• between 6 & 8 girls are slightly shorterand lighter than boys
• By age 9 that trend reverses
• After 8 girls begin accumulating fat at a faster reate and add even more during adolescence
• Lower portion of the body grows faster 
• Bones lengthen
• Musecles are very flexible
• Girls better at fine-motor skills, writing drawing
• Boys better at gross-motor skills, sports

• Between 6 & 12 all primary teeth are lost and replace by permanent ones
• Girls lose their teeth slightly earlier than boys

• More than 80% of obese kids become overweight adults
• Lifelong health risks
• Causes in middle childhood
• Overweight parents
• Low SES
• Parent's feeding practices 
• Overfeeding and overly controlling
• Low physical activity
• TV
• Cultural food environment

• Most often a family disorder
• Family lifestyle must be taken into consideration in attempting to intervent with obesity
• Focuses on changing behaviors and thought patterns
• Focuses on changing behaviors and thought patterns
• treating both parent and child together works best

• Bronchial tubes very sensitive to stimuli
• cold, infection allergies, stress
• wheezing, coughing, breathing problems
• Cases of children with Asthma has doubled in the past 3 decades
• Most frequent cause of school absence and child hospitalization
• Heredity, environment increase risk
• Higher in Blacks, Boys, and in Urban areas with high pollution
• Obsesity 

• Only 15% of U.S. elementary schools offer students with physical education 3 times a week and that drops to only 3% in High Schools
• Only 42% of boys and 11% of girls of school age are physically active enough to be considered healthy
• Experts believe that schools should not only offer more frequent physical education classes but should also deemphasize competition and focus on individual exercise

Attention and Recess

• Research shows that distributing cognitively demanding tasks over a longer period of time and by introducing regular breaks enhances attention and performance at all ages. 
• Children are more attentive in classromms after recess than before itand the effect was greater for 2nd than 4th graders
• Recess is one of the few remaining contexts devoted to child-organized games that provide practice in vital social skills-cooperation, leadership, followership, and inhibition of aggresion -under adult supervision rather than adult direction
• as a result, children transfer these skills to the classroom, and may better participate in discussions, collaboration, follow rules, and enjoy academic pursuits, and more.

• Development of operational thinking can best be understood in terms of gains in information-processing  speed rather than a sudden shift to a new stage
• With practice, cognitive schemes demand less attention and become more automatic, freeing up space in working memory so that children can focus on combining old schemes and generating new ones
• As a result children acquired central conceptual sturctures (networks of concepts and relations that permit them to think more effectively about a wide range of situations)
• Examines separate aspects of thinking
• Preschools can follow one story line, draw separate objects
• Early school years can follow 2 story lines in one plot, drawings that show both the features of objects and their relationship to one another
• around 9 to 11 yrs old, children integrate muliple dimensions
• Some forms of logic required by Piagentian tasks do not emerge spontaneously
• instead heavily influenced by  training, context, and culural conditions

• Inattention
• Implusivity
• Excessive motor Activity
• Deficient executive processing
• Results in social problems, and acadmeic problems
• Runs in families, highly heritable
• Children with ADHD show  abnormal brain functioning including reduced electrical and blood-flow activity and structural abnormalities in the fronal lobes of the cerebral cortex and in other areas invloved in attentin, inhibition of behavior, an dother aspects of motor control
• Children with with ADHD brains grow slower and are on average 3% smaller
• Treatments
• Stimulants, family intervention, Adults with ADHD need ongoing assistance

Metacognition

Awareness of thought 

• Becomes more elaborate and refined in middle childhood
• Views their mind as active and controllable
• attention, concentration increase
• mental inferneces (logic)
• expands  knowlege of false-beliefs and another's beliefs can be wrong
• Helps them understand another's perspective
• Use of private speech (hearing one's self think)
  

Cognitive Self-Regulation

The process of continuously monitoring progress toward a goal, chcking outcomes and redirecting  unsuccessful efforts

• Although metacognition expands, school-age children often have  difficulty putting what they know about thinking into action
• This developes gradually
• Monitoring learning outcomes is cognitively demanding and requires constant evaluation of effort and progress
• By adolescence, self-regulation is a strong prdictor of acadmeic seuuess and parnet and teachers can foster it by:
• Pointing out important features of tasks
• Stress importance of planful learning
• Suggest effective learning strategies
• provide for evaluation of effectiveness
• Emphasize monitoring of progress
  
