Middle and Late Childhood

Middle and Late Childhood - A Comprehensive Presentation from Santrock's Lifespan Development (17th ed.).

1. Middle & Late Childhood © Tinnie Cruz, RPm San Beda College Alabang SY2021-2022

2. Physical Development during Middle and Late Childhood

3. Physical Changes and Health There is a slow, consistent pattern of growth. Children gain about 5 to 7 pounds a year, which is accounted by the increases in the size of the skeletal and muscular systems. Total brain volume stabilizes by the end of late childhood, but certain structures and regions continue to occur such as the prefrontal cortex. Some brain areas become more active while others becomes less active.

4. Motor Development Motor skills become much smoother and more coordinated. Boys perform better than girls in activities that involve the gross motor skills. The increased myelination in the nervous system is reflected in the improvement of the fine motor skills. Girls perform better than boys in activities that involve the fine motor skills.

5. Exercise Exercises programs with a frequency of three weekly sessions lasting longer than 60 minutes were effective in lowering the blood pressure. Aerobic exercise was found to benefit cognitive functions. Parents and schools play an important roles in determining the children’s exercise levels. Screen time is linked with low activity, obesity, and worse sleep patterns.

6. Health, Illness, and Disease Injuries are the leading cause of death during middle and late childhood, and the most common cause is motor vehicle accidents Others may be due to bicycle, skateboards, roller skates, and other sports equipment Being overweight is increasingly a problem. Heredity and environment are related to being overweight Parents and children often have similar body types, height, body fat composition, and metabolism Greater availability of food, energy-saving devices, declining physical activity, parent’s eating habits and monitoring of children’s eating habits, the context which a child eats, and heavy screen time Diet, exercise, and behavior modification can be helpful Encourage parents to

7. Health, Illness, and Disease Many elementary-school aged children possess the risk for cardiovascular disease. The incidence of cancer has increased slightly. Childhood cancers mainly attack the white blood cells, brain, bone, lymph system, muscles, kidneys, and nervous system. The most common form of cancer in children is leukemia , wherein the bone marrow manufactures an abundance of abnormal WBC that crowd out normal cells.

8. Children with Disabilities

9. Children with Disabilities

10. Educational Issues ALL STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES SHALL BE GIVEN A FREE, APPROPRIATE PUBLIC EDUCATION (PL 94-142) In The Philippines, we have the Special Education Act of 2008 that was introduced by the late Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago

11. Educational Issues

12. Educational Issues The effort to educate children with disabilities in the regular classroom has become to extreme. Like general education, special education should challenge children with disabilities to become all they can be.

13. Cognitive Development during Middle and Late Childhood

14. Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage Children begins to reason logically as long as it can be applied to specific or concrete examples. Concrete operations allows the child to consider several characteristics than focusing on a single property of an object. Children can now classify/divide things into different sets/subsets and consider their interrelationships. Seriation: the ability to order stimuli along a quantitative dimension Transitivity: the ability to logically combine relations to understand certain conclusions.

15. Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage Some researchers found that some concrete operational abilities do not appear in synchrony. Neo- Piagetians give more emphasis to how children use attention, memory, and strategies to process information

16. Information-processing During middle and late childhood years, most children dramatically improve their ability to sustain and control attention. Children pay more attention to those that are task-relevant.

17. Memory Improvements in memory reflect children’s increased knowledge and their use of strategies. Working memory develops slowly. Children who have better working memory have advancements in their comprehension, math skills, problem-solving, and reasoning. Older children have more expertise on a certain subject area. Children develop more detailed, coherent, and evaluative autobiographical memories when their mothers reminisce with them in elaborated and evaluative ways.

18. Memory Strategies: deliberate mental activities that improves the processing of information. Elaborate what is to be remembered Mental imagery works better for older children Encourage children to understand, give meaning, elaborate and personalize the material. Repeat with variation and link Embed memory-relevant language

19. Memory Fuzzy Trace Theory: memory is best understood by the verbatim memory trace (precise details of information) and gist (central idea) At some point during early elementary school years, children begin to use gist more

20. Thinking Executive function is a better predictor of school readiness than general IQ. Concentrate and persist on learning tasks (self-control/inhibition) Mentally work with the masses of information that will be encountered (working memory) Consider different strategies and perspectives (flexibility)

21. Thinking Mindful children and adults maintain an active awareness of the circumstances in their life and are motivated to find the best solutions to tasks. Mindful individuals create new ideas, are open to new information, and explore multiple strategies and perspectives. Mindfulness is an important mental process that children can engage in to improve a number of cognitive and socioemotional skills, such as executive function, focused attention, emotion regulation, and empathy.

