male embryo trigger the
development of testes rather than ovaries; the
testes secrete copious amounts of the class of
hormones known as androgens
 Estrogens, such as estradiol, influence the
development of female physical sex characteristics.
Androgens, such as testosterone, promote the
development of male physical sex characteristics.
o Social influences
 Three main social theories f gender have been
proposed- social role theory, psychoanalytic
theory, and social cognitive theory.
 Social role theory
 Gender differences result from the contrasting
roles of men and women
 Psychoanalytic theory of gender
 Stems from Freud's view that the pre-school
child develops a sexual attraction to the
opposite-sex parent.
 Oedipus (boys)
 Electra (girls)
 5-6 years of age, child renounces this
attraction because of anxious feelings
 Social cognitive theory of gender
 Children's gender development occurs
through observing and imitating what other
people say and do, though being rewarded
and punished or gender-appropriate and
gender-inappropriate behavior
 Parental influences
 Parents, by actions, influence their children's
gender development
 Mothers' socialization strategies -
influence their daughters to be more
obedient and responsible than sons,
place restrictions on daughters
autonomy
 Fathers' socialization strategies -
show more attention to sons, engage in
actvities with sons, put more effort to
promote son's intellectual development
 Peer influences
 Peers extensively reward and punish gender
behavior
 there is greater pressure for boys to conform
to a traditional male role than for girls to
conform to a traditional female role
 Tomboy - implies broad social acceptance of
girls' adopting traditional male behaviors
 Gender composition
 3 y.o. - preference to spend time with
same-sex playmates
  4-12 y.o. - preference increases
 Group size
 5 y.o. - boys are more likely to
associate in larger clusters than girls are.
They also participate in organized group
games
 Interaction
 Boys - rough-and-tumble play,
competition, conflict, ego displays, risk
taking, and seeking dominance
o Cognitive influences
 Observation, imitation, rewards and punishment—
these are the mechanisms by which gender
develops according to social cognitive theory
 Interactions between the child and the social
environment are the main keys to gender
development in this view.
 Gender schema theory, which states that gender-
typing emerges as children gradually develop
gender schemas of what is gender-appropriate and
gender-inappropriate in their culture
 A schema is a cognitive structure, a network
of associations that guide an individual’s
perceptions.
 A gender schema organizes the world in terms
of female and male
 Children are internally motivated to perceive
the world and to act in accordance with their
developing schemas.
2. Families
 Parenting
 Child maltreatment
 Sibling relationship and birth order
 The changing family in changing society
 Parenting
o o
Baumrind's Parenting styles (Diana Baumrind,
1971)
 argues parents should be neither punitive nor
aloof.
 Authoritarian parenting
 is a restrictive, punitive style in
which parents exhort the child to follow
their directions and respect their work
and effort.
 places firm limits and controls on
the child and allows little verbal
exchange.
 might spank the child frequently,
enforce rules rigidly but not explain
them, and show rage toward the child.
 Authoritative parenting
 encourages children to be
independent but still places limits and
controls on their actions.
 Extensive verbal give-and-take is
allowed, and parents are warm and
nurturant toward the child.
 Authoritative parents show
pleasure and support in response to
children’s constructive behavior.
 They also expect mature,
independent, and age-appropriate
behavior by children.
 Neglectful parenting
 is a style in which the parent is
very uninvolved in the child’s life
 Indulgent parenting
 is a style in which parents are
highly involved with their children but
place few demands or controls on them.
Such parents let their children do what
they want.
o Punishment
 Time out, in which the child is removed from a
setting that offers positive reinforce- ment, can also
be effective.
o Coparenting
 which is the support that parents provide one
another in jointly raising a child.
