336 Ch. 11 Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood PDF

Preview

Summary

Manis...

Description

11.1: Piaget’s concrete operational period ● 11.1: Achievements on Concrete operational thought ○ Advances in thinking ■ Concrete operations → systematic mental rules or procedures that are reversible ● Ex: addition and multiplication ■ Key to all conservation tests ○ Reversible mental operations → think more logically and systematically ■ Class inclusion task → kids shown 7 yellow and 3 red flowers → ask if there are more flowers or more yellow flowers ● Younger kid will answer more yellow flowers ■ Proposed kids don’t get parts and whole concept ○ Asked kids to classify things → 3 conservation tasks, class inclusion test, hierarchically, and by color ■ Improved on all from k to 3rd grade ■ Some mastered more quickly than others ■ Variation in age → did not think this was important ○ 2 other parts of concrete operational thinking: ■ Seriation → the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension ● Put sticks of various lengths in order from shortest to longest ● Young kids → can put a few in order but have problems adding a new stick to the middle ● Piaget → can’t keep two relationships in mind at the same time ● Can do length before other dimensions ■ Transitive inference → the ability to infer a relationship between the quantity of two objects based on their relationship to the quantity of a third object

● Kids asked to make a logical inference about a quantitative dimension ○ Eg length or weight ○ Show that A was longer than B then B was longer than C, asked to compare A and C ○ Concrete operational thinkers → able to apply logical mental operations to concrete materials and situations → not able to solve abstract or hypothetical questions ○ Applications of concrete operations to education ■ Conservation, classification, seriation, and transitivity → fundamental concepts underlying children’s efforts to learn math and science ■ Classification → important for the study of sciences ■ Reversibility → important for mathematical skills ● 11.2: Critique of Piaget’s concrete operations period ○ Definitely become more logical thinkers in middle childhood ○ Is the shift more sudden → piaget’s idea or more gradual? ■ Dev. is gradual ○ Piaget’s tasks studied → not just one change in cognitive structure ■ Changes in thinking on piaget’s tasks → gradually occur in middle childhood ■ Depend on information processing efficiency and knowledge/practice with particular tasks or materials ○ Kids → understand underlying principles at an earlier age → if simplify and make it more familiar, reduce working memory demands, small amount of training on the concepts, wording of questions is more comprehensible ○ The flower thing → would normally use a term to refer to the whole ■ Kids might answer wrong because they have difficulty comprehending the question → not logical thinking ■ Tested using collection terms → performed better

■ Can solve task when given experience assembling their own collections → capable at 4-5 years ○ Final criticism → concrete operations are universal ■ Research in different cultures → depends on familiarity with the materials 11.2: Information Processing and Cognitive neuroscience Approaches ● 11.3: Attention ○ Continues to improve in middle childhood ○ Selective attention → focusing on relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information ■ Significant improvements in efficiency from childhood → early adulthood ■ Brain regions involved in attention → continue to mature ○ Executive attention → maintaining attention across the changing conditions of a task, initiating new tasks or plans, and switching among tasks ■ Ask children and adults → go no go task → in an mri scanner ■ Not push a button when you see a particular character ■ Maintain one operation and inhibit another operation ■ Activates frontal lobe in adults ■ Found → higher activity in 3 frontal cortex areas on no go trials than on go trials ● Larger difference for children than adults ● Kids brain → working harder ● 11.4: Working Memory ○ Thought of as a workspace within the mind that is used to carry out operations, store information, and make decisions on a moment by moment basis ○ Adult brain → working memory tasks → network of brain regions → lateral prefrontal and posterior parietal ■ School age → activate same networks ○ 3 memory buffers and a central executive

■ Buffer 1: visuospatial sketchpad ● Holds and manipulates up to three or four pieces of visual or spatial information ■ Buffer 2: phonological loop ● Holds and manipulates a limited number of articulated sounds ■ Buffer 3: Episodic buffer ● Workspace that can combine information for the visuospatial sketchpad and phonological loop ■ Central executive → controls all of these → focuses attention on particular elements of the model and transfers information from one part of the model to another ● Even from working memory to long term & vice versa ■ All buffers → limited capacity ● Random list of words: ○ Young kids → 3-4 words ○ Adults: 6-7 words ● General increase in working memory capacity during middle childhood ○ Working memory span correlated to: ■ Reading comp ■ Mathematical problem solving ■ Self-regulation ○ Improvements in working memory → maturation of brain networks → bidirectional ○ Each skill → work different parts of working memory → increased efficiency ● 11.5: Processing Speed ○ Kail → gave 6 -21 year olds → reaction time tasks ■ Mental rotation tasks → two letters → different orientations → same or mirror images of each other