22. Thinking Creative Thinking: the ability to think in novel and unusual ways and to come up with unique solutions to problems Convergent Thinking: produces one correct answer Divergent Thinking: produces many different answers to the same question Children will show more creativity in some domains than others.

23. Metacognition Metacognition: cognition about cognition or knowing about knowing Young children do have some general knowledge about memory. Young children also have only limited knowledge about their own memory. They have an inflated opinion of their memory abilities A key to education is helping students learn rich repertoire of strategies that produce solutions to problems. Good thinkers routinely use strategies and effective planning to solve problems Good thinkers know when and where to use these strategies.

24. Intelligence Intelligence: the ability to solve problems and to adapt and learn from experiences IQ = [Mental Age/Chronological Age] x 100 Mental Age: an individuals level of mental development relative to others SB-5 consists of five content areas: fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visuo-spatial reasoning, and working memory. The Wechsler Scale includes 16 verbal and nonverbal scales.

25. Intelligence Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence: Analytical: analyze, judge, evaluate, compare, and contrast Creative: create, design, invent, originate, and imagine Practical: ability to use, apply, implement, and put ideas into practice Gardner’s 8 Mental Frames: Verbal, Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Naturalist A number of psychologists think that the multiple intelligence views took intelligence too far.

26. Intelligence Although genetic endowment may always influence a person’s intellectual ability, environmental influences and opportunities available to children and adults do make a difference. IQ scores have been increasing so quickly that a high percentage of people regarding as having average intelligence at the turn of the century would be considered below average today. Efforts to counteract deprived early environment’s effect on intelligence emphasize prevention rather than remediation

27. Intelligence Even if there are culture-fair tests, those people with more education tend to score higher than those with less education. Learning Disability: an individual that has an IQ below 70 and has difficulty adapting to demands of everyday life. Organic: genetic disorder that can cause brain damage Cultural-familial: IQs between 55 and 70 where one grew up in below-average intellectual environment,

28. Intelligence Gifted: above-average intelligence and/or superior for something Precocity: master an area earlier than their peers Marching to their own drummer: learning in a qualitatively different way A passion to master: driven to understand the domain they have a high ability in. They show signs of high ability in a particular area, but strong support and years of training also play its role

29. Language Development At about 7 years of age, children begin to respond with a word that is the same part of speech as the stimulus word. During the elementary school years, improvement in logical reasoning and analytical skills helps children understand comparatives and subjunctives. Language is more connected as sentences becomes related to one another in producing descriptions, definitions, and narratives that makes sense. Metalinguistic Awareness: the mechanism which allows children to think about their language, understand what words are, and even define them

30. Language Development Children who begin elementary school with a robust vocabulary have an advantage when it comes to learning to read. Whole-language Approach: reading instruction should parallel natural learning. This involves the integration of other skills and subjects. Phonics Approach: reading instruction that teaches basic rules for translating written symbols into words.

31. Language Development Parents and teachers should encourage children’s early writing but not be overly concerned about the formation of letters or spelling. Corrections of spelling and printing should be selective and made in positive ways that do not discourage the child’s writing and spontaneity. Children should be given many writing opportunities. Compared with adults, children are less sensitive to feedback, less likely to use explicit strategies, and are more likely to learn a second language from large amounts of input. Bilingualism is linked to positive outcomes for children’s language and cognitive development

32. Socioemotional Development during Middle and Late Childhood

33. Emotional and Personality Development From 8 to 11 years of age, children increasingly describe themselves in terms of psychological characteristics and traits. They are more likely to recognize the social aspects of the self. Perspective Taking: the social cognitive process involved in the assumption of perspective of others and understanding their thoughts and feelings This can be important in determining whether children would develop prosocial or antisocial attitudes and behavior.

34. Emotional and Personality Development Self-esteem: the global evaluations of the self. Self-concept: the domain specific evaluations of the self. The foundations of self-esteem and self-concept emerge from the quality of parent-child interactions. Self-esteem may not always match reality, which may represent arrogance, grandiosity, and an unwarranted sense of superiority. Low self-esteem has been implicated in overweight and obesity, anxiety, depression, suicide, and delinquency. Children with high self-esteem are more likely to be securely attached to their parents and to have parents who engage in sensitive caregiving

35. Emotional and Personality Development Self-efficacy: the belief that one can master a situation and produce favorable outcomes During middle and late childhood, children has an increased capacity for self-regulation. High self-control was linked to lower levels of deviant behavior, which may also be key to adult health and longevity.