Child maltreatment
 Types of child maltreatment
 Physical abuse - characterized by the
infliction of physical injury as a result of
punching, beating, kicking, biting, burning,
shaking, or otherwise harming a child
  Child neglect is characterized by
failure to provide for the child’s basic needs
 Sexual abuse includes fondling a
child’s genitals, intercourse, incest, rape,
sodomy, exhibitionism, and commercial
exploitation through prostitution or the
production of pornographic materials
 Emotional abuse
(psychological/verbal abuse/mental
injury) includes acts or omissions by parents
or other caregivers that have caused, or could
cause, serious behavioral, cognitive, or
emotional problems
o Developmental consequences of abuse
 Among the consequences of child
maltreatment in childhood and adolescence are
poor emotion regulation, attach- ment problems,
problems in peer relations, difficulty in adapting to
school, and other psychological problems such as
depression and delinquency.
o Sibling relationships and birth order
 3 important characteristics of sibling
relationships (Judy Dunn, 2007)
 Emotional quality of the relationship
 Familiarty and intimacy of the
relationship
 Variation in sibling relationships
 Birth order
 Compared with later-born children,
firstborn children have also been described as
more adult-oriented, helpful, conforming, and
self-controlled
 Only children often are achievement-
oriented and display a desirable personality,
especially in comparison with later-borns and
children from large families
o Children in divorced families
 children from divorced families show poorer
adjustment than their counterparts in nondivorced
families
 Children in divorced families are more likely
than children in nondivorced families to have
academic problems, to show externalized problems
(such as acting out and delinquency) and
internalized problems (such as anxiety and
depression)
 Children who are socially mature and
responsible, who show few behavioral problems,
and who have an easy temperament are better
able to cope with their parents’ divorce.
 Children with a difficult temperament often
have problems in coping with their parents’ divorce
3. Peer Relations, Play, and Television
 Peer relations
 Play
 Television
 Peer relations
o Peer group functions
 Source of information and comparison about
the world outside the family
 Children receive feedback about their abilities
from their peer group
o Developmental changes
 Many preschool children spend considerable
time in peer interaction conversing with playmates
about such matters as “negotiating roles and rules
in play, arguing, and agreeing”
 during early childhood children’s interactions
with peers become more coordinated and involve
longer turns and sequences
o Friends
 children distinguish between friends and
nonfriends
o The connected worlds of parent-child and peer
relations
 Parents may influence their children’s peer
relations in many ways, both directly and indirectly
 Basic lifestyle decisions by parents—their
choices of neighborhoods, churches, schools, and
their own friends—largely determine the pool from
which their children select possible friends.
 Play
o Play is a pleasurable activity in which children
engage
for its own sake, and its functions and forms vary.
 o According to Freud and Erikson, play helps children
master anxieties and conflicts.
o Therapists use play therapy both to allow children to
work off frustrations and to analyze children’s conflicts
and ways of coping with them
o Play permits children to practice their competencies and
acquired skills in a relaxed, pleasurable way.
o Pre-school years are considered the "golden age" of
symbolic pretense play that is dramatic or sociodramatic
in nature
o Types of play
 Sensorimotor play is behavior by infants to derive
pleasure from exercising their sensorimotor
schemes.
 Practice play involves the repetition of behavior
when new skills are being learned or when physical
or mental mastery and coordination of skills are
required for games or sports.
 Pretense/symbolic play - occurs when the child
trans- forms the physical environment into a
symbol.
 Social play - is play that involves interaction with
peers. Social play increases dramatically during the
preschool years.
Constructive play - combines
sensorimotor/practice play with symbolic
representation
 Occurs when children engage in self-regulated
creation of a product or a solution
 Increases in the preschool years as symbolic
play increases increases and sensorimotor
play decreases
Middle and Late Childhood
Thursday, 17 October 2019
9:15 PM
Chapter 9: Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle and Late
Childhood
1. Physical Changes and Health
 Body growth and change
 The brain
 Motor development
 Exercise
 Health, illness, and disease
 Body growth and change
o Slow and consistent growth
o Head circumference and waist circumference
decrease in relation to body height
o A less noticeable physical change is that bones
continue to ossify during middle and late childhood but
yield to pressure and pull more than mature
bones.
o The loose movements and knock- knees of early
childhood give way to
o improved muscle tone.
o Because of their greater number of muscle cells, boys
are usually stronger than girls.
 The Brain
o Total brain volume stabilizes by the end of middle
and late childhood, but significant changes in various
structures and regions of the brain continue to occur.
o brain pathways and circuitry involving the prefrontal
cortex, the highest level in the brain, continue to
increase in middle and late childhood
o Cerebral cortex thickness also changes
o As children develop, activation of some brain areas
increases while others decrease
o One shift in activa- tion that occurs as children
develop is from diffuse, larger areas to more focal,
smaller areas
o The activation change was accompanied by
increased efficiency in cognitive performance, especially
in cognitive control, which involves flexible and effective
control in a number of areas
 Motor Development
o During middle and late childhood, children’s motor
skills become much smoother and more coordinated
than they were in early childhood.
o Increased myelination of the central nervous system
is reflected in the improve- ment of fine motor skills
during middle and late childhood.
