Cognitive Development of The Primary Schoolers (Middle Childhood)

GROUP 2
Leader: Ma. Bernadette L. Magtiza

Members:
 Clark D. Eustaquio
 Cherry Mie Carabañac
 Claire L. Fama
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRIMARY SCHOOLERS

(MIDDLE CHILDHOOD)
The mental (cognitive) change children undergo during the middle childhood era are often pronounced and
noticeable than their physical changes. Children’s ability to consciously, thoughtfully and pro-actively choose
to pursue goals appears during this development period. Children’s thinking style gradually becomes more
logical, organized, and flexible as they enter Piaget’s “Concrete Operational” thinking stage.
Cognitive Development: Piaget’s Concrete Operations

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years) is known as the stage of cognitive operations.
 A mental operation, in the Piagetian way of thinking, is the ability to accurately imagine the
consequences of something happening without it actually needing to happen. During mental
operation, children imagine “what if” scenarios which involve the imaginal transformation of mental
representations of things they have experienced in the world; people, places and things. The ability to
perform mental arithmetic is a good example of an operation.
 Children at this stage become capable of mastering addition and subtraction and similar operations
and consequently are able to tell you that if they eat one cookie out of a jar containing five, they will be
four cookies left in the jar.
 Children’s mental representations remain concretely linked to things they have seen and touched
throughout the middle childhood period. At this age, children can easily tell you that if the fence
breaks open, the dog will able to get out.
 It serves as an important transition between earlier stages of development and the coming stage
where children will learn how to think more abstractly and hypothetical.
 Egocentrism is not found in children in the concrete operation stage.
The various concrete operations children start to master during this middle childhood stage of their
development:
1. Conservation
 It involves the ability to understand when the amount of something remains constant across
two or more situations despite the appearance of that thing changing across those situations.
 Children capable of conservation appreciate that an object’s quality is not altered simply by
transforming how that object appears.
 Piaget came to understand that the ability to conserve depended upon two more fundamental
cognitive or thinking skills: Decentration and Reversibility.
 Decentration
 It involves the ability to pay attention to multiple attributes of an objects or situation rather
than being locked into attending to only a single attribute.
 Through the development of decentration skills, older children start to be able to pay
attention to more than one at a time.
 Helps children to advance their math and reading skills by making it possible for them to go
beyond simple memorization of symbols and begin to understand how symbols can be
arranged to convey meaning.
 Reversibility
 One of the most important development in this stage. Children understand that numbers or
objects can be changed, then return to their original state.
2. Classification
 Piaget also believed that children in the middle childhood master hierarchical classification; the
ability to simultaneously sort things into general and more specific groups, using different types
of comparisons. Most children develop hierarchical classification ability between ages 7 and 10.
3. Seriation
 It involves the ability to put things in order based on quantity or magnitude.
 Children count number in order, they are demonstrating the ability to seriate.
 Children often use their seriation skill in school context.
4. Spatial Reasoning
 It is the ability to understand and reason (to draw conclusions) using cues in the environment
that convey information about distance or direction.
 During middle childhood, children become able to discriminate objects that are nearby and far
away based on their apparent size. They learn that object that are further away will appear
smaller than objects that are closer.
 For the first time of their lives, middle-childhood children become able to give directions using other
person’s vantage point rather than their own.
Children’s development of spatial reasoning skills, including their ability to represent places from multiple
perspectives helps them to form more accurate cognitive maps (mental pictures of their environment) than
they could previously.
Even though middle childhood aged children who have achieved concrete operations stage have made many
gains in their thinking abilities, they have not yet reached the level of adult thinking because they are not
skilful at thinking abstractly.
Cognitive Milestones
Elementary-aged children learns sequential manner, meaning they need to understand numbers before they
can perform a mathematical equation.
Young primary-aged children can do the following:
 can tell left from right
 can able to speak and express themselves
 in school, they share about themselves and their families
 During play, they practice using the words and language they learn from school.
 they start to understand times and days of the week
 they enjoy rhymes, riddles and jokes
 their attention span is longer
 they can follow more involved stories
 they are learning letters and words
 by six, most can read words or combinations of words
Implications to Child care, Parenting and Education
The parents, caregivers and teachers should:
 Use concrete props and visuals things especially when dealing with sophisticated materials.
 Continue to give kids a chance to manipulate and tests objects.
 Make sure readings are brief and well organized.
 Use familiar examples to explain more complex ideas.
 Give opportunities to classify and group objects and ideas on increasingly complex level.
