Review sheet Chapter 10 Erikson p 336r - Industry v. Inferiority: conflict in middle childhood resolved positively when experiences lead children to develop a sense of competence at useful skills and tasks - Erikson combines several developments of middle childhood: a positive, but realistic self-concept, pride in accomplishment, moral responsibility, and cooperative participation with playmates Achievement related attributions 339-340 - Attributions: common everyday explanations for causes of behavior - Mastery-oriented attributions: those with high academic self-esteem and motivation, crediting success to ability, a characteristic they can improve through trying hard and can count on when faced with new challenges, such as insufficient effort or a difficult task - Learned helplessness: attribute failures to ability (not success). When they succeed, it is attributed to luck - Unlike mastery-oriented, learned helplessness children believe that ability is fixed and cannot be improved by trying hard - Mastery-oriented kids seek information on how best to increase ability through effort - Learned helpless kids focus on obtaining positive and avoiding negative evaluations on fragile sense of ability - Fail to connect effort with success, don’t develop metacognitive and self regulatory skills necessary for high achievement - Lack of effective learning strategies, reduced persistence, and a sense of loss of control sustain on another in a vicious cycle - Adult communication plays a key role in different attributions between mastery oriented children and learned helpless children - Person praise: emphasis on child’s traits - Process praise: emphasis on behavior and effort - Children with low self esteem feel more shame following failure if they previously received process person praise, less shame if they previously received process praise or no praise at all - Consistent with a learned-helplessness orientation, person praise teaches children that abilities are fixed, which leads them to question their competence and retreat from challenges - In contrasts, process praise -- consistent with a mastery orientation -- implies that competence develops through effort - Girls more often than boys attribute poor performance to lack of ability- When girls do not do well, they tend to receive messages from teachers and parents that their ability is at fault, and negative stereotypes undermine their interest and effort - Cultural values influence children’s views about success and failure - Aisan parents and teachers are more likely than their american counterparts to view effort as key to success - Asian children then feel a stronger sense of obligation towards parents, internalizing their messages - Americans in contrast, focus more on success because it enhances self-esteem - Fostering a Mastery-Oriented Approach - An invention called attribution retraining, encourages learned-helpless children to believe that they can overcome failure by exerting more effort and using more effective strategies - Children are given tasks difficult enough that they will experience some failure, followed by repeated feedback that helps them revise their attributions - Another approach is to encourage low-effort students to focus on mastering a task for its own sake, not on grades, and on individual improvement, not on comparisons with classmates - Instruction in effective strategies and self regulation is also vital, to compensate for development lost in this area and to ensure that renewed effort pays off - Attribution retraining works best if started early, before children’s views of themselves become hard to change - Even better approach is to prevent learned helplessness Moral Development 342-345 - During middle childhood, children construct a flexible appreciation of moral rules - Take into account an increasing number of variables - not just the action and its immediate impact, but also the actor’s intentions and the context of his behavior - For example, between ages 7 and 11, children say it is acceptable to hit another child in certain situations -- in self-defense, to protect someone else from serious bodily injury, or to prevent the other child from hurting herself - Older children focus less on the actor’s transgression and more on the aim of his behavior (trying to prevent harm) - By age 7 to 8, children no longer say that truth telling is always good and lying is always bad but consider prosocial and antisocial intentions and the context of the behavior - Evaluate certain types of truthfulness very negatively - for example, blunt statements, particularly in public contexts where they are especially likely to have negative social consequences (telling a classmate that you don’t like her drawing) - Chinese children more often rate lying favorably when the intention is modesty, as when a student who has thoughtfully picked up litter from the playground says “I didn’t do it”- Chinese children are more likely to favor lying to support the group at the expense of the individual - In contrast, Canadian children more often favor lying to support the individual at the expense of the group (claiming that friend who is a poor speller is actually a good speller because the friend wants to participate in the spelling competition) - These judgements reflect school-age children’s enhanced understanding of varied reasons for deception - Realize that people may convey inaccurate information because they are biased, trying to be persuasive, concerned about how others may react, or protecting others’ welfare - Perspective taking is recursive: Children must consider simultaneously the viewpoints of two or more people -- the person who lies and the recipients of the lie - Appreciate of second-order false belief, which depends on recursive thought, is related to gains in moral judgement in middle childhood - One study gave children a morally relevant second-order false belief task: A child, while helping her teacher clean up, accidentally throws out a bag containing a treasured cupcake belonging to a classmate who is out of the room. - School age children who reasoned accurately about the helper’s belief about the bag’s contents (trash) and the cupcake owner’s belief about the cupcake’s location (in a bag in the classroom), assigned less blame to the helper - Using their recursive capacity, these children inferred that the cupcake owner would understand that the