■ Name retrieval tasks → pairs of pictures → determine whether they were physically identical or had the same name ■ Same pattern in dev. Changes found at different ages ■ Common mechanisms → brain growth and functioning → underlie speed improvements ■ 13-15 years old → reach adults levels of speed on a wide range of mental functions ○ Combination of several sets of longitudinal data at different ages (5-17 years) → more complete ■ Continued across age period ■ Diminishing amount of gain over time ■ Growth function → resembled pruning of synapses and myelination of brain networks ○ Improvements in processing speed → advances in the complexity of thinking ■ Encode faster into working memory → retain long enough to operate on it ● 11.6: Growth of Long-Term Memory ○ Devise strategies to store info in long-term memory ○ Semantic memory → knowledge of words and concepts → a vast network of associations between concepts that includes words as well as themes ■ Network with nodes and links between nodes ○ Dev. of long term memory → creating more concepts and linking them more and more strongly with other concepts ■ Known as consolidation ○ Process of adding to semantic network → accelerates ■ Bc cognitive changes & exposure to school and other activities ○ 3 processes in adding more info to long term memory: memory strategies, dev. Of knowledge and expertise, metamemory ■ Memory strategies

● Rehearsal → often rehearse during a delay period ○ More likely if an award or instructed to do so ○ Older children → do it spontaneously ■ Rehearsing in sets rather than just repeating them ● Organization strategies → grouping words that are related during rehearsal, recall, or both ○ Young kids → can use → given training ■ Don’t use randomly ● How do they develop? ○ Use of rehearsal and organization strategies → increase over time ○ Discover new strategy → perform better ● Memory dev → fairly rapid transitions from non strategic behavior to strategic ○ Expertise and metamemory ■ More expertise → better memory ■ Study: ● Compared 10 year old chess experts with graduate students who had a working knowledge of chess ● Showed chess board for 1 sec with pieces in locations → asked to place where they were on a blank board ○ Kids did better ● Recall digits in order they were spoken → adults did better ■ Metamemory → knowledge about memory ■ Metacognition → subset of a more general type of understanding of the mind ■ Middle child → metamemory increases ● 11.7: Eyewitness Memory ○ Accuracy of Testimony

■ Asked open ended questions → 3-4 yr old → produce accurate recall of events in their lives ■ Young children → brief responses → 70-80% correct ■ Report most central, leave out details ■ Older children → more detailed and complete, more accurate than younger ■ Cued recall → more correct details but also more errors ■ Remember same amount after 1 month but delays of 5+ months → recall of 6 yrs and younger declines more than adults ● Theory: young children rely on verbatim memory of events ■ Interviewer → more kind and supportive → more accurate ● More authoritative → more errors ● Method of questioning → important ○ Repeat questions → elicit more information from children ○ Suggestibility ■ Young children → more susceptible to suggestions ■ Study: ● Looked at 3-6 year olds → asked if they remember getting their finger caught in a mousetrap ● Many false reports in the initial session → increased by the end of 9 more weekly questionings ● Many elaborated on the false events → provided additional info ● Some kept believing even after being told it wasn’t real ○ Optimizing children’s EyeWitness Testimony ■ ⅓ of children who are abused → disclose details about abuse in an initial session

■ 90% will eventually share ■ Important → investigators avoid misleading or suggestive questions ■ Guidelines: ● Having the interviewer build a warm rapport with child → not praising or criticizing things they say ● Start with open ended questions ● Follow up by using info supplied by child to cue memory ■ Yields greater amount of testimony, fewer errors, and lower likelihood of children incorporating suggestions 11.3: Intelligence in children ● 11.8: Assessment of Intelligence ○ Binet and Simon → assumed intelligence → one score ■ Tested many different items → memory, reasoning, judgement, verbal comprehension ○ General intelligence → g → intelligence is a single entity ○ Hierarchical model of intelligence → now accepted → verbal, spatial, and numerical skills → separate aspects of general intelligence ○ Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children → 15 different subtests ■ 10 mandatory, 5 optional ■ Gives full scale score ■ Also gives four indices → verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and processing speed ○ Calculating IQ ■ Scale with mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15 ■ Large number of people tested → distribution will be normal ○ Stability and Predictive Power of IQ ■ IQ → stable during middle childhood and adolescence

