Life-Span Development

Twelfth Edition
Chapter 9:
Physical and Cognitive Development
in Middle and Late Childhood

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 BODY GROWTH AND
CHANGE
• Body Growth and Change:
• Growth averages 2–3 inches per year
• Weight gain averages 5–7 lbs. each year
• Muscle mass and strength gradually increase; baby fat
decreases
• Ossification of bones
• Boys have a greater number of muscle cells and are
typically stronger than girls

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 BODY GROWTH AND
CHANGE
• The Brain:
• Brain volume stabilizes
• Significant changes in structures and regions occur,
especially in the prefrontal cortex
• Improved attention, reasoning, and cognitive control
• Increases in cortical thickness
• Activation of some brain areas increase while others
decrease
• Shift from larger areas to smaller, more focal areas
• Due to synaptic pruning
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 BODY GROWTH AND
CHANGE
• Motor Development:
• Gross motor skills become smoother and more
coordinated
• Boys usually outperform girls on gross motor skills
• Improvement of fine motor skills during middle and
late childhood
• Increased myelination of the central nervous system
• Girls usually outperform boys on fine motor skills

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 EXERCISE
• Exercise plays an important role in children’s
growth and development
• Percentage of children involved in daily P.E.
programs in schools decreased from 80% (1969)
to 20% (1999)
• Television watching is linked with low activity
and obesity in children

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 EXERCISE

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 HEALTH, ILLNESS, AND
DISEASE
• Middle and late childhood is usually a time of
excellent health
• Injuries are the leading cause of death during middle
and late childhood
• Motor vehicle accidents are most common cause of severe
injury
• Cancer is the 2nd leading cause of death in children 5–
14 years old
• Most common child cancer is leukemia
• Many elementary-school children already possess risk
factors for cardiovascular disease
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HEALTH, ILLNESS, AND
DISEASE

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 HEALTH, ILLNESS, AND
DISEASE
• Overweight Children:
• Being overweight as a child is a risk factor for being
obese as an adult
• Girls are more likely than boys to be overweight
• Changes in diet and total caloric intake may be one
reason for increasing obesity rates
• Raises risks for many medical and psychological
problems
• Pulmonary problems, diabetes, high blood pressure
• Low self-esteem, depression, exclusion from peer groups

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LEARNING DISABILITIES

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 LEARNING DISABILITIES
• Definition of learning disability includes three
components:
• Minimum IQ level
• Significant difficulty in a school-related area
• Exclusion of severe emotional disorders, second-language
background, sensory disabilities, and/or specific
neurological deficits
• Boys are identified three times more frequently
than girls
• Most common form involves reading (i.e., dyslexia)
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 LEARNING DISABILITIES
• Possible Causes:
• Genetics (many tend to run in families)
• Environmental influences
• Problems in integrating information from multiple
brain regions
• Difficulties in brain structures and functions

• Intervention:
• Improving reading ability through intensive instruction

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 LEARNING DISABILITIES
• ADHD
• Characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity
• Number of children diagnosed has increased substantially

• Possible Causes:
• Genetics
• Brain damage during prenatal or postnatal development
• Cigarette and alcohol exposure during prenatal
development
• Later peak for cerebral cortex thickening

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LEARNING DISABILITIES

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 LEARNING DISABILITIES
• ADHD Treatment:
• Stimulant medication (Ritalin or Adderall) is helpful
• Combination of medication and behavior management
seems to work best
• Exercise may reduce ADHD symptoms

• Critics argue that physicians are too quick to

prescribe medications

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 LEARNING DISABILITIES
• Educational Issues:
• 1975: laws passed requiring all public schools to serve
disabled children
• Law requires disability students to receive:
• IEP (Individualized Education Plan): written statement that
is specifically tailored for the disabled student
• LRE (Least Restrictive Environment): a setting that is as
similar as possible to that of non-disabled children
• Inclusion: educating a child with special education needs in
the regular classroom

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 COGNITIVE CHANGES
• Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage:
• Ages 7 to 11
• Children can perform concrete operations and reason
logically
• Reasoning can only be applied to specific, concrete examples
• Ability to classify things into different sets 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

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COGNITIVE CHANGES

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 COGNITIVE CHANGES
• Evaluating Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage:
• Piaget proposed that various aspects of a stage should
emerge together
• Some concrete abilities do not appear at the same time
• Education and culture exert stronger influences on
children’s development than Piaget believed
• Neo-Piagetians: argue that Piaget got some things
right, but that theory needs considerable revision
• More emphasis on attention, memory, and strategy use
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 MEMORY
• Memory: long-term memory increases with age
during middle and late childhood
• Experts have acquired extensive knowledge about
a particular content area
• Influences how they organize, represent, and interpret
information
• Affects ability to remember, reason, and solve
problems
• Older children usually have more expertise about a
subject than younger children do
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 MEMORY
• Two important strategies: creating mental images and
elaborating on information
• Elaboration: engaging in more extensive processing of information

• Fuzzy Trace Theory: two types of memory

representations:
• Verbatim memory trace: precise details of information
• Gist: central idea of information
• Older children begin to use gist more; contributes to fuzzy traces
• Fuzzy traces are more enduring than verbatim traces

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 THINKING
• Critical Thinking: thinking reflectively and
productively, and evaluating evidence
• Few schools really teach critical 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
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 THINKING
• Strategies for Fostering Creativity:
• Encourage brainstorming
• Provide environments that stimulate creativity
• Don’t overcontrol students
• Encourage internal motivation
• Build children’s confidence
• Guide children to be persistent and delay gratification
• Encourage children to take intellectual risks
• Introduce children to creative people
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 THINKING
• Scientific Thinking:
• Children tend to:
• Ask fundamental questions about reality
• Place a great deal of emphasis on causal mechanisms
• Be more influenced by chance events than by overall patterns
• Maintain old theories regardless of evidence
• Tools of scientific thought are not routinely taught in
schools