 Present problems that require concrete thinking.
 Let the child explore and solved the problems.
 Facilitate learners by providing a variety experiences.
Information Processing Theory
 This is another theory that has been used to explain children’s cognitive development during
childhood. It describes how children retain, organize, and use information while learning and how
these abilities change over the course of children’s development.
 This is a single minded theory that views children squarely in terms of their ability to consume, digest,
and regurgitate information. Accordingly, children take “inputs” from their experiences, process them
internally, and create behavioural “outputs”.
 The major utility of information processing theory with regards to the middle childhood time period is
that it provides concepts and language useful for understanding children’s mental abilities in the
context of school environment and tasks.
Attention
 During middle childhood, as children become more efficient at processing “inputs”, their attention
span lengthens in duration their ability to focus and concentrate their attention becomes more
pronounced and reliable. Children gain the ability to sustain their attention towards a topic for
longer periods of time. Further, their ability to inhibit or ignore the automatic tendency of their
attention to become captured by distractions (such as birds twittering outside the window) also
improves.
 A child’s persistent inability to sustain focus on activities may be a sign of Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
Memory
 According to Information Processing Theory, children’s memory capacity and ability to use their
memory also increases and improves during middle childhood.
 At this age children become better able to use memorization strategies (e.g., heuristics or short
cuts for remembering, for instance, learning the first letter of each word in a list you are trying to
remember. The “ROYGBIV” is an example of such a mnemonic strategy for remembering the colors
in the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet.
Middle childhood children’s overall knowledge continues to grow and become better organized as a by-
product of their everyday use of their cognitive skills. With the growth of their knowledge base, their meta-
cognitive abilities also mature. The term “meta-cognition” describes children’s growing ability to pay attention
to their own mental state and use this information to more efficiently solve problems.
Language Development
 A far more visible expression of children’s cognitive development during middle childhood can be
found in their ability to use and appreciate increasingly sophisticated forms of language.
 During elementary school, vocabulary increases four-fold and exceeds 40,000 words. Reading
contributes enormously to vocabulary growth.
 School-aged children’s learn how to emphasize or stress certain syllables so as to alter the meaning of
words and sentences.
 Children develop meta-linguistic awareness. This skill helps them begin to appreciate that
communications can carry multiple layers of meaning at once, beyond just the surface layer and the
literal meaning of the basic words that are used.
 They begin to understand and tell more complex jokes, metaphors, and puns and to appreciate
sarcasm.
 Children’s grasp of grammar improves, enabling them to start using more complex sentence structures
in their speech and writing.
 They also develop referential communication skills, meaning that they develop the ability to clearly
express their own ideas as well as to ask for clarification when they don’t understand what other
people saying.
Language production depends on children’s mastery of fine motor control over the movements of their lips,
tongue, breath, etc. Similarly, mastery of complex language phrasing and sentence construction depends on
children’s various cognitive abilities, including memory and attention. Delays on these other systems may
cause delays in children’s language development.
Developmental Disorder and Learning Disabilities

Children’s cognitive and social skills are evaluated as they enter and progress through school. Sometimes this
evaluation indicates that a child needs special assistance with language or in learning how to interact with
others. Evaluation and diagnosis of a child can be the first step in helping to provide the child with the type of
instruction and resources needed.
Here are some developmental and learning difficulties:
 Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that affects communication and
behaviour. A person with autism has difficulty with and a lack of interest in learning language.
 Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties
with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. For example,
the child may reverse letters, may have difficulty reading from left to right, or may have problems
associating letters with sounds.
 Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is considered a neurological and behavioural disorder
in which a person has difficult staying on task, screening out distractions, and inhibiting behavioural
outbursts.
SOURCES:
https://www.gracepointwellness.org/1272-child-development-theory-middle-childhood-8-11/article/37677-
cognitive-development-piagets-concrete-operations
https://www.slideshare.net/khim23/module-19-cognitive-development
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-lifespandevelopment/chapter/introduction-to-cognitive-
development-in-middle-childhood/
https://www.slideshare.net/rahmani1/piaget-cognitive-development-theory

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GROUP 2

Leader: Ma. Bernadette L. Magtiza

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRIMARY SCHOOLERS

Cognitive Development: Piaget’s Concrete Operations

Developmental Disorder and Learning Disabilities

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