 Exercise
o Elementary school children are far from physical
maturity, so they need to be active
o Researchers also are finding that exercise is linked to
children’s cognitive development.
 Health, Illness, and Disease
o Accidents and injuries
 Injuries are the leading cause of death during
middle and late childhood, and the most common
cause of severe injury and death in this period is
motor vehicle accidents, either as a pedestrian or
as a passenger
o Overweight children
 Causes great concern because overweight
children are at risk for developing pulmonary
problems, sleep apnea, hip problems, diabetes,
hypertension, elevated blood cholesterol levels
o Cardiovascular disease
 Uncommon
 Many elementary-school-aged children
already possess one or more of the risk factors for
cardiovascular disease, such as hypertension and
obesity
 metabolic syndrome—a constellation of
factors, including obesity, high blood pressure, and
type 2 diabetes—placing indi- viduals at risk for
developing cardiovascular disease in adulthood
o Cancer
 Cancer is the second leading cause of death
in U.S. children 5 to 14 years of age
 Child cancers mainly attack the white blood
cells (leukemia), brain, bone, lymph system,
muscles, kidneys, and nervous system. All are
characterized by an uncontrolled proliferation of
abnormal cells
 Leukemia - most common child cancer
2. Children with disabilities
 The Scope of Disabilities
o Learning disabilities
 has difficulty in learning that involves
understanding or using spoken or written language,
and the difficulty can appear in listening, thinking,
reading, writing, and spelling.
 may involve difficulty in doing mathematic
 is not primarily the result of visual, hearing, or
motor disabilities; mental retardation; emotional
disorders; or due to environmental, cultural, or
economic disadvantage.
 Dyslexia
 Is a category reserved for individuals
who have a severe impairment in their ability
to read and spell
 Dysgraphia
 is a learning disability that involves
difficulty in handwriting
 inability to match up sounds and
letters.
 writing products may be virtually
illegible
 numerous spelling errors
 Dyscalculia
 also known as developmental
arithmetic disorder, is a learning disability
that involves difficulty in math computation
o ADHD
 is a disability in which children consistently
show one or more of these characteristics over a
period of time: (1) inattention, (2) hyperactivity,
and (3) impulsivity.
 ADHD with predominantly inattention
 ADHD with predominantly hyperactivity/
impulsivity,
 ADHD with both inattention and
hyperactivity/impulsivity.
 A recent study revealed that peak thickness of
the cerebral cortex occurred three years later (10.5
years) in children with ADHD than in children
without ADHD (peak at 7.5 years)
 Intervention: Ritalin or Adderall (stimulant) -
helps in attention
o Emotional and behavioral disorders
 consist of serious, persistent problems that
involve relationships, aggression, depression, and
fears associated with personal or school matters, as
 well as other inappropriate socioemotional
characteristics.
o Autism Spectrum Disorder
 pervasive developmental disorders, range
from the severe disorder labeled autistic disorder to
the milder disorder called Asperger syndrome.
 characterized by problems in social
interaction, problems in verbal and nonverbal
communication, and repetitive behaviors
 Mental retardation is present in some children
with autism; others show average or above-
average intelligence
 Autistic disorder is a severe developmental
autism spectrum disorder
 restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped
patterns of behavior
 Asperger syndrome is a relatively mild
autism spectrum disorder in which the child has
relatively good verbal language
 engage in obsessive repetitive routines
and preoccupations with a particular subject
 Educational issues
o An individualized education plan (IEP) is a
written statement that spells out a program that is
specifically tailored for the student with a disability
o The least restrictive environment (LRE) is a
setting that is as similar as possible to the one in which
children who do not have a disability are educated.
o inclusion describes educating a child with special
education needs full-time in the regular classroom
3. Cognitive changes
 Piaget's Cognitive Developmental Theory
 Information Processing
 Intelligence
 Extremes of Intelligence
 Piaget's Cognitive Developmental Theory
o The Concrete Operational stage
 7 to 11 years of age.
 children can perform concrete operations,
reason logically as long as reasoning can be applied
to specific or concrete examples.
 operations are mental actions that are
reversible
 concrete operations are operations that are
applied to real, concrete objects
 Concrete operations allow the child to
consider several characteristics rather than focus
on a single property of an object.
