Chapter 9
Physical and Cognitive
Development in Middle and Late
Childhood
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Physical and Cognitive
Development in Middle
And Late Childhood
Physical
Development
Cognitive
Development
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Physical
Development
Body Growth
and
Proportion
Motor
Development
Health
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Children With
Disabilities
Body Growth and Proportion
• Proportional changes are among the most
pronounced.
– Head and waist circumference and leg length
decrease in relation to body height.
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Muscle mass and tone improve.
Strength doubles.
Weight gain averages 2.27 to 3.18 kg a year.
Increased weight is primarily due to
increases in the size of the skeletal and
muscular systems, and the size of some organs.
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Motor Development
• Motor development becomes much smoother and more
coordinated.
• Skipping rope, swimming, bike riding, skating, and
climbing are mastered.
• Increased myelination of the CNS is reflected in the
improvement of fine motor skills.
• Hands are used more adroitly as tools—hammering,
pasting, tying shoes, and fastening clothes.
• By 10–12 years children begin to show manipulative
skills similar to the abilities of adults.
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Health
• Obesity
• Accidents and Injuries
• Cancer
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Obesity
• 42.3% of Canadian boys and 35.4% of
Canadian girls were classified either overweight
or obese in 1996, twice the average 20% in
1981.
• Nature is a factor in weight but nurture may be
the main culprit for an increase in child obesity.
• Exercise is considered extremely important in
childhood weight loss programs.
• Treatment of childhood obesity consists of
exercise, diet, and behaviour modification.
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Accidents and Injury
• The most common cause of severe injury and
death is motor vehicle accidents, either as a
pedestrian or a passenger.
• The use of seat-belts is important in reducing the
severity of such accidents.
• Other serious injuries involve skateboards, roller
skates, and other sports equipment.
• Appropriate safety helmets, protective eye and
mouth shields, and protective padding are
recommended.
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Cancer
• Cancer is the second leading cause of death in
children 5–14 years of age.
• Currently 1 in every 330 children in the U.S.
develops cancer before the age of 19.
• The incidence of cancer in children is increasing.
• Child cancers are mainly those of the white
blood cells, brain, bone, lymph system, muscles,
kidneys, and nervous system.
• All are characterized by an uncontrolled
proliferation of abnormal cells.
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Children with Disabilities
• Who Are Children with
Disabilities?
• Learning Disabilities
• Attention Deficit
Hyperactivitiy Disorder
• Educational Issues
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Who Are Children with Disabilities?
• Physical conditions and the delay of cognitive
and social skills are considered disabilities.
• Prevalence in Canadian children:
– 10% with learning disabilities
– 5%–10% with attention deficit disorder
– 6%–14% with conduct disorder, hyperactivity, and
emotional disturbances
• All three conditions are more common in boys
than in girls.
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Learning Disabilities
• Children with a learning disability:
– are of normal intelligence or above.
– have difficulties in at least one academic area, and usually
several.
– have a difficulty that is not attributable to any other diagnosed
problem or disorder.
• The most common problem that characterizes children
with a learning disability involves reading—severe
impairment termed dyslexia.
• They often have difficulties in handwriting, spelling, or
composition.
• Successful intervention programs exist.
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Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD)
• ADHD is a disability in which children
consistently show one or more of the following
characteristics over a period of time:
– inattention
– hyperactivity
– impulsivity
• The disorder occurs as much as 4–9 times as
much in boys as in girls.
• Students with ADHD have a failure rate in school
that is 2–3 times that of other students.
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Causes of ADHD
• Definitive causes of ADHD have not been found.
• Possible low levels of certain neurotransmitters
have been proposed.
• Pre- and postnatal abnormalities may be a
cause.
• Environmental toxins such as lead could
contribute to ADHD.
• Heredity is considered a contributor, as 30%–
50% of children with the disorder have a sibling
or parent who has it.
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Treatment for ADHD
• Many experts recommend a combination of academic,
behavioural, and medical interventions to help ADHD
students better learn and adapt.
• The intervention requires cooperation and effort on the
part of the parents, school personnel, and health-care
professionals.
