Off to School: Cognitive and Physical Development in Middle Childhood Chapter Six Off to School: Cognitive and Physical Development in Middle Childhood

Learning Objectives According to Piaget, how do children think during the concrete operational and formal operational stages? According to information processing theories, how do children learn to improve their learning and remembering? How can we apply research about learning to children’s school experiences? 2

Piaget’s Final Two Stages: More Sophisticated Thinking Concrete-Operational Period (7 - 11 years) Can use symbols to perform mental operations Mental operations are mental actions that produce consistent results Can reverse thought Less influenced by appearance, immediate perceptions, and egocentrism than preoperational children Limitation: Thinking is bound to the concrete, here and no; cannot deal effectively with abstract or hypothetical 3

More Sophisticated Thinking The Formal Operational Period (11 years - adulthood) Children can reason abstractly and hypothetically At this stage children tend to use deductive reasoning at a higher level than concrete operational children Deductive reasoning is drawing conclusions from facts or rules Understand that hypothetical situations may not produce the same results as “real world” problems Ex: A feather might be able to break a glass in a hypothetical situation even though a feather does not break a glass in “real life.”

Criticisms of Piaget’s View Adolescents who are in the formal operational stage may not always reason at that level Adolescents’ thinking is often egocentric and irrational Cognitive development continues after reaching the formal operational stage; Piaget’s stages do not account for this continued development

Information-Processing Strategies for Learning and Remembering Most human thinking takes place in working memory Working Memory - type of memory in which a small number of items can be stored briefly Information may be transferred to long-term memory Long-Term Memory - permanent storehouse for memories that has unlimited capacity

Memory Strategies: A Few Highlights Gradually, children learn about their own memory processes and evaluate them Organization - information to be remembered is structured so that related information is placed together Elaboration - information is embellished to make it more memorable

Metacognition—Thinking About Thinking An awareness of your own thought processes and strategies Becomes more advanced as children age Metacognitive knowledge – awareness of one’s own cognitive processes Metamemory – a child’s understanding of their own memory Cognitive self-regulation – the ability to select strategies for learning and monitor those strategies effectively to determine if they are successful

Monitoring Monitoring is part of metacognition Gradually, children learn about their own memory processes and begin to evaluate them Elementary school-aged children can often identify information which they have not learned, but do not focus their attention on learning it