 The concrete operational child coordinates
information about both dimensions.
 seriation, which is the ability to order stimuli
along a quantitative dimension
 transitivity, which is the ability to logically
combine relations to understand certain
conclusions.
o Information Processing
 Memory
 Long-term memory, a relatively
permanent and unlimited type of memory,
increases with age during middle and late
childhood
 long-term memory depends on the
learning activities individuals engage in when
learning and remembering information
 Strategies for adults to use when
attempting to improve children’s memory
skills:
 Encourage children to engage
in mental imagery.
 Motivate children to remember
material by understanding it rather than
by memorizing it.
 Repeat with variation on the
instructional information and link early
and often.
 Embed memory-relevant
language when instructing children
 Fuzzy trace theory states that
memory is best understood by considering
two types of memory representations:
  (1) verbatim memory trace -
consists of the precise details of the
information
 (2) gist - refers to the central
idea of the information.
 Thinking
 Three important aspects of thinking
are being able to think critically, creatively,
and scientifically.
 Critical thinking involves
thinking reflectively and productively,
and evaluating evidence.
 mindfulness—being
alert, mentally present, and
cognitively flexible while going
through life’s everyday activities
and tasks—is an important aspect
of thinking critically.
 Creative thinking is the ability
to think in novel and unusual ways to
come up with unique solutions to
problems
 Convergent thinking -
which produces one correct answer
and characterizes the kind of
thinking that is required on
conventional tests of intelligence
 divergent thinking,
which pro- duces many different
answers to the same question and
characterizes creativity.
 Scientific thinking - Like
scientists, children ask fundamental
questions about real- ity and seek
answers to problems that seem utterly
trivial or unanswerable to other people
 Metacognition is cognition about
cognition, or knowing about knowing
 Many studies classified as
"metacognitive" have focused on
metamemory or knowledge about memory
o Intelligence
 Intelligence is the ability to solve problems and to
adapt and learn from experiences.
 Individual differences are the stable, con-
sistent ways in which people are different from
each other
 Binet tests
 It consisted of 30 questions on topics
ranging from the abil- ity to touch one’s ear to
the ability to draw designs from memory and
define abstract concepts.
 Binet developed the concept of
mental age (MA), an individual’s level of
mental development relative to others
 intelligence quotient (IQ), a
person’s mental age divided by chronological
age (CA), multiplied by 100. MA/CA 3 100.
 The Wechsler Scales
 developed by psychologist David
Wechsler. They include the Wechsler Preschool
and Primary Scale of Intelligence—Third
Edition (WPPSI-III) to test children from the
ages of 2 years 6 months to 7 years 3 months
of age;
 The Wechsler scales not only provide
an overall IQ score, but they also yield several
composite indexes (for example, the Verbal
Comprehension Index, the Working Memory
Index, and the Processing Speed Index) that
allow the examiner to quickly determine the
areas in which the child is strong or weak.
 Types of intelligence
 triarchic theory of intelligence
(Robert J. Sternberg), states that intelligence
comes in three forms
 Analytical intelligence -
ability to analyze, judge, evaluate,
compare and contrast
 creative intelligence, which
consists of the ability to cre- ate, design,
invent, originate, and imagine;
 practical intelligence, which
involves the ability to use, apply,
implement, and put ideas into practice.
 Gardner's eight frames of mind
  Verbal: The ability to think in words
and use language to express meaning.
Occupations: Authors, journalists, speakers.
 Mathematical: The ability to carry out
mathematical operations. Occupations:
Scientists, engineers, accountants.
 Spatial: The ability to think three-
dimensionally. Occupations: Architects, artists,
sailors.
 Bodily-kinesthetic: The ability to
manipulate objects and be physically adept.
Occupations: Surgeons, craftspeople, dancers,
athletes.
 Musical: A sensitivity to pitch,
melody, rhythm, and tone. Occupations:
Composers, musicians, and sensitive listeners.