• This leads to academic sef-efficacy

Whole-language vs. Phonetical approaches to learning a language 

(Reading)

• Whole language approach argued that reading should be taught in a way that parallels natural language learning. From the beginning, children should be exposed to text in its complete form-stories, poems, letters, posters, and lists-so that they can appricieate the communicative function of written language
• Phonics approach believes that children should first be coached on phonics, the basic rules for translating wtritten symbols into sounds, only after mastering these skills should the get complex reading material
• Studies show that children learn best when it is a combination of both approaches

• Individuals whose nervous systmes function efficiently appear to have an edge in intellectual skills

Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence

I bet this is the extra credit

• Defines inteligence in terms of distinct sets of processing operations that permit individuals to engage in a wide range of culturally valued activities. 
• Dismissing  the idea of general intelligence, Gardner proposes at least eight independent intelligences
• linguistic
• logico-mathematical
• musical
• spatial
• bodily-kinesthetic
• naturalist
• interpersonal
• intrapersonal
• Cultural values and learning opportunities affect the extent to which a childs intellectual strengths are realized
  

• Identifies 3 broad, interacting intelligences
• Analytical Intelligence
• Information-processing skills
• Creative Intelligence
• the capacity to solve novel problems
• Practical Intelligence
• the application of intellectual skills in everyday situations.
• Intelligent behavior invloves balancing all 3 intelligneces to achieve sucess in life according to one's personal goals and requirementes of one's cultural community

Biological and environmental factors in intelligence

Differences in IQ scores

• Educational Advantage
• Scores of Americal Black children typically 12 to 13 pts below White cohort
• Scores of low SES children are 9 pts below middle SES children
• When Children of low-IQ mothers are adopted by parents who are above average in income and education, they score above average in IQ
• Genetic Differences
  
• How much can we boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement
• Arthur Jensen's mongraph argues and still maintains that  heredity is largely repsonsible for individual, ethinic, and SES variations in intelligence
• The Bell Curve 
  
• Herrnstein and Murry rekindled the controversy they aregue that heredity contributes substantially to individual and SES deifferneces (and possibly to ethinc differences) in IQ

• Vocabulary 
• Increases fourfold during school years
• 20 new words a day
• eventuall exceeds 40k words
• Grammar
• mastery of complex constructions
• advances understanding of infinitive phrases
• Pragmatics
• adjust to people and situations
• phrase requests to get what they want
• 
  

• Bilingual Development
• learn both languages at the same time or learn first language then second
• sensitive period during childhood
• can attain language milestones in both languages according to typical timetable
• Bilingual Education
• Language immersion (after learning one language, only being taught in another for multiple years)
• English-only programs
• risks losing use of part or all of other language  (semilingualism)

• Blacks
• Often use topic-associating style (blending several similar anecdotes) instead of topic-focused style (describing an experiece from beginning to end)
• Whites
• often use Topic-Focused style (begining to end) 
• Less complex and shorter narratives than african american children

• Traditional
• Teacher is sole authority for knowledge, rules, and decision making
• Students are relatively passive-listening, responding when called on, and completing teacher-assigned tasks.
• Progress is evaluated by how well they keep pace with the a uniform set of standards for their grade
• Constructivist
• encourages students to consturct their own knoleges.
• most are grounded in Piagets theory which views children as active agents who reflect on and coordinate their own thoughts rather than absorbing those of others
• Richly  equipped learning centers, small groups and individuals solving self-chosen problems, and a teacher who guides and supports  in response to children's needs. 
• students are evaluated by considering their progress in relation to their own prior develpment
• Social-constructivist classrooms
• Children participate in a wide range of challenging activities with teachers and peers, whith whom they jointly  construct understandings
• Children acquire knowledg and strategies from working together, they become competent, contributing members of their classroom community and advance in cognitive and social development
• Vygotsky's emphasis on the social orgins of higher cognitive processes has inspired the followin educational themes:
• Teacher snd children as partners in learning
• Experiences with many types of symbolic communcation in meaningful activities
• Teaching adapted to each child's zone of proximal development