● Does fluctuate from age to age → children’s attention and effort, upward or downward trends in quality of environment ■ Correlate .5 with school grades and achievement test scores ● 75% of variation → depend on factors other than IQ ■ Correlates .6 → number of years of schooling a person eventually gets ○ Limitations of IQ tests ■ Measure cognitive skills that are relevant to school success ● Not creativity, artistic or musical ability, or ability to understand social situations ■ Doesn’t measure fixed cognitive or biological capacity ■ Test developed using middle class white kids → content may not be familiar to immigrant’s kids or minorities ■ Psychologists → view IQ → single estimate of child’s cognitive ability ● 11.9: Genes, Environment, and Brain development ○ Genes contribute → 50% of variability in intelligence in the population ○ 25% of variability → shared environment ○ 25% nonshared environment ○ Twin pair with higher reading ability at earlier ages → higher intelligence scores at later ages ○ Genetic contribution → increases with age ■ Not environmental ■ Heritability goes from 23 → 62 percent ■ Shared environment from 74 → 33 percent ○ Why does heritability increase and shared environment decrease?

■ Evocative and active gene environment correlations → increasingly important → middle childhood and adolescence ■ Gene-environment correlations → increase heritability values → make identical twins more alike over time ■ Could also because variation in environment decreases → school ○ Contributions of changes in the environment ■ Can’t estimate the effects of dramatic changes ■ Large changes in environment → affect IQ ■ Adoption → increases IQ ● Even more in high SES homes ■ Many environmental factors → combine → form environmental risk ■ IQ stable → environmental risk also stable ● Doesn’t matter what risks → just the combination ■ 2+ risks → lower IQ scores ○ Brain Development and Intelligence ■ Classified kids as superior, high, or average intelligence → looked at cortical thickness in several regions ■ Intelligence scores → not correlated with overall thickness of cortex or the rate cortex thinned with age ■ Highest IQ → thinner cortices at age 7 → showed steep decrease by ages 11 to 13 → gradual decline ● Peak @ 11.2 ■ High intelligence → slight rise in thickness at age 9 → steady decline ● Peak @ 8.5 ■ Average intelligence → steady decline in thickness across entire age period ● Peak @ 5.6 ■ Brain of superior IQ children more flexible and responsive to experience

● Thicken for longer period and underwent longer pruning ○ 11.10: Alternative Views of intelligence ■ Think more broadly about intelligence ■ Gardner and Sternberg →interpersonal understanding and creativity → should be included in intelligence ■ Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Framework ● 8 distinct kinds of intelligence: ● Linguistic intelligence → sensitivity to the sounds and meanings of words and how language can be used ● Logico-mathematical intelligence → understanding of logical and numerical patterns and ability to reason about logical problems ● Spatial intelligence → ability to perceive the visual world accurately, perform transformations on perceptions, and re-create visual experiences ● Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence → dancer, athlete, mechanic ● Musical intelligence ● Intrapersonal Intelligence → yogi, therapist ● Interpersonal intelligence → teacher, salesperson ● Naturalistic intelligence → biologist, geologist ■ Also argued that criteria for judging something to be domain of intelligence → too narrow ■ Education is interested ■ Tapping into a child’s strength in new avenues → work with kids who aren’t responding to the typical way ■ Critics: no clear guidelines on how criteria should be measured ● Shouldn’t label kids high or low → just that teachers should engage everyone

● Many abilities he defined → correlate with each other ■ Sternberg’s triarchic theory of successful intelligence ● Analytic intelligence → information processing abilities ○ Ability to encode, remember and retrieve information ○ Use of strategies ○ Ability to monitor the success of a strategy ○ Don’t fully assess real life intelligence ● Creative intelligence → solving novel problems ○ Use analytic intelligence → free up working memory → consider more varied and complex aspects of a problem ○ Figuring out what they need to solve a new problem → generate more than one solution ● Practical intelligence → ability to apply intellectual skills in a variety of contexts ○ adaptation → adapt their thinking to particular situations ○ Shaping → shape situation to fit their needs ○ Select → new contexts that better suit their skills and goals ○ More how intelligence is in non-western cultures 11.4: School Achievement in Middle School ● 11.11: Language Development ○ Grammar and Vocab ■ Learn most of remaining grammatical structures ■ Using passive voice ■ Metalinguistic awareness → ability to reflect on language ● Kids → increasingly aware of grammar