 Interpersonal: The ability to
understand and interact effectively with
others. Occupations: Successful teachers,
mental health professionals.
 Intrapersonal: The ability to
understand oneself. Occupations:
Theologians, psychologists.
 Naturalist: The ability to observe
patterns in nature and understand natural and
human-made systems. Occupations: Farmers,
botanists, ecologists, landscapers.
 IQ
 The worldwide increase in intelligence
test scores that has occurred over a short
time frame has been called the Flynn effect
after the researcher who discovered it, James
Flynn.
 Culture fair tests
 Culture-fair tests are tests of
intelligence that are intended to be free of
cultural bias
 The first includes items that are
familiar to children from all
socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds,
or items that at least are familiar to the
children taking the test.
 The second type of culture-fair
test has no verbal questions.
 Using inelligence tests
 Avoid stereotyping and expectations.
 Know that IQ is not a sole indicator of
competence.
o Extremes of inelligence
 Mental retardation
 is a condition of limited mental abil- ity
in which an individual has a low IQ, usually
below 70 on a traditional intelligence test,
and has difficulty adapting to everyday life.
 About 89% of those with mental
retardation fall into the mild category, with Iqs
of 55-70. most of them are able to live
independently as adults and work at a variety
of jobs.
 About 6 percent are classified as
having moderate mental retardation, with IQs
of 40 to 54;
 About 3.5 percent of those with mental
retardation are in the severe category, with
IQs of 25 to 39; these individuals learn to talk
and accomplish very simple tasks but require
extensive supervision.
 Less than 1 percent have IQs below 25;
they fall into the profoundly mentally retarded
classification and need constant supervision.
 Causes of mental retardation
 Organic cause
 Mental retardation that
is caused by genetic disorder or by
brain damage. Organic refers to the
tissues or organs of the body,
indicating physical damage. IQs: 0-
50. Down syndrome - 50.
 Cultural-familial retardation
 mental deficit in which
no evidence of organic brain
damage can be found. Individuals'
IQ generally range from 50-70
 Giftedness
 People who are gifted have above-
average intelligence (IQ of 130 or higher and
with a superior talent for something)
  3 criteria that characterize gifted
children, whether in art, music, or academic
domains
 Precocity
 children begin to master
an area earlier than their peers.
Learning in their domain is more
effortless for them than for
ordinary children
 Marching to their own
drummer
 Gifted children learn in a
qualitatively different way than
ordinary children. They need
minimal help, or scaffolding from
adults.
Chapter 10 Socioemotional Development in Middle and Late
 A passion to master
Childhood
 Gifted children are
driven to understand the domain in
which they have high ability
 Individuals who are highly gifted are
typically not gifted in many domains and
research on giftedness is increasingly focused
on domain-specific developmental trajectories
4. Language development
 Vocabulary, grammar, and metalinguistic awareness
 Reading
 Writing
 Bilingualism and second-language learning
 Vocabulary, grammar, and metalinguistic awareness
o metalinguistic awareness, which is knowledge
about language, such as knowing what a preposition is
or the abilty to discuss the sounds of a language.
 Reading
o The whole-language approach stresses that read-
ing instruction should parallel children’s natural lan-
guage learning.
o In contrast, the phonics approach emphasizes that
read- ing instruction should teach basic rules for
translating written symbols into sounds.
o Rich Mayer (2008) recently described three cognitive
pro- cesses involved in being able to read a printed
word:
1. Being aware of sound units in words, which consists of
recognizing phonemes.
2. Decoding words, which involves converting printed
words into sounds.
3. Accessing word meaning, which consists of finding a
mental representation of a word’s meaning.
 Bilingualism and second-language learning
o children’s ability to pronounce words with a nativelike
accent in a second language typically decreases with
age, with an especially sharp drop occurring after the
age of about 10 to 12.
