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Summary Test 2 notes Chapter 5-7
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SLK NOTES TEST 2: MULTIPLE CHOICE CHAPTER 5-7CHAPTER 5 MIDDLE CHILDHOOD
Middle childhood starts from the age of 6 to 12 years
Important period in the child’s cognitive, social emotional and self-concept
development
These years usually focuses on education
Physical development
Rapid growth of arms and legs, slower growth rate compared to earlier
preschool period (gradual growth)
Height (6cm) mass (2kg) annually
1. The brain- brain has almost reached adult size and weight (volume and
mass) but the structures and connections are still forming. Frontal lobes
are developing at this stage and are important for judgement, impulse
control, planning, reasoning, emotions, memory and problem solving. Girls
grow faster than boys at this stage.
2. The respiratory system- functions more economically and the elasticity
of the lungs increases, breathing becomes deeper and slower.
Circulatory system develops at a slower rate.
3. Permanent teeth- milk teeth lost and replaced by permanent ones.
Malocclusion (condition where teeth are not aligned properly and results
in faulty contact between upper and lower teeth when jaw is closed and
difficulties in biting and chewing) disappears as children become older.
4. Vision- well developed at this stage but the most common problem is
myopia (near-sightedness, distant objects are out of focus, but closer
objects are not).
Motor skills
Motor skills show greater development at this stage. With practice children can
achieve same level of skills as adults (e.g. playing a piano). Boys develop gross
motor skills more rapidly. These skills develop because of the increase in
strength, coordination and muscular control over the body.
Sexuality
According to Freud, this period is sexual latency where children show
little or no interest in sexuality.
Sexuality is less observable especially by adults and because children in
this age range usually choose same sex peers as friends, it may create the
wrong impression that the development of their sexuality has stopped.
At the end of middle childhood, children have a firm and established
gender identity and gender constancy, understand the concept of gender
consistency.
Children will become aware of issues related to sexual orientation and
learn that not all people are heterosexual.
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, Some children masturbate for pleasure occasionally. Occurrence of sex
play with same gender and of the opposite is common.
Children begin to understand how babies are made. Girls at this stage
begin to show first signs of puberty.
Cognitive development
Major cognitive advances occur between the age of 6 and 12 years and patterns
and habits established during this time will not only affect experiences in
adolescence but also in adulthood.
Piaget’s theory: concrete operational stage
Spans ages of 7 to 11 and signifies the stage which children start using
mental operations (strategies and rules that make thinking more
systematic and more powerful) to solve problems and reason.
Some mental operations apply to numbers such as addition, subtraction,
multiplication and division. Others apply to categories of objects
(organizing objects according to shapes, size and colours).
Others apply to spatial relations (tasks such as map reading). The most
critical operation is reversibility (the understanding that both physical
actions and mental operations may be reversed).
Each operation has an inverse that you may undo or reverse the effect of
an operation. The ability to understand hierarchies of classes rests on
the ability to move both ways in thinking about relationships.
Reversible mental operations allow concrete operational children to
perform the conservation task.
Horizontal decalage means that children do not readily transfer what
they have learnt about one type of conversation to another type even
though the underlying principles are the same.
Concrete operational thinking is powerful than preoperational thinking as
preoperational children are egocentric, centred in their thinking and
confuse appearance with reality.
Concrete operation thinking is a major cognitive advance but has its own
limits, it is limited to tangible and the real to the here and now meaning
that thinking abstractly and hypothetically is beyond the ability of
concrete operational thinkers.
How applicable is the theory today?
The mastery of skills such as conservation depends on neurological
maturation and adaptation to the environment and is not tied to cultural
experience
This research was done on Swiss children and the question which then
arises is how children from Africa will perform in these tasks.
Findings indicate that children from Africa achieve the Piagetian tasks in
the same sequence as Piaget’s subjects although some of the ethnic
groups achieve the tasks at a later stage
Factors that seem to influence this are schooling, familiarity with the
material being manipulated and the educational levels of the parents and
the way in which children are reared.
Development of information-processing skills
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, 1. Memory-central to information-processing skills. The working memory
(short-term) improves during middle childhood which includes advances in
the phonological loop which stores sounds and verbal material (plays an
important part in tasks like learning to read, understanding language and acquiring
vocabulary) and the visual-spatial sketchpad which stores visual material
(involves the creation and use of mental images). Examples of memory
strategies are rehearsal (mental or vocal repetition), organisation
(categorisation, grouping ideas, objects or words into meaningful units)
and elaboration (embellishing information to make it more memorable)
2. Processing speed- refers to the speed which individuals carry out
cognitive processes. Plays a central role in cognitive development during
childhood and increases with age. Cognitive processing becomes faster
and more efficient. Critical when a specific number of actions must be
completed within a fixed period.
3. Automatic processing- processing speed is significantly influenced by
factors such as automatic processing called automaticity (cognitive
activities that require virtually no effort). Its advantage is that it makes
more cognitive capacity available to perform other cognitive tasks. It is
also important to information processing throughout the lifespan
4. Knowledge base- this information has to be stored and organised
effectively in order to be used effectively. The existence of a knowledge
base plays a major role in memory performance.
5. Control process/ executive functions- processes that pull memory,
processing speed and knowledge base together. Refer to a variety of
cognitive skills that enable the individual to plan, organise, make
decisions, think abstractly and solve new problems. Helps control
impulsive behaviour. Prefrontal cortex is involved in executive functioning.
Important to developmental psychologists as they predict how well
children achieve academically. An important control process is
metacognition which allows a person to evaluate a cognitive task,
determine how to accomplish it, monitor performance and make
adjustments. Metamemory refers to an informal understanding of
memory. This process develops in areas such as attention, intention,
knowledge, thinking and memory strategies.
6. Theory of mind- refers to the individual’s knowledge of the mind and
how it functions. This includes knowledge of one’s own mental state and
those of others and how these mental states influence behaviour. During
this stage a child’s mind becomes more elaborate and refined. Children
become adept at understanding emotion and their thinking about others
extends beyond individuals to include conceptions of relationships and
groups.
7. Higher order cognitive tasks- include reasoning, decision-making,
problem solving, thinking, academic skills such as reading, writing and
arithmetic. Information that has been previously received, processed and
stored by basic cognitive processes is used, combined, reformatted and
manipulated by higher order cognitive processes.
How applicable is the information-processing approach?
It has important applications to education
Has also influenced other theoretical approaches
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