• Class size under 18 students
• Physical setting-equipped activity centers
• Curriculum-integrated, skills and knowledge
• Teachers- certified, work with each student
• Evaluations- done often and used to indidualizes education to child
• Parents-teacher conferences, able to visit, observe, and volunteer

• Children may adopt a teacher's positive or negative views and start to live up to them
• this effect is especially strong when the teacher emphasizes competition and publicly compare children, regularly favoring the best students

• Students wiht learing difficulties are place in regular classrooms for all or part of the shcool day 
• A practice designed to prepare them for participation in society and to combat prejudices against individuals with disablities

• Convergent Thinking
• One single correct answer
• emphasizes on intelligence tests
• Divergent Thinking
  
• Generating multiple, unusual possiblities
• Tests of Creative capacity tap this
  

• Gifted
• Displaying exceptional intellectual strengths
• 1 or 2 students in every grade have IQ scors above 130
• Talented
• Outstanding in a specific field
• Education Methods:
• enrichment in regular classroom
• pull out for special instruction
• move to higher grade
• multiple intelligences model
• Research on giftedness indicates that many gifted children and adolescents are socially isolated
  

US achievement vs. other countries

• Usually falls below average (the average is 498) US average for 15 yr olds was 474
• Reasons:
• US students reported studying by memorization instead of relating inforamtion to previously acquired knowlege
• Asian schools:
• cultural valuing of academic achievement
• emphasis on effort
• high-quality eduacaiton for all
• time devoted to instruction

Erikson's Industry vs. Inferiority

• When children whose previous experiences have been positive enter middle childhood prepared to diret their energies toward realistic accomplishment.
• Erkson believed that the combination of Adult Expectations and Children's Drive toward mastery sets the ste state for psychological conflict of middle childhood, Industry vs. Inferiority, which is resolved positively when children develp a sense of competence at useful skills and taskt

• Industry
• Developing a sense of competence at useful skills
• School provides many opportunities for this
• Inferiority
• pessimism and lack of confidence in own ability to do things well
• Family environment, teacher sand peers can contribute to these negative feelings

• Changes in Self-Concept:
• Younger school age children describe themselves in all-or-none descriptions
• Older school age children are better at perspective taking (inferring others' attitudest towards the child & incorporating thost attitudes into their self-definition)
• This prompts Social Comparisions (judgements of one's own apperance, abilities, angd behavior in rlations to those of others)
• As children internalize others' expectations of and make social comparisions, they form an Ideal Self that they use to evaluate their Real Self.
• A large discrepancy between the 2 can undermine self-esteem, leading to sadness, hopelessness, and depression
• Cultural Variation
  
• US Children give longer accounts of significant past experiences including more:
• personal preferences, skills, and opinions
• "I am", "I like"
• Chinese children 
  
• More atributes involving group members and relationships

Changes in Self-Esteem

Cultural

• Over the first few years of elementary school
• Levels of self-esteem decline as children evaluate themselves in various areas
• Usually not great enough to harm
• most appraise their characteristics and competencies realistcally while maintaining an attitued of self-respect
• From 4th grade on, self-esteem rises for the majority of young people
• Culture
• Chinese and Japanese 
• despite higher academic achievement score lower in self-esteem than North Aerican Childrent
• Culture values social harmony and tend to be reserved about judging themselves positively but generous in their priase of others
• Girls
  
• In academic self-judgements girls score  hirgher in languages arts self-esteem, whereas boys have higher math, science and physical/athletic self-esteem dimensions
• EVEN when children of equal skill levels are compared
• Girls exceed boys in self-esteem dimensions of close friendship and social accptance
• Over all self-worth is only slight difference (boys being higher)
• Girls may think less well of themselves because they internalize this negaitve cultural message
• African-Americans have lightly higher self-esteem than whites, due dot warm, extnded families and stronger sense of ethnic prided

Changes in Self-Esteem

Child-rearing practices

• Authoritative Parenting
• Children feel good about themselves
• Warm, positive parenting lets children know that they are acepted as competent and worthwhile
• Firm but appropriate expecations backed up with explanations help them evaluate their own behavior against reasonable standards
• Controlling Parenting
  