1. Emotional and personality development
 The self
 Emotional development
 Moral development
 Gender
 The self
o In middle and late childhood, 8-11 y.o. children
describe themselves with psychological characteristics
and traits in contrast to concrete self-descriptions
o Recognizing the social aspects of the self, include
references to social groups in their self-descriptions
o Increasing social comparison
o Understanding others
 Children increase in perspective taking or the
ability to assume other people's perspectives and
understand their thoughts and feelings
 Children with lower level of perspective taking
engage in more antisocial behavior
o Self-esteem and self-concept
 Self-esteem - global evaluations of the self
and is also called self-worth or self-image
 Self-concept - domain-specific evaluations of
the self
  Self-efficacy - belief that one can master a  Protect from re-exposure to frightening
situation and produce favorable outcomes situations
 Belief that "I can"  Help make sense of what happened
 Self-regulation - deliberate efforts to manage  Moral development
one's behavior, emotions, and thoughts, leading to o Autonomous morality - children consider the
increased social competence and achievement intentions of the individual, believe that rules are subject
o Industry vs. inferiority to change and are aware that punishment does not
 Industry - when children are encouraged in always follow wrongdoing
their efforts to make, build, and work, their sense of
industry increases
 Emotional development
o Children further develop their understanding and
self-regulation of emotion
o Developmental changes
 Inproved emotional underrstanding. Improved
ability to understand complex emotions like pride
and shame
 Increased understanding that more than one
emotion can be experienced in a particular
situation
 Increased tendency to be aware of the events
leading to emotional reactions
 Use of self-initiated strategies for redirecting o Kohlberg Stages
feelings
 Preconventional reasoning is the lowest level of
 Capacity for genuine empathy
moral reasoning, said Kohlberg. At this level, good
o Coping with stress and bad are interpreted in terms of external
 Older childen generate more coping rewards and punishments.
alternatives to stressful conditions and use more  Stage 1: Heteronomous morality
cognitive coping strategies  is the first stage of preconventional
 Better than younger children at intentionally reasoning.
shifting their thoughts to something that is less  Moral thinking is tied to punishment,
stressful
they must obey because they fear
 Recommendations for parents, teachers, and punishment
other caregivers  Stage 2: Individualism, instrumental purpose,
 Reassure children of their safety and and
security Exchange
 Allow children to retell events and be  At this stage, individuals reason that
patient in listening to them pursuing their own interests is the right
 Encourage children to talk about any thing to do but they let others do the
disturbing or confusing feelings, reassuring same
them that such feelings are normal after a
 Equal exchange
stressful event
  Conventional reasoning. At this level, individuals
apply certain standards, but they are the standards
set by others, such as parents or the government.
 Stage 3: Mutual interpersonal expectations,
relationships, and interpersonal conformity
 Individuals value trust, caring, and
loyalty to others as basis of moral
judgments
 Children and adolescents adopt parents'
moral standards at this stage
 Stage 4: Social systems morality
 Moral judgments are based on
understanding the social order, law,
justice, and duty
 Postconventional reasoning is the highest level
in Kohlberg's theory of moral development
 Stage 5 - social contract or utility and
individual rights
 At this stage, individuals reason that
values, rights, and principles undergird
or transcend the law.
 person evaluates the validity of
actual laws, and social systems can be
examined in terms of the degree to
which they preserve and protect
fundamental human rights and values.
 Stage 6 - universal ethical principles
 the person has developed a moral
standard based on universal human
rights. When faced with a conflict
between law and conscience, the person
reasons that conscience should be
followed, even though the decision
might bring risk.
o In contrast to Kohlberg's justice perspective, Gilligan
argues for a care perspective, which is a moral
perspective that views people in terms of their
connectedness with others and emphasizes
interpersonal communica tion, relationships with others,
and concern for others
o Social conventional reasoning
 Focuses on conventional rules that have been
established by social consensus in order to control
behavior and maintain social system
o Prosocial behavior
 The study of prosocial moral behavior has placed
more emphasis on the behavioral aspects of moral
development
o Moral personality
 Children develop a moral personalty
 Components
 Moral identity
 Individuals have a moral identity when
moral notions and moral commitments
are central to their lives
 Moral character
 Has willpower, desires, and integrity to
stand up to pressure, overcome
distractions and disappointments, and
behave morally
 Moral exemplars
 People who have lived exemplary
moral lives
 Moral personality, identity, character,
and set of virtues reflect moral
excellence and commitment
 Gender
o Gender stereotypes
 which are broad categories that reflect
general impressions and beliefs about females and
males.
o Gender role classification
 Androgyny - presence of positive masculine
and feminine characteristics in the same person