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 THINKING
• Metacognition: cognition about cognition
• Metamemory: knowledge about memory
• Children have some knowledge of metamemory by 5–6 years
of age
• They do not understand certain components
• Knowledge about strategies

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 INTELLIGENCE
• Intelligence: problem-solving skills and the ability to learn from and
adapt to life’s everyday experiences
• Individual Differences: stable, consistent ways in which people are
different from each other
• Intelligence Tests:
• Binet Tests: designed to identify children with difficulty learning in school
• 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,
multiplied by 100
• Stanford-Binet Tests: revised version of the Binet test
• Scores approximate a normal distribution—a bell-shaped curve
• Wechsler Scales: give scores on several composite indices
• Three versions for different age groups

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INTELLIGENCE

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INTELLIGENCE

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 INTELLIGENCE
• Types of Intelligence:
• Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence:
intelligence comes in three forms:
• Analytical intelligence: ability to analyze, judge, evaluate,
compare, and contrast
• Creative intelligence: ability to create, design, invent,
originate, and imagine
• Practical intelligence: ability to use, apply, implement, and
put ideas into practice

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 INTELLIGENCE
• Types of Intelligence (continued):
• Gardner’s Eight Frames of Mind:
• Verbal: ability to think in words and use language to express
meaning
• Mathematical: ability to carry out mathematical operations
• Spatial: ability to think three-dimensionally
• Bodily-Kinesthetic: ability to manipulate objects and be physically
adept
• Musical: sensitivity to pitch, melody, rhythm, and tone
• Interpersonal: ability to understand and interact effectively with
others
• Intrapersonal: ability to understand oneself
• Naturalist: ability to observe patterns in nature and understand
natural and human-made systems

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 INTELLIGENCE
• Controversies and issues in intelligence:
• Heredity and genetics versus environment
(increasingly higher scores suggest role of education)
• Flynn effect
• Bell curve: U.S. is developing large underclass of
intellectually deprived
• Racial and cultural bias
• Use and misuse of IQ tests
• Classifying types of mental retardation
• Classification as being gifted

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 INTELLIGENCE
• Evaluating Multiple-Intelligence Approaches:
• Pros:
• Stimulated teachers to think more broadly about children’s
competencies
• Motivated educators to develop programs that instruct students in
multiple domains
• Contributed to interest in assessing intelligence and classroom
learning
• Cons:
• Multiple-intelligence views may have taken the concept of specific
intelligences too far
• Research has not yet supported the different types
• Are there other types of intelligences?

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 DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
• Influences of Genetics:
• Heritability: the variance in a population that is
attributed to genetics
• Heritability of intelligence is about .75
• Problems:
• Heritability index is only as good as the data entered into the analysis
• Assumes we can treat genetic and environmental influences as separate
• One strategy is to compare the IQs of identical and fraternal
twins
• Most researchers agree that genetics and environment interact
to influence intelligence
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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES

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 DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
• Environmental Influences:
• Communication of parents
• Schooling
• Flynn Effect: rapidly increasing IQ test scores around
the world
• Increasing levels of education attained by more people
• Explosion of available information
• Interventions designed to help children at risk for
impoverished intelligence

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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES

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 DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
• Group Differences:
• On average, African American schoolchildren score 10
to 15 points lower on IQ tests than White American
schoolchildren
• Gap has begun to narrow as African Americans have gained
social, economic, and educational opportunities

• Culture-Fair Tests: tests that are intended to be

free of cultural bias
• Items that are familiar to children from all backgrounds
• Nonverbal intelligence tests

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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES

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 DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
• Using Intelligence Tests:
• Avoid stereotyping and expectations
• Know that IQ is not the sole indicator of competence
• Use caution in interpreting an overall IQ score

• Extremes of Intelligence:
• Mental Retardation: a condition of limited mental ability
in which an individual has a low IQ (typically below 70)
and has difficulty adapting to everyday life
• Can be mild, moderate, or severe
• Can have an organic cause, or it can be social and cultural in origin
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DIFFERENCES IN IQ SCORES
• Extremes of Intelligence (continued):
• Giftedness: people who have 130 IQ or higher and/or
superior talent for something
• Three criteria:
• Precocity
• Marching to their own drummer
• A passion to master
• Giftedness is likely a product of both heredity and
environment
• Many experts argue that education programs for gifted
children need a significant overhaul

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 LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
• During middle and late childhood:
• Changes occur in the way children’s mental vocabulary
is organized
• Rapid increase in vocabulary and grammar skills
• Improved logical reasoning/analytical skills
• Metalinguistic Awareness: knowledge about language
• Improves significantly during elementary school years

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 LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
• Reading:
• Children with a large vocabulary have an advantage in
learning to read
• Two approaches to teaching reading:
• Whole-language approach: reading instruction should parallel
children’s natural language learning
• Recognize whole words; use context to guess at meaning
• Reading is connected with listening and writing skills
• Phonics approach: reading instruction should teach basic
rules for translating written symbols into sounds
• Research suggests that instruction in phonics should be emphasized,
although both methods can be beneficial

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 LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
• Bilingualism:
• Learning a second language is easiest for children
• U.S. students are far behind other countries in learning
multiple languages
• Ability to speak two languages has a positive effect on
child’s cognitive development
• Bilingual children perform better on tests of:
• Control of attention (focus)
• Concept formation
• Analytic reasoning
• Cognitive flexibility
• Cognitive complexity

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