Developmental psychology

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- Preface
- Theoretical problems of development psychology
  - 1.1 The subject, objectives and methods of psychology
  - 1.2 Conception of age and psychological development stages
- The problem of the periodization of mental development in developmental psychology
  - 2 The problem of the periodization of mental development in developmental psychology
  - 2.1 Biogenetic concepts in foreign developmental psychology
  - 2.2 The theory of Jean Piaget’s mental development
  - 2.3.Epigenetic principle of development by E.Erikson
  - 2.4 Cultural-historical concept of mental development by Vygotsky
- Psychological aspects of ontogenetic development period
  - 3.1.Newborn crisis
  - 3.2 Infancy (2-12 months)
  - 3.3 Toddlerhood (1-3 year)
  - 3.4 Preschool age (3- 6-7 year)
  - 3.5 Early school age (7—10,11 years)
  - 3.6 Adolescence (10-11 — 15-16 years)
  - 3.7 Youth (17-18 – 26 years)
  - 3.8 Aduldhood
  - 3.9 Late aduldhood
- Practice
  - 1.1 The subject, objectives and methods of psychology
  - 2 The problem of the periodization of mental development in developmental psychology
  - 2.4 Cultural-historical concept of mental development by Vygotsky
  - 3.4 Preschool age (3- 6-7 year)
  - 3.6 Adolescence (10-11 — 15-16 years)

- Алғы сөз
- Даму психологиясының теориялық мәселелері
  - 1.1 Психологияның пәні, міндеттері мен әдістері
  - 1.2 Жастың психологиялық тұжырымдамасы және психикалық дамудың кезеңділігі туралы мәселе
- Даму психологиядағы психикалық дамудың кезеңділігі туралы мәселе
  - 2 Даму психологиядағы психикалық дамудың кезеңділігі туралы мәселе
  - 2.1 Шетелдік және отандық психологиядағы қозғаушы күштердің, ақыл-ой дамуының көздері мен жағдайлары туралы пікірлер
  - 2.2 Ж.Пиаженің психикалық даму теориясы
  - 2.3.3Э. Эриксонның жеке тұлғаны дамытудың эпигенетикалық теориясы
  - 2.4 Л.С. Выготскийдің психикалық дамуының мәдени-тарихи тұжырымдамасы
- Онтогенетикалық даму кезеңдерінің психологиялық сипаттамалары
  - 3.1.Сәби дағдарысы
  - 3.2 Нәресте (2-12 ай)
  - 3.3 Ерте жастағы (1-3 жас)
  - 3.4 Мектепке дейінгі жас (3- 6-7 жас)
  - 3.5 Кіші мектептік жас (7-10,11 жас)
  - 3.6 Жасөспірім жас (10,11-15,16 жас)
  - 3.7 Жастық жас (17,18 – 26 жас)
  - 3.8 Кемел жас
  - 3.9 Кәрілік
- Практика
  - 1.1 Психологияның пәні, міндеттері мен әдістері
  - 2 Даму психологиядағы психикалық дамудың кезеңділігі туралы мәселе
  - 2.4 Л.С. Выготскийдің психикалық дамуының мәдени-тарихи тұжырымдамасы
  - 3.4 Мектепке дейінгі жас (3- 6-7 жас)
  - 3.6 Жасөспірім жас (10,11-15,16 жас)

# 3.5 Early school age (7—10,11 years)

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Middle and late childhood spans the ages between early childhood and adolescence, approximately ages 6 to 11. Children gain greater control over the movement of their bodies, mastering many gross and fine motor skills that eluded the younger child. Changes in the brain during this age enable not only physical development, but contributes to greater reasoning and flexibility of thought. School becomes a big part of middle and late childhood, and it expands their world beyond the boundaries of their own family. Peers start to take center-stage, often prompting changes in the parent-child relationship. Peer acceptance also influences children’s perception of self and may have consequences for emotional development beyond these years.

