1. Chapter 4: Middle Childhood Module 4.2 Intellectual Development in Middle Childhood

2. Concrete Operational Stage - Piaget

• 7 - 12 years

• Characterized by active and appropriate use of logic

• • Logical operations applied to concrete problems

• • Conservation problems; reversibility; time and speed, decentering

3. Concrete Operational Stage - Piaget

• Shift from preoperational thought to concrete operational thought:

• • Children shift back and forth between preoperational and concrete operational thinking

• • They attain the concept of reversibility, which is the notion that processes transforming a stimulus can be reversed, returning it to its original form.

• • Because they are less egocentric, they can take multiple aspects of a situation into account, an ability known as decentering .

• • Once concrete operational thinking is fully engaged, children show several cognitive advances

4. Concrete Operations Videos

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alZXoALQJr4

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMgb42EBpMc

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJyuy4B2aKU

5. Memory - Information Processing Model

• Memory in the information-processing model is the ability to encode, store, and retrieve information.

• Memory capacity may shed light on another issue in cognitive development. Some developmental psychologists suggest that the difficulty children experience in solving conservation problems during the preschool period may stem from memory limitations.

• In school age years:

• • Increasing ability to handle information

• • Memory improvement

• • Short term memory capacity improvement

6. Thinking about Memory: Metamemory

• Understanding about processes that underlie memory

• Improves during school age years

• Helps children use control strategies (conscious, intentional tactics to improve functioning)

7. Memory Strategies for School Age Children

• School-age children can be taught to use particular strategies

• • Keyword strategies - one word is paired with another that sounds like it

• See Center for Development and Learning (10 Strategies to Enhance Memory) for additional strategies

• http://www.cdl.org/resource-library/articles/memory_strategies_May06.php?type=recent&id=Yes

8. Vygotskys Approach

• Cognitive advances occur through exposure to information within zone of proximal development ( ZPD) - The ZPD is the level at which a child can almost, but not quite, understand or perform a task

• • Influential in development of classroom practices

• • Cooperative learning

• • Reciprocal teaching

9. Cooperative Learning and Reciprocal Teaching

• Cooperative learning is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. Each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught but also for helping teammates learn, thus creating an atmosphere of achievement.

• • Documented results include improved academic achievement, improved behavior and attendance, increased self-confidence and motivation, and increased liking of school and classmates. Cooperative learning is also relatively easy to implement and is inexpensive.

• Reciprocal teaching refers to an instructional activity that takes place in the form of a dialogue between teachers and students regarding segments of text. The dialogue is structured by the use of four strategies: summarizing, question generating, clarifying, and predicting. The teacher and students take turns assuming the role of teacher in leading this dialogue.

10. Language in Middle Childhood

• Vocabulary continues to increase

• Mastery of grammar improves

• Understanding of syntax grows

• Certain phonemes remain troublesome

• Decoding difficulties when dependent on intonation

• More competence in pragmatics

• Increase in meta-linguistic awareness

11. Metalinguistic Awareness

• One of most significant developments in middle childhood is childrens increasing understanding of their own use of language

• By age 5 or 6,

• • Understand language is governed by set of rules

• By age 7 or 8,

• • Realize that miscommunication may be due to factors attributable not only to themselves, but to person communicating with them

12. How does language promote self-control?

• Helps school-age children control and regulate behavior

• Self-talk used to help regulate behavior

• Effectiveness of self-control grows as linguistic capabilities increased

13. Bilingualism

• English is second language for 32 million Americans

14. Immigrants in the United States

• Are monolingual speakers of their native language

• Develop bilingualism as they acquire English

• Establish English-speaking households

• Raise their children as English-speaking monolinguals (Pease-Alveraz, 1993)

15. Long-term Bilingualism

• According to survey data, even Spanish, a language thought to be particularly enduring in the United States, seldom lasts beyond the second or third generation (Pease-Alveraz, 1993)

16. Cognitive Advantages of Bilingualism

• Greater cognitive flexibility

• Higher self-esteem

• Greater meta-linguistic awareness

• Potential improved IQ scores

17. Schooling Around the World

• In the United States, as in most developed countries, a primary school education is both a universal right and a legal requirement. Virtually all children are provided with a free education through the twelfth grade.

