Chapter 10 Physical Development in the School Aged Child Providing Developmentally Appropriate Sports o Build on children s interests Emphasize enjoyment Let kids contribute o Teach age appropriate skills Limit practices o Discourage unhealthy competition o Focus on personal and team improvement Rough and Tumble Play o Friendly chasing and play fighting o Common in many mammals and across cultures o Peaks in middle childhood o Boys do more o May help establish dominance hierarchy School Recess o 7 of U S schools no longer provide recess to students and many others have recess Jobs funding depend on academics and test scores not time to play outside o Recess periods don t subtract time from learning they actually boost children s learning o Regular unstructured recess fosters children s health and competence physically only once a day capability academically and socially Cognitive benefits Social Benefits Regular breaks distribute cognitively demanding tasks throughout the day leading to more attention and better performance Child organized games lead to practice in social skills o Ex cooperation leadership followership inhibition of aggression Under adult supervision rather than Adult Direction Physical Benefits Even more beneficial than PE for children especially girls Chapter 11 Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood Piaget s Theory The Concrete Operational Stage o Piaget s 3rd stage ages 7 12 o Children s mental activities become more logical with actual concrete objects and materials o Advances in Reversibility Conservation Reversibility allows for Conservation Decentration Ability to focus on more than a single property of an object Reversibility Ability to do reversible mental actions on real concrete objects The capacity to think through a series of steps and then mentally reverse their direction returning to the starting point Classification organization into groups according to a common property The ability to classify or divide things into different sets or subsets and to consider their interrelationships o Example Show 5 collies and 2 poodles Ask Are there more o Kids in middle childhood know that collies are a subcategory of collies or dogs dog Classification Class inclusion Seriation School age children develop the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension such as length or weight which is called seriation o Something they either have or can experience through their They can also seriate mentally an ability called transitive inference 7 8 Allows children to integrate 3 relations at once senses o A is longer than B o B is longer than C o Is A or C longer Transitive inference Spatial Reasoning Mental rotations o Around 7 8 align the self s frame to match the orientation of another person Ex which is my left hand Directions o Around 8 10 give clear well organized directions by using a mental walk strategy Ex in class Piaget s Theory Limitations of Concrete Operational Thought o Mental operations work best with objects that are concrete vs problems with abstract ideas o Horizontal Decalage Master concrete operational tasks and abilities gradually Some before others Further Research on Concrete Operations o Culture and schooling affect performance on tasks more than Piaget thought Affects ability to reason Ex Brazilian street children calculate complex computations not learned in school o Neo Piagetians suggest advances in information processing helps the development of operational thinking o Cognitive development in middle childhood is probably best explained by a blend of Piagetian and information processing ideas Key Information Processing Improvements o Cognition becomes more efficient in middle childhood o Brain Development leads to gains in Information processing speed and capacity Gains in inhibition Selective Attention Improves and becomes more o Through the elementary years children become better at deliberately attending to just those aspects of a situation that are relevant to their task goals Planful o Steps in Planning Postponing action to weigh alternatives not doing the first thing that comes to mind Organizing task materials Remember steps of a plan Monitor how well the plan works Revise if necessary o Helps accomplish goals better Memory Improvements Working Memory o Often assessed by digit span 5 yrs 4 items 7 yrs 5 items 9 yrs 6 items Adults 7 items How to remember a phone then Chunking grouping bits into larger units Automatization o Certain skills become automatic during middle childhood ex reading writing o Frees up working memory o Increased intellectual capacity and speed of processing Long Term Memory o Long Term Memory minutes to decades o Declarative facts ex names of people places phone numbers o Procedural complex skills how you do something riding a bike o Verbatim detailed memories of specific events exactly what o Gist general not specific memory of common occurrences o Declarative procedural verbatim gist memories improve in keyboarding happened middle childhood Working Long Term o Length of time info is attended to More focus more of a chance for remembering o Steady increased in memory found between ages 6 18 o Sharpest increase between 6 11 years Development of Memory Strategies o Memory Strategies Mental or behavioral activities that can improve recall and recognition of material Rehearsal early grade school Ex spelling x flashcards practice divided over several days is more effective than one day of intensive practice Written notes Relating new info to prior knowledge Adding to knowledge one already has Organization soon after rehearsal Grouping together related items Knowledge base helps organization Elaboration end of middle childhood create relationships or shared meanings between 2 or more pieces that aren t members of the same category Meaningful chunks of information o Schooling promotes using these memory strategies o In middle childhood May not use strategies on their own but can be taught to
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