Overall Physical Growth: Rates of growth generally slow during these years. Typically, a child will gain about 5-7 pounds a year and grow about 2-3 inches per year (CDC, 2000). They also tend to slim down and gain muscle strength and lung capacity making it possible to engage in strenuous physical activity for long periods of time. The beginning of the growth spurt, which occurs prior to puberty, begins two years earlier for females than males. The mean age for the beginning of the growth spurt for girls is nine, while for boys it is eleven. Children of this age tend to sharpen their abilities to perform both gross motor skills, such as riding a bike, and fine motor skills, such as cutting their fingernails. In gross motor skills (involving large muscles) boys typically outperform girls, while with fine motor skills (small muscles) girls outperform the boys. These improvements in motor skills are related to brain growth and experience during this developmental period.

Brain Growth: Two major brain growth spurts occur during middle/late childhood (Spreen, Riser, & Edgell, 1995). Between ages 6 and 8, significant improvements in fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination are noted. Then between 10 and 12 years of age, the frontal lobes become more developed and improvements in logic, planning, and memory are evident (van der Molen & Molenaar, 1994). Myelination is one factor responsible for these growths. From age 6 to 12, the nerve cells in the association areas of the brain, that is those areas where sensory, motor, and intellectual functioning connect, become almost completely myelinated (Johnson, 2005). This myelination contributes to increases in information processing speed and the child’s reaction time. The hippocampus, responsible for transferring information from the short-term to long-term memory, also show increases in myelination resulting in improvements in memory functioning (Rolls, 2000). Children in middle to late childhood are also better able to plan, coordinate activity using both left and right hemispheres of the brain, and to control emotional outbursts. Paying attention is also improved as the prefrontal cortex matures (Markant & Thomas, 2013).

From ages 7 to 11, children are in what Piaget referred to as the Concrete Operational Stage of cognitive development (Crain, 2005). This involves mastering the use of logic in concrete ways. The word concrete refers to that which is tangible; that which can be seen, touched, or experienced directly. The concrete operational child is able to make use of logical principles in solving problems involving the physical world. For example, the child can understand principles of cause and effect, size, and distance.

The child can use logic to solve problems tied to their own direct experience, but has trouble solving hypothetical problems or considering more abstract problems. The child uses Inductive Reasoning, which is a logical process in which multiple premises believed to be true are combined to obtain a specific conclusion. For example, a child has one friend who is rude, another friend who is also rude, and the same is true for a third friend. The child may conclude that friends are rude. We will see that this way of thinking tends to change during adolescence being replaced with deductive reasoning. We will now explore some of the major abilities that the concrete child exhibits.

Working Memory: The capacity of working memory expands during middle and late childhood, and research has suggested that both an increase in processing speed and the ability to inhibit irrelevant information from entering memory are contributing to the greater efficiency of working memory during this age (de Ribaupierre, 2002). Changes in myelination and synaptic pruning in the cortex are likely behind the increase in processing speed and ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli (Kail, McBride-Chang, Ferrer, Cho, & Shu, 2013).

Children with learning disabilities in math and reading often have difficulties with working memory (Alloway, 2009). They may struggle with following the directions of an assignment. When a task calls for multiple steps, children with poor working memory may miss steps because they may lose track of where they are in the task. Adults working with such children may need to communicate: Using more familiar vocabulary, using shorter sentences, repeating task instructions more frequently, and breaking more complex tasks into smaller more manageable steps. Some studies have also shown that more intensive training of working memory strategies, such as chunking, aid in improving the capacity of working memory in children with poor working memory (Alloway, Bibile, & Lau, 2013).