• Those who too often help or make decisions for their child communicate a sense of inadequacy to childrent
• Parents who are repeatedly disapproving is also linked to low self-esteem
• Children subjected to such parenting need constant reassurance and many rely heavily  on peers to affirm their self-worth
• this is a risk factor for adjustmetn difficulties including aggression and antisocial behavior
• Indulgent Parenting
• correlated with unrealistcally high self-esteem which undermines development
• These children tend to lash out at challenges to the overblown self-image and thus are likely  to be hostile and aggressive
  

Changes in Self-Esteem

Attributions

• Mastery-Oriented
• crediting their successes to ability 
• a characteristic they can improve through trying hard and can count on when facing new challenges
• Attribute failure to factors that can be changes or controlled, such as insufficient effort or a very difficult task
• Learned Helplessness
  
• Attribute their failures, not their successes to ability. 
• When they succeed they conclude that external factors such as luck are responsible
• They believe their that ability is fixed and cannot be improved by trying harder
• Do not develop the metacognitive and self-regulatory skills necessary for high achievement.

Types of Coping

By age 10

• Problem-Centered Coping
• situation is seen as changeable
• difficulty is identified
• decision made on what to do
• Emotion-Centered Coping
  
• used if problem-centered coping does not work
• internal, private, aimed at controlling distress when little can be done about outcome
• goal is emotional self-efficacy

• Self-conscious emotions more governed by personal responsibility
• pride and guilt
• Emotional Understanding
  
• explain emotion using internal states
• understand mixed emotions (by age 8)
• rise in empathy
• supported by cognitive development and social experience
• leades to a rise in empathy
• Emotional Self-Regulation
  
• Motivated by self-esteem and peer approval
• Emotional Self-Efficacy (being in control)
• they must learn to manage negative emotion that threatens their self-esteem

Selman's stages of perspective-taking

Perspective-Taking:The capacity to imagine what other people may be thinking and feeling

Good perspective takers, are more likely to display empathy and sympathy and to handle difficult social situations effectively, among the reasons they are better liked by their peers.

Kohlberg's Preconventional Stages

Stages 1 & 2

• Stage 1: Might Makes Right (about age 10)
• Most important value is obedience to authority
• Avoid punishment
• "Heinz should not steal the medicine because he could go to jail"
• Stage 2: Look Out for Number One
• Each person tries to take care of his or her own needs
• The reason to be nice to other people is so they will be nice to you
• "Heinz should steal the medicine because he needed his wife to help care for him" or "Heinz would be lonely without his wife"

Kohlberg's Conventional Stages

Stages 3 & 4

• Stage 3: "Good Girl" and  "Nice Boy"
• Proper behavior is behavior that pleases other people
• Social approaval is more important than any specific reward
• "Heinz should steal the drug. He wouldn't be a very nice husband if he let his wife die. A good husband would do all he could to save his wife"
• or... "Heinz should not steal the drug. It isn't his fault his wife has cancer. Steaing is still stealing and Heinz should not be stealing. He still loves his wife and did all he could do for her. It is that selfish druggist who is the bad person here. He sure ins't very nice."
• Stage 4: Law and Order
• Proper behavior means being a dutiful citizen and obeying te laws set down by society
• "Heinz should not steal the medicine because the law prohibits stealing, making it illegal"

Kohlberg's Postconventional Stages

Stages 5 & 6

• Stage 5: Social Contract
• One should obey the rules of society because they exist for the benefit of all
• Rules are established by a mutual agreement
• However, if rules become destructive or one party does not live up to the agreement, the contract is no longer binding
• "Heinz should steal the medicine because everyone has a right to choose life, regardless of the law."
• Or... "Heinz should not steal the medicine because the scientist has a right to fair compensation. Even if his wife is sick, it does not make his actions right."
• Stage 6: Universal Ethical Principles
• Individual situations do not determine right or wrong - general universal principles do
• "Heinz should steal the medicine, because saving a human life is a more fundamental value than the property rights of another person"
• Or... "Heinz should not steal the medicine , because others may need the medicine just as badly, and their lives are equally significant."