• Ritalin is a controversial stimulant given to control
behaviour.
• In many children, Ritalin actually slows down the
nervous system and behaviour.
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Educational Issues
• Canadians have moved from educating
children with disabilities in segregated
classrooms to the current practice of
mainstreaming – educating a child with
special education needs in a regular
classroom.
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Cognitive
Development
Piaget’s
Theory
Information
Processing
Intelligence
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Language
Development
Piaget’s Theory
• Piaget believed that around the age of 7, children enter
the concrete operational stage.
• Concrete operational thinking involves:
– mental operations replacing physical actions
– reversible mental actions
– coordination of several characteristics of objects
– classification and interrelation of things
– seriation
– transitivity
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Evaluating Piaget’s Theory
• Contributions
• Criticisms
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Contributions
• Piaget’s major contributions to understanding
children’s cognitive development include:
– assimilation
– accommodation
– object permanence
– egocentrism
– conservation
• His observation yielded important things to look
for in cognitive development, such as shifts in
thinking and the significance of experience.
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Criticisms
• Estimates of children’s competence
• Stages
• The training of children to reason at higher
levels
• Neo-Piaget’s argue that Piaget required more
emphasis on strategies, the speed at which
children process information, particular cognitive
task involved, and the division of cognitive
problems into smaller, more precise steps.
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Information Processing
• Memory
• Critical Thinking
• Metacognition
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Memory
• Though short-term memory shows no considerable
increase after age 7, long-term memory increases with
age during middle and late childhood.
• Long-term memory depends on the learning activities
individuals engage in when learning and remembering
information.
• Expertise is a term that is used to describe organized
factual knowledge about a particular content area.
• If a child has expertise in an area, their memory tends to
be good regarding material related to that expertise.
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Critical Thinking
• Critical thinking involves grasping the deeper
meaning of ideas, keeping an open mind about
different approaches and perspectives, and
deciding for oneself what to believe or do.
• Deep understanding occurs when children are
stimulated to rethink their prior ideas.
• Some experts believe that schools spend too
much time on getting students to give a single
correct answer in an imitative way, rather than
encouraging them to expand their thinking and
become deeply engaged in meaningful thinking.
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Metacognition
• Metacognition is cognition about cognition or
knowing about knowing.
• Some experts believe the key to education is
helping students learn a rich repertoire of
strategies that result in solutions of problems.
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Intelligence
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The Binet Tests
The Wechsler Scales
Types of Intelligence
Controversies and Issues in Intelligence
The Extremes of Intelligence
Giftedness
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Definition of Intelligence
• Intelligence is problemsolving skills and the
ability to learn from and
adapt to the experiences
of everyday life.
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The Binet Tests
• Alfred Binet developed the concept of mental
age: an individual’s level of mental development
relative to others.
• Binet’s original 1905 scale has been revised as
the Stanford-Binet tests and is administered to
individuals aged 2 years through adulthood.
• It requires both verbal and nonverbal responses.
• It assesses four content areas: verbal reasoning,
quantitative reasoning, abstract/visual
reasoning, short-term memory.
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Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
• William Stern created the concept of
intelligence quotient (IQ).
• IQ is a person’s mental age divided by
chronological age, multiplied by 100.
• IQ = MA/CA x 100.
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The Wechsler Scales
• David Wechsler developed tests to assess students’
intelligence:
– The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of
Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R) for ages 4–6½
– The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC)
for ages 6–16.
– The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS).
• The Wechsler scales provide an overall IQ and yield
verbal and performance IQs.
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Types of Intelligence
• Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory
• Gardner’s Eight Frames of Mind
• Evaluating the Multiple Intelligence
Approach
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Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory
• Robert J. Sternberg developed the triarchic
theory of intelligence, which states that
intelligence comes in three forms:
– Analytical – involves the ability to analyze,
judge, evaluate, compare, and contrast.
– Creative – consists of the ability to create,
design, invent, originate, and imagine.
– Practical – focuses on the ability to use,
apply, implement, and put into practice.