Attention: As noted above the ability to inhibit irrelevant information improves during this age group, with there being a sharp improvement in selective attention from age six into adolescence (Vakil, Blachstein, Sheinman, & Greenstein, 2009). Children also improve in their ability to shift their attention between tasks or different features of a task (Carlson, Zelazo, & Faja, 2013). A younger child who is asked to sort objects into piles based on type of object, car versus animal, or color of object, red versus blue, may have difficulty if you switch from asking them to sort based on type to now having them sort based on color. This requires them to suppress the prior sorting rule. An older child has less difficulty making the switch, meaning there is greater flexibility in their attentional skills. These changes in attention and working memory contribute to children having more strategic approaches to challenging tasks.

Memory Strategies: Bjorklund (2005) describes a developmental progression in the acquisition and use of memory strategies. Such strategies are often lacking in younger children, but increase in frequency as children progress through elementary school. Examples of memory strategies include rehearsing information you wish to recall, visualizing and organizing information, creating rhymes, such “i” before “e” except after “c”, or inventing acronyms, such as “roygbiv” to remember the colors of the rainbow. Schneider, Kron-Sperl, and Hünnerkopf (2009) reported a steady increase in the use of memory strategies from ages six to ten in their longitudinal study.

Moreover, by age ten many children were using two or more memory strategies to help them recall information. Schneider and colleagues found that there were considerable individual differences at each age in the use of strategies, and that children who utilized more strategies had better memory performance than their same aged peers.

Children may experience three deficiencies in their use of memory strategies. A mediation deficiency occurs when a child does not grasp the strategy being taught, and thus, does not benefit from its use. If you do not understand why using an acronym might be helpful, or how to create an acronym, the strategy is not likely to help you. In a production deficiency the child does not spontaneously use a memory strategy, and has to be prompted to do so. In this case, the child knows the strategy and is more than capable of using it, but they fail to “produce” the strategy on their own. For example, a child might know how to make a list, but may fail to do this to help them remember what to bring on a family vacation. A utilization deficiency refers to a child using an appropriate strategy, but it fails to aid their performance. Utilization deficiency is common in the early stages of learning a new memory strategy (Schneider & Pressley, 1997; Miller, 2000). Until the use of the strategy becomes automatic it may slow down the learning process, as space is taken up in memory by the strategy itself. Initially, children may get frustrated because their memory performance may seem worse when they try to use the new strategy. Once children become more adept at using the strategy, their memory performance will improve. Sodian and Schneider (1999) found that new memory strategies acquired prior to age eight often show utilization deficiencies with there being a gradual improvement in the child’s use of the strategy. In contrast, strategies acquired after this age often followed an “all-or-nothing” principle in which improvement was not gradual, but abrupt.

Knowledge Base: During middle and late childhood, children are able to learn and remember due to an improvement in the ways they attend to and store information. As children enter school and learn more about the world, they develop more categories for concepts and learn more efficient strategies for storing and retrieving information. One significant reason is that they continue to have more experiences on which to tie new information. In other words, their knowledge base, knowledge in particular areas that makes learning new information easier, expands (Berger, 2014).

Metacognition: Children in middle and late childhood also have a better understanding of how well they are performing a task, and the level of difficulty of a task. As they become more realistic about their abilities, they can adapt studying strategies to meet those needs. Young children spend as much time on an unimportant aspect of a problem as they do on the main point, while older children start to learn to prioritize and gauge what is significant and what is not. As a result, they develop metacognition. Metacognition refers to the knowledge we have about our own thinking and our ability to use this awareness to regulate our own cognitive processes (Bruning, Schraw, Norby, & Ronning, 2004).

Control questions:

1. Changes when child starts studying at school?
2. How studying influence children? Due to mental development what perception function changes?
3. What changes happen with emotional-motivational during studying at school?
4. What are the ways of nurturing early scholl age children?
5. What are the stages of studying during early preschool age?
6. How to improve mental abilities to study better?
7. Mechanisms of studying together? What are the characteristics

Give the definition to the following notions:

- Study
- Understand
- Hometask
- Study activity
- Intellectual development of cognitive abilities
- Memorize
- Reduction of imagination
- Scientific notions
- Responsibility
- Moral senses
- Need of knowledge