● Self correct grammatical mistakes in their speaking and writing ● Includes the understanding of double meaning ● Ability to understand puns → kid holds two incongruous meanings of a word or phrase in mind at once and resolves incongruity ■ Receptive vocab → increases a ton ● Learn alot of word meanings ● Largest increase → derived words → adding prefix or suffix ○ Communication ■ Improves ■ Ability to construct a narrative improves ● Add details: time, place, participants, emotions, evaluative statements ■ 8-9 → show classic narrative structure → sequence of events, possibly involving a conflict, leading to main event of the story or resolution of conflict ■ Depends on culture and conversation style with adults ● White → one topic ● Black → central theme but more topics ● Latino → family relationships ● 11.12: Educating English Language Learners ○ 13% → 5+ → speak a language other than english at home ○ ELL → english language learners ○ 9.2 % in 2012-2013 ■ Varies state by state, california has the most at 22.8% ○ Two approaches ■ ESL → english as a second language ● Taught entirely in english and sometimes helped with a bilingual classroom aide ■ Bilingual education ● Receive education in both languages

● Transitional bilingual programs → begin in native level and attempt to transition within 2-3 years ● Dual language bilingual programs → equal months of instructions in english and native language ○ Bilingual → moderate advantages over ESL ■ Referring to english language achievements ■ 2-5 years →immigrants to catch up to native ■ 4-7 years → to command english to the point where they could do grade level work ○ Factors outside make a difference ■ 27% of language minority children → below poverty line ■ Lack resources within family and community → support academic achievement ■ Educators → greater reliance on bilingual ed, use of supplemental programs to enrich language and literacy practices at home, reducing poverty through gov welfare work programs ○ ELL → smaller english vocab as monolingual peers → fall behind and learn at a slower rate ■ Researchers → provide high quality preschool with english exposure ● 11.13: Development of Literacy ○ OVerview of Reading development ■ Chall → 5 stages ● US: middle class, highly educated parents → reach stage one in kindergarten ● Low income/immigrant → 2 or more years delayed ● Humans → no specialized brain structures for reading ● Children → systematically and explicitly be taught ● Stage 0: 2-6 ○ Masters basic oral language development, letter recognition, phonological awareness

● Stage 1: 6-7 ○ Formal literacy instructure ○ Spelling-sound correspondences ○ Sounds out and spells simple english words ● Stage 2: 7-8 ○ Masters basic decoding rules ○ Reads more fluently ○ Spells more complex words ● Stage 3: 9-14 ○ Transitions from learning to read and reading to learn ● Stage 4: 15-17 ○ Reads more widely ○ Adopt multiple viewpoints ○ Writes papers from more than one point of view ○ Early reading development ■ Phonological awareness → the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words ■ Phonological decoding → learning which sounds go with which letters and how to use this knowledge to pronounce unfamiliar words ■ Sight word vocab → words children can read accurately and quickly without resorting to phonological decoding ■ Self-teaching mechanism → after phonologically decoding right a few times → retrieve from memory immediately ○ Reading comprehension ■ Involves creating a mental model of events, locations, and ideas in text ■ Processing speed, working memory, and knowledge of vocab and grammar

■ Word reading speed → reading comp scores from 1st grade on ■ Strong correlation between comprehension of written and spoken language ○ Methods of teaching ■ Whole language approach → assumes kids learn to read naturally by interaction with interesting and meaningful text ■ Phonics approach → children were taught how spelling patterns correspond to sounds and how to decode printed words ■ Favored → balanced approach → blends the two above ● 11.14: Development of Mathematics ○ Conceptual knowledge ■ Place value concept and fractions → 2 most difficult ■ Place value concept → understanding what a number means ● US and EU → weaker than east asian ● Maybe because language differences ● High quality instruction and hands on practice → crucial ● Concrete teaching methods → facilitate acquisition ■ 4-6 → get the concept of fractions ● Older kids → strug with numerator denominator ● East asian → understand faster ○ Arithmetic operations ■ Eventually use fact retrieval → retrieving memorized sums ■ Solving more complex problems → understanding place value concept, fact retrieval, and amount of time practicing the problems ○ Problem solving ■ Most kids struggle

■ Im...