Middle Childhood 6 11 Healthiest years Least likely to have an accident Least likely to die Become stronger Hearts lungs Run faster Middle Childhood 6 11 Become more capable and independent E g can brush teeth get dressed etc on own Immersed in play and school and peers can do chores feed the dog can do a homework assignment from school try to conform to peers clothing language things they collect can tell parents what they want like and be more included in decision making Middle Childhood 6 11 Appreciation of cooperation and fair play Improved problem solving abilities Feeling productive very important Erikson industry focused on skills and tasks Erikson Industry versus inferiority Fourth of Erikson s eight psychosocial crises Characterized by tension between productivity and incompetence Children attempt to master culturally valued skills develop a sense of themselves as either industrious or inferior competent or incompetent The Nature of the Child Self concept developing further Developing ideas about self that personality abilities gender and ethnic background gradually becoming more specific and logical More influence from peer and society are incorporated now Brain Development middle childhood Complex tasks slowly mastered with brain maturation prefrontal cortex Variety of social skills Control impulses Planning for future Analyze consequences Reading increasingly interconnected brain by age 7 or 8 years Brain Development Speed of thought Reaction time faster Time it takes to respond to a stimulus either physically with a reflexive movement such as an eye blink or cognitively with a thought Attention Selective attention is better Ability to concentrate on some stimuli while ignoring others focus on most important elements in environment Automaticity Automatization occuring more Process in which repetition of a sequence of thoughts and actions makes the sequence routine so that it no longer requires conscious thought Cognitive Development middle childhood Piaget Concrete operational thought Ability to reason logically about direct experiences and perceptions Can apply their new reasoning skills to concrete situations Cognitive Development What develops now is ability to use mental categories and subcategories flexibly inductively and simultaneously Piaget Hierarchy of categories Classification Organization of things into groups or categories or classes according to some characteristic they have in common By age 8 most children can classify Building on Theory Piaget Other logical concepts Transitive inference Is ability to figure out the unspoken link between one fact and another Linked to maturation of hippocampus which reaches critical point around age 7 Seriation Includes knowledge that things can be arranged in logical series Vygotsky and School Age Children knowledge is acquired from social context Guiding each child through zone of proximal development is crucial Children are apprentices in learning Language is integral as a mediator for understanding and learning Information Processing Information processing theory Compares human thinking processes to computer analysis of data Like computers people sense and perceive large amounts of information Seek specific units of information as a search engine does Analyze as software programs do Express their conclusions so another person can understand as a networked computer or a printout might do Information Processing Learning the number system Siegler Number understanding accrues gradually New and better strategies for calculation are tried ignored half used abandoned and finally adopted Memory Working memory improves steadily and significantly Capacity of long term memory is virtually limitless by the end of middle childhood Memory storage expands over childhood but more important is retrieval As the prefrontal cortex matures children are better able to use strategies Advances in Memory Metacognition Thinking about your own thinking Ability to analyze and evaluate a cognitive task to determine how best to accomplish it and then can monitor and adjust one s performance on that task Improves with age and experience Understanding metaphors School age children comprehend and enjoy puns unexpected answers to normal questions and metaphors New cognitive flexibility and social awareness make these funny Language reading math skills Language Vocabulary Know basic vocabulary of their first language by age 6 Learn as many as 20 new words a day and apply grammar rules they did not use before Become more flexible and logical Learning disorders Dyslexia Unusual difficulty with reading thought to be the result of some neurological underdevelopment Dyscalculia Unusual difficulty with math probably originating from a distinct part of the brain Gender differences in school performance Girls ahead of boys in verbal skills in every nation Boys ahead of girls in math and science Gender differences in math narrowed or disappeared Gender similarities hypothesis Classroom Girls have higher grades overall grades dip at puberty Differences in Learning x SES Family poverty Strong correlation between academic achievement and socioeconomic status Causal factors of low achievement in middle childhood Limited early exposure to words Teachers and parents expectations