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Gardner’s Eight Frames of Mind
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Verbal skills
Mathematical skills
Spatial skills
Bodily-kinesthetic
skills
Musical skills
Interpersonal skills
Intrapersonal skills
Naturalist skills
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Evaluating the Multiple Intelligence
Approach
• Contributes to the interest in assessing
intelligence and classroom learning in
innovative ways that go beyond
conventional standardized and paperpencil memory tasks.
• Have other domains been left out?
• Some critics believe that the approaches
by Sternberg and Gardner are the best
way to explain undeveloped intelligences.
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Controversies and Issues in
Intelligence
• Ethnicity and Culture
• The Use and Misuse of Intelligence Tests
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Ethnicity and Culture
• The consensus is that these differences are
based on environmental differences.
• Many early tests of intelligence were culturally
biased, favouring urban children over rural
children, children from middle socio-economic
families over children from low-income families,
and White children over minority children.
• Culture-fair tests are tests of intelligence that
attempt to be free of cultural bias.
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The Use and Misuse of Intelligence
Tests
• Psychological tests are tools whose
effectiveness depends on the knowledge, skill,
and integrity of the user.
• They can be used for positive purposes, or they
can be badly abused.
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Cautions
• Some cautions about IQ:
– Scores on IQ tests can lead to stereotypes
and expectations.
– Remember to consider all domains of
intelligence and not just an overall score.
– Need to understand how adaptive social
behaviour is relate to intellectual deficiency at
any age.
– IQ scores do not always show cognitive
deficits.
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The Extremes of Intelligence
• Mental Retardation
• Giftedness
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Mental Retardation
• Mental retardation is a condition of limited
mental ability in which an individual has a low
IQ, usually below 70 on a traditional intelligence
test, and has difficulty adapting to everyday life.
• Organic retardation is caused by a genetic
disorder or brain damage.
• Cultural-familial retardation is a mental deficit
in which no evidence of organic brain damage
can be found.
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Giftedness
• People who are gifted have above-average intelligence
(an IQ of 120 or higher) and/or superior talent for
something.
• Characteristics of gifted children are:
– Precocity
– Marching to their own drummer
– A passion to master
• Recent studies support the conclusion that gifted people
tend to be more mature, have fewer emotional problems,
and grow up in a positive family climate.
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Creativity
• Creativity is the ability to think about something in novel
and unusual ways and to come up with unique solutions
to problems.
• Convergent thinking produces one correct answer and
is characteristic of the kind of thinking required on
conventional intelligence tests.
• Divergent thinking produces many different answers to
the same questions and is more characteristic of
creativity.
• Most creative children are quite intelligent, the reverse is
not necessarily true.
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Strategies for Developing Creativity
• Brainstorm
• Provide environments that stimulate
creativity
• Don’t over-control
• Encourage internal motivation
• Foster flexible and playful thinking
• Introduce children to creative people
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Language Development
• Vocabulary and
Grammar
• Reading
• Bilingualism
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Vocabulary and Grammar
• During middle and late childhood, a change
occurs in the way children think about words.
• They become less tied to the actions and
perceptual dimensions associated with words
and more analytical in their approach to words.
• Children make similar advances in grammar.
• The elementary school child’s improvement in
logical reasoning and analytical skills helps in
the understanding of the use of comparatives
and subjectives.
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Reading
• Education and language experts continue to
debate how children should be taught to read.
• The whole-language approach stresses that
reading instruction should parallel children’s
natural language learning, and that reading
materials should be whole and meaningful.
• The basic-skills-and-phonetics approach
emphasizes that reading instruction should
teach phonetics and its basic rules for translating
written symbols into sounds, and early reading
instruction should involve simplified materials.
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Bilingualism
• Researchers have found that bilingualism does not
interfere with performance in either language.
• Children who are fluent in two languages perform better
on tests of attentional control, concept formation,
analytical reasoning, cognitive flexibility, and cognitive
complexity.
• Bilingual children are also more conscious of spoken and
written language structure, and are better at noticing
errors of grammar and meaning.
• Bilingual children in a number of countries have been
found to perform better on intelligence tests.
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