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

2. 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

3. Piaget’s Final Two Stages: More Sophisticated Thinking
Concrete-Operational Period ( 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

4. 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.”

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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