• More than 160 million of the worlds children do not have access to even a primary school education. An additional 100 million children do not progress beyond a level comparable to our elementary-school education, and overall close to a billion individuals (two-thirds of them women) are illiterate throughout their lives.

18. Reading

• No other task that is more fundamental to schooling than learning to read

• Reading involves significant number of skills

• • Low-level cognitive skills (the identification of single letters and associating letters with sounds) to higher level skills (matching written words with meanings located in long-term memory and using context and background knowledge to determine the meaning of a sentence).

19. How Should We Teach Reading?

• Disagreement about nature of mechanisms by which information is processed during reading:

• • Code-based approaches emphasize the components of reading, such as the sounds of letters and their combinationsphonicsand how letters and sounds are combined to make words. They suggest that reading consists of processing the individual components of words, combining them into words, and then using the words to derive the meaning of written sentences and passages.

• • Whole-language approaches - reading is viewed as a natural process, similar to the acquisition of oral language. According to this view, children should learn to read through exposure to complete writingsentences, stories, poems, lists, charts, and other examples of actual uses of writing. Instead of being taught to sound out words, children are encouraged to make guesses about the meaning of words based on the context in which they appear. Through such a trial-and-error approach, children come to learn whole words and phrases at a time, gradually becoming proficient readers.

• National Reading Panel and National Research Council support reading instruction using code-based approaches

20. No Child Left Behind Act

• The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 aimed to ensure that all children would be able to read by the time they reached the third grade. The law requires school principals to meet this goal or risk losing their jobs and their school funding.

• Negative Outcomes:

• • Frequent testing becoming commonplace

• • Student scores related to federal funding

• • Reading instruction sometimes replaces recess, social studies and music

• • Increase in amount of homework

• • Some schools reading programs have become so intense that some children are simply burning out.

21. Homework

• Time spent on homework is associated with greater academic achievement in secondary school

• Relationship gets less strong for the lower grades; below grade 5, the relationship disappears

• For older children more homework is not necessarily better

• Some research indicates that benefits of homework may reach plateau beyond which additional time spent on homework produces no further benefits

22. Multicultural Education

23. Multicultural Education

• As the U. S. population has become more diverse, elementary schools have also paid increased attention to issues involving student diversity and multiculturalism. And with good reason:

• • Cultural, as well as language, differences affect students socially and educationally.

• • The demographic makeup of students in the United States is undergoing an extraordinary shift.

• • For instance, the proportion of Hispanics will in all likelihood more than double in the next 50 years.

• • Moreover, by the year 2050, non-Hispanic Caucasians will likely become a minority of the total population of the United States.

24. Cultural Assimilation or Pluralistic Society?

• Cultural assimilation model - in which the goal of education was to assimilate individual cultural identities into a unique, unified American culture.

• Pluralistic society model - suggests that American society is made up of diverse, coequal cultural groups that should preserve their individual cultural features.

• • Over the past decade or so, educators began to argue that the presence of students from diverse cultures enriched and broadened the educational experience of all students. Pupils and teachers exposed to people from different backgrounds could better understand the world and gain greater sensitivity to the values and practices of others.

25. Bicultural Identity

• School systems encourage children to maintain their original cultural identities while they integrate themselves into dominant culture

• More contemporary approaches emphasize a bicultural strategy in which children are encouraged to maintain simultaneous membership in more than one culture

26. Intelligence

• Intelligence is the capacity to understand the world, think with rationality, and use resources effectively when faced with challenges (Wechsler, 1975).

• Has this definition changed over the years?

