Chapter 11
The School Years:
Biosocial Development

• Compared with other periods of life, childhood is a time of relatively smooth and uneventful biosocial development.
• Children become slimmer than in earlier years, their limbs lengthen, their body proportions change, their muscles become stronger, and their lung capacity increases.

• Nutrition
– Variation in children’s height and weight
• Heredity
– Family habits

• BMI
– Divide weight in kilograms by height in meters squared.
• Risks:
– Serious orthopedic and respiratory problems and other illnesses. It is often a psychological problem as well.

• Heredity
• Exercise
• TV watching
• Cultural Attitudes
• Precipitating Event

• Increase physical activity
• Change their eating patterns
• Family-based treatment program of exercise and nutrition education

• A disorder characterized by chronic inflammation of the airways.
– Crowded living conditions
– Airtight windows
– Carpeted floors
– More bedding
– Dogs and cats living inside the house

• Growth is relatively slow in middle childhood may be part of the reason children become so much more skilled at controlling their bodies.
• Brain maturation is a key factor in reaction time, which naturally improves in age.

• Influenced by
– Gender
– National policies
– Genetics

• Achievement Tests
– Measure what a child has learned
• Aptitude Tests
– Measure learning potential
– Intelligence tests: Stanford-Binet and Wechsler

• Testing remains controversial because a child’s test performance can be affected by nonacademic factors:
– Capacity to pay attention and concentrate
– Emotional stress
– Health
– Language difficulties
– Test taking anxiety

• Robert Sternberg’s 3 distinct types:
– Academic
– Creative
– Practical

• Howard Gardner’s 8 Intelligences
– Linguistic
– Logical-mathematical
– Musical
– Spatial
– Body-kinesthetic
– Interpersonal
– Intrapersonal
– Naturalistic

• For children with special needs, the growth of new skills, closer friendships, and ways of thinking is encumbered by the difficulties posed by psychological disorders such as ADHD.
• Developmental psychopathology applies insights from studies of normal development to the origins and treatment of childhood disorders.

• Abnormality is normal
• Disability changes over time
• Adulthood can be better or worse
• Diagnosis depends on the social context

• 3 areas of deficiencies
– Communication ability
– Social skills
– Imaginative play
• Asperger Syndrome: a disorder in which a person masters verbal communication
(sometimes very well) but has unusual difficulty with social perceptions and skills.

• Exist when a child has no apparent physical problem, is not intellectually slow, does not live in severely stressful conditions, and does not lack basic education, but nonetheless has difficulty mastering one or more basic academic skills
– Reading (dyslexia)
– Math (dyscalcula)
– Spelling
– Writing

• Child has great difficulty concentrating for more than a few moments at a time and is almost always in motion.
– Unusually impulsive, distractible, and sometimes aggressive
– ADD or ADHDA

• Possible causes:
– Genetic inheritance
– Prenatal damage (teratogens)
– Postnatal damage (lead poisoning or repeated blows to the head)

• Effective Treatment
– Medication (Adderrall and Ritalin)
– Psychological therapy
– Changes in the home and school environments

• Mainstreaming
– Putting children with special needs in the same
“stream”—the general-education classroom—
• Resource Rooms
– A designated room, equipped with special material and staffed by a trained teacher, where they spend part of their school day getting help with basic skills
• Inclusion
– Children with special needs are included in the regular classroom and receiving special individualized instruction, typically from a teacher or paraprofessional trained in special education