36. Emotional and Personality Development During the industry vs. inferiority stage of Erikson’s development, children become more interested in how things are made and work. When children are encouraged in their efforts to make, build, and work, their sense of industry increases. School becomes important

37. Emotional and Personality Development In this stage, children are more adept at talking about their own and others’ emotions. They also show a growing awareness of the need to control and manage their emotions to meet social standards. As children get older, they are able to accurately appraise a stressful situation and determine how much control they have over it. By 10 years of age, most children are able to use cognitive strategies in coping with stress, but those who have been in families that are not supportive and are characterized by turmoil/trauma, children may be so overwhelmed by stress that they do not use such strategies.

38. Emotional and Personality Development In this stage, children are more adept at talking about their own and others’ emotions. They also show a growing awareness of the need to control and manage their emotions to meet social standards. As children get older, they are able to accurately appraise a stressful situation and determine how much control they have over it. By 10 years of age, most children are able to use cognitive strategies in coping with stress, but those who have been in families that are not supportive and are characterized by turmoil/trauma, children may be so overwhelmed by stress that they do not use such strategies.

39. Moral Development Kohlberg suggested that there are three levels of moral development, which he deemed as universal. The development from one level to another is fostered by opportunities to take the perspective of others and to experience conflict between one’s current level of moral thinking and the reasoning of someone at a higher level. One’s morality gradually becomes more internal or mature. Peer interaction and perspective taking are critical aspects of the social stimulation that challenges children to change their moral reasoning.

40. Summary of Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development

41. Moral Development Gilligan’s Care Perspective: views people in terms of their interconnectedness with others and emphasizes interpersonal communication, relationships with others, and concern for others. Domain Theory of Moral Development: there are different domains of social knowledge and reasoning. Moral development emerges from their attempts to understand and deal with different forms of social experience. Social Conventional Reasoning: focuses on the conventional rules that have been established by social consensus in order to control behavior and maintain a system

42. Moral Development Moral reasoning focuses on the ethical issues and rules of morality. Unlike conventional rules, they are not arbitrary. They are obligatory, widely accepted, and somewhat interpersonal. Moral judgments involve concepts of justice Violation of moral rules is more serious than of conventional rules Children begin to express objective ideas about fairness by the time they reach elementary school

43. Gender By elementary school years, children have considerable knowledge about which activities are linked with being male or female. Female brains are approximately 10% smaller than males, but female’s brain have more folds, which gives more surface brain tissue. It is likely that there are far more similarities than differences in the brains of females and males. Boys perform better in math due to the implications of visuospatial skills than girls. Girls perform better in reading and writing.

44. Gender Girls earn better grades and complete high school at a higher rate, and they are less likely to drop out of school than boys. Males are more likely to be assigned to special/remedial classes Girls are likely to be engaged more with the academic material, be attentive, put more effort, and participate Boys are physically aggressive, while girls are relationally aggressive When it comes to verbal aggression, gender differences disappear

45. Families As children move into the middle and late childhood years, parents spend considerably less time with them. The value that parents place on education can determine whether children do well in school During middle and late childhood, some control is transferred from parent to child. Parents continue to exercise general supervision and control, while children are allowed to engage in moment-to-moment self-regulation.

46. Families Family management practices are positively related to student’s grades and self-responsibility, and negatively to school-related problems. Attachment becomes more sophisticated as children’s social worlds expand to include peers, teachers, and others, they typically spend less time with parents Secure attachment is associated with lower internalized problems and a higher level of emotion regulation, and less difficulty in emotion identification

47. Peers Reciprocity becomes important The size of peer group increases and interaction is becoming less supervised. It is until age 12 where preference for same-sex peers increases. Popular – frequently the best friend Average – average number of positive and negative nominations Neglected – infrequently nominated as best friend and not disliked Rejected – infrequently nominated as best friend and disliked Controversial – both best friend and disliked

48. Peers Children’s social cognition becomes increasingly important in understanding peer relations Bullies torment victims to gain higher status and with the need for others to see their power displays. Children who are bullied are more likely to experience depression, engage in suicidal ideation, and attempt suicide. Friends are more similar than in age, sex, race, and many other factors including attitudes toward school, educational aspirations, and achievement orientations

49. Schools Constructivist Approach: children are encouraged to explore their world, discover knowledge, reflect, and think critically with careful monitoring and meaningful guidance from the teacher. Direct Instruction Approach: structured, teacher-centered approach characterized by teacher direction and control, expectations for student’s progress, maximum time spent on academic tasks, and efforts to keep negative affect to a minimum