• • Part of the difficulty in defining intelligence stems from the manyand sometimes unsatisfactorypaths that have been followed over the years in the quest to distinguish more intelligent people from less intelligent ones.

27. Intelligence Tests (IQ)

• Binets Test

• • Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition (SB5)

• Wechsler Intelligence Scale for ChildrenFourth Edition (WISC-IV)

• Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, 2nd Edition (KABC-II)

28. Alternative Conceptions of Intelligence

• Spearmans g

• Cattell: fluid and crystallize intelligence

• Gardner: 8 intelligences

• Vygotsky: dynamic assessment

• Sternberg: triarchic theory of intelligence

29. Group Differences in IQ

• Previous experiences of test-takers may have a substantial effect on their ability to answer questions

• Cultural background and experience have the potential to affect intelligence test scores

• • Traditional measures of intelligence are subtly biased in favor of white, upper- and middle-class students and against groups with different cultural experiences.

30. Racial Differences in IQ - Nature or Nurture?

• Mean score of African Americans tends to be about 15 IQ points lower than the mean score of whitesalthough the measured difference varies a great deal depending on the particular IQ test employed

• To what degree is an individuals intelligence determined by heredity, and to what degree by environment? The issue is important because of its social implications.

• • If intelligence is primarily determined by heredity and is therefore largely fixed at birth, attempts to alter cognitive abilities later in life, such as schooling, will meet with limited success.

• • If intelligence is largely environmentally determined, modifying social and educational conditions is a more promising strategy for bringing about increases in cognitive functioning.

31. The Bell Curve Controversy

• Herrnstein and Murray contend: Average 15-point IQ difference between whites and African Americans is due primarily to heredity

• • IQ difference accounts for higher rates of poverty, lower employment, and higher use of welfare among minority groups as compared with majority groups.

• Most experts in the area of IQ were not convinced by The Bell Curve contention that differences in group IQ scores are largely determined by genetic factors. Still, we cannot put the issue to rest, largely because it is impossible to design a definitive experiment that can determine the cause of differences in IQ scores between members of different groups. (Thinking about how such an experiment might be designed shows the futility of the enterprise: One cannot ethically assign children to different living conditions to find the effects of environment, nor would one wish to genetically control or alter intelligence levels in unborn children.)

32. Mental Retardation - Below Intelligence Norms

• Mental Retardation - (Legal definition determined by many factors, including IQ score)

• Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act:

• • The intent of the lawan intent that has been largely realizedwas to ensure that children with special needs received a full education in the least restrictive environment , the setting most similar to that of children without special needs.

• • This educational approach to special education, designed to end the segregation of exceptional students as much as possible, has come to be called mainstreaming. In mainstreaming , exceptional children are integrated as much as possible into the traditional educational system and are provided with a broad range of educational alternatives.

• • Goal: Full inclusion

33. Benefits of Mainstreaming

• Ensure that all persons, regardless of ability or disability, have access to full range of educational opportunities, and fair share of lifes rewards

• Research that examined such factors as academic achievement, self-concept, social adjustment, and personality development generally failed to discern any advantages for special needs children placed in special, as opposed to regular, education classes.

34. Gifted - Above Intelligence Norms

• Gifted - Little agreement exists among researchers on a single definition of this rather broad category of students.

• • Federal government guideline (P.L. 97-35 Sec 582) - include children who give evidence of high performance capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, leadership capacity, or specific academic fields, and who require services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop such capabilities .

• Research suggests that highly intelligent people tend to be outgoing, well adjusted, and popular

• Some gifted children not well received by teachers and peers because of unique ways in which preciosity is manifested.

35. Educating Gifted and Talented Children

• Acceleration - allows gifted students to move ahead at their own pace, even if this means skipping to higher grade levels.

• Enrichment - through which students are kept at grade level but are enrolled in special programs and given individual activities to allow greater depth of study on a given topic.