• By middle childhood, children have had time to internalize rules for good conduct
• Leads children to become more independent and trustworthy
• Strict Equality (5-6 yrs old)
  
• Everyone treated exactly the same
• Merit (6-7 yrs old)
• Those who are more deserving get more rewards
• Equity & Benevolence (8 yrs old)
  
• Everyone gets what they need
• Focus on greater good

• Flexible moral views
• lying not always bad
• truth not always good
• Clarify link between moral imperative and social convention
• more respect for conventions with purpose
• consdier intentions

• Formed from proximity, similarity
• Peer Culture
  
• behavior, vocabulary, dress code
• can include relational aggression and exlusion
• Desire for group belonging
  

• Personal quaities and trust is importantn
• More selective in choosing friends
• Choose friends similar to self
• Can last several years
  
• learn to resolve disputes
• Type of friends influence development
• aggressive friends can magnify anti-social traits

• May be "tough" boys who are athletically skilled, but poor studentss who cause trouble and defy adult authority
• Relationally aggressive girls who ignore, exclude, and spread rumores about other children (Mean Girls)

High rates of conflict, physical and relational aggression, and hyperactive, inattentive, and impulsive behavior (Bart Simpson)

• Passive and socially awkward
• Overwhelmed by social anxiety

• Display both postive and negative behaviors
• Though they have friends, they often bully others
• Engage in calculated relational aggression

Usually just as socially skilled as average children

• Positive social skills
• coaching
• modeling
• reinforcing
• Improve academic achievement
  
• Intervene in harsh parenting practices
• Most rejected children's social imcompetence originates in this type of house hold, both parent and child will need help
• Developing a school code against bullhying can reduce peer victimization

Peer Victimization

certain children become targets of verbal and physical attacks or other forms of abuse

• A form of supervision in which parents exercise general over-sight while letting chidren take charge of moment-by-moment decision making
• Grows out of a cooperative relationship between parent and child based on give-and-take and mutual respect
• Parents must guide and monitor from a distance and effecitively communciate expecations when they are with their children
  

• US has highest rate of divorce 

• Shield children from conflict
• Provide continuity
• Explain Divorce
• Emphasize the permanence of the situation
• Sympathize with feelings
• Use authoritative parenting
• Promote both parental relationships

• Low-SES children who participate in after-care programs exceed their self-care counterparts in:
• classroom work habits
• academic achievement
• prosocial behavior

• Fears of dark, thunder, lightning, and supernatural beings persist
• Fears based on the wider world emerge
• most are media-fueled
• exposure to frightening events
• School phobia
• 5-7 yrs old: separation from home
• 11-13: particulaer aspects of school
• Harsh living conditions promote severe anxieties

Victims of War

Ethnic and Political Violence

• Chronically dangerous environments lead to:
• loss of feelings of safety
• desensitzation of violence
• impaired moral reasoning
• hopelessness for future
• Parents, schools, and communities must provide security reassurance, and interventions
  
• work to preserve physical, psychological, and educational well-being

• Western Schooling:
• Lots of practice with strategies
• Little practice in using everyday cues to help memory
• spatial locations
• arrangements of object
• Strategies:
  
• Rehersal (early grade school)
• repeating information to oneself
• Organization (early grade school)
• grouping related items together
• Elaborations (end of middle childhood)
• creating a relationship between pieces of infromation not in same category

By the end of middle childhood, children star to use elaboration, creating a relationship or shared meaning, between 2 or more pieces of information that don not belong to the same category.

• Personal charcteristics
• Easy temperament
• Mastery Orientation
• Warm parental relationship
  
• Supportive adult outside the family
• Community resources

Piaget's Conservation in the Concrete Operational Stage

Age 7-11

• The ability to pass conservation tasks provides clear evidence of Operations (mental actions that obey logical rules)
• Capable of decentrations (focusing on severl aspects of a problem and rlating them, rather than centering on just one)
• Demonstrates reversibility (the capacity to think through a series of steps and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point)

• 2 Views
• tests not biased, represent success in the common culture
• Cultural factors can hurt test performance
• communcation styles
• High SES and Whites
• knowledge-training questions
• hierarchicial task style
• Lower SES, and minorities
  
• real questions
• no right answer
• develop complex verbal skills
• Collaborative task style
• Topic-associating narrative style
• test content
• sterotype threat
• cultrually biased test

• Combine tests with asessment of adaptive behavior
• Norm groups that mirror the national population
• Dynamic assessment
• Reduce high-stakes testing
• NCLB
• Undermine or Upgrade?