31 Aug HSCO 502 Impact Assignment Instructions

HSCO 502

Impact Assignment Instructions

Overview

The focus of this assignment is on situational and environmental elements that impact normal development.

Intructions

Your Impact Paper Assignment must be at least 6 pages including a title page, 4 pages in the body, and a reference page. Note: You may have up to 6 pages in the body of your paper. In addition, you must include your textbook and at least 3 other scholarly sources besides the textbook as you develop your paper. You must use these sources to provide an overview of the most meaningful information from your sources that helps you understand the topic.

This paper must be written in current APA format.

Topic: Parenting Styles (impact on children)

Use the following headings to organize your paper. Provide insight to these questions from your reading and research on the topic:

Introduction

· How is the topic defined or conceptualized?

· Importance to the field of human development

Developmental Impact

· At what age and stage does this issue typically impact a person?

· What is its potential impact on a person’s development progress?

· What is the impact to cognitive, social, emotional, relationship, and/or moral dimensions of development?

Faith & Professional Perspectives

· Are there Christian principles or biblical themes that provide explanation or clarification you want to include?

· What are the most important considerations for human services providers to know as they work with individuals and families experiencing this impact to development?

Resources

· Provide 2 suggestions of educational readings that you might suggest if a client was impacted by your topic. What reading materials would be most beneficial and appropriate for your clients? You must research literature, read reviews and excerpts, and become knowledgable and comfortable with the content of the materials. Then, make 2 suggestions of the best information you found and would be comfortable recommending to clients. Provide the title, a link to the source, and a 1-paragraph explanation of the content.

· Provide 2 referral sources that you could recommend to clients. Research providers in your local area that offer services and care related to your impact topic. Provide a web link to the agency or organization. Under the link, provide a 1-paragraph explanation of services they provide that are related to your topic and why you would recommend it.

References

Provide a complete list of references in current APA format that you used to inform your paper.

Writing Guidelines

Your references can include peer-reviewed journal articles found in Liberty’s library or credible web resources; if you are not sure of the credibility of your web resource, ask your instructor before using it. Provide appropriate citations and references for any information you use in this paper. Write the paper using professional writing etiquette and consult the Liberty Writing Center if you have questions about grammar or format. Remember that all work must be your own and plagiarism is not tolerated. Be sure to review the plagiarism policy in your syllabus. Make sure to use in-text citations throughout your paper. Anything that is not common knowledge or is not an original thought must be cited or it is considered plagiarism. Direct quotes should not be used, but rather you should rephrase ideas into your own words. In-text citations should be in current APA format (Author, Year).

Note: Your assignment will be checked for originality via the Turnitin plagiarism tool.

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Chapter 6

Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood

Malik is 8-1/2 years old and in the third grade. He lives in a blue-collar, urban neighborhood that borders on a much poorer section of the city. He’s on schedule when it comes to learning to read, and he’s particularly good in math. There are three kids in his class who are pulled out for an advanced math class, and he is one of them. The school’s playground has little to offer except a basketball hoop at one end. The most active and aggressive boys tend to take over that end of the playground during recess. Malik usually spends recess at the opposite end, with a couple of good friends, including his next-door neighbor, Benj. They like to play a complex game of tag, often negotiating and changing the rules.

Malik lives with his mother, father, grandmother, and 3-year-old twin brothers. All of the adults in his family work, and so after school each day Malik lets himself into their row home with his key, fixes himself a snack, and either does his homework or plays video games (usually the latter). He is not permitted outside, or to have friends in, unless one of his parents or grandmother is home to monitor him. His mom arrives home about 5:30, along with his brothers, who spend their weekdays in a child care center. After they talk for a bit, his mom expects Malik to take charge of the twins, playing games or reading to them while she prepares dinner. Malik is good at distracting the boys, and after being on his own for several hours he’s usually happy to have their company until everyone else gets home. When dinner is over, Malik has responsibility for taking out the trash, but otherwise, if his homework is done, he watches TV or plays video games with Benj until bedtime.

Development is so rapid during the early childhood years that it is not uncommon for parents to view their elementary school aged child as having grown up, almost overnight. However, children are still far from grown up in middle childhood. They face a whole new set of developmental challenges. Many youngsters begin to spend longer periods away from home, some face hours on their own, and all children must adjust to more rigorous schedules. They must learn to control their behavior, monitor their attention, and acquire formal and complicated academic competencies. They must make friends and learn to navigate the schoolyard, with its greater demands for athletic prowess, social skill, and cooperative negotiation of conflicts. They must also learn the rules of the group and when to abide by them. They must discover what it means to be male or female, not to mention what it means to be themselves. So many challenges await them.

However, children of elementary school age are also more adept at almost every task when compared to their preschool-aged siblings. Observing the eagerness and energy children exhibit in the early school years makes it easy to understand the capacity for industry that Erikson described (see Chapter 1). For most children, the challenges of school and peer group will be mastered gradually, and in many different ways. Armed with foundational skills in language, mobility, self-regulation, and understanding of self and others, the youngster is now poised to assume membership in a larger social network.

Clearly, the years of elementary school, as the years to follow, are marked by ups and downs. These normal fluctuations create opportunities for helpers to provide support or guidance for children, their families, and their teachers. What are the cognitive, emotional, and social needs of children at this stage? What approaches are most helpful given children’s developmental level? In the next two chapters, we will attempt to provide you with information that will be useful when working with children at this point in their development. Your understanding of cognitive development, the focus of this chapter, will enable you to understand children’s ways of construing the world, helping you appreciate their academic needs as well as the intellectual bases for their friendships, gender roles, moral understanding, and conflicts.

Brain and Behavior

Let’s begin by briefly considering the child’s changing brain. Changes in brain size and organization accompany the accomplishments of middle childhood. It is tempting to assume that these brain changes are “maturational,” that is, triggered by pre-programmed genetic activity. But remember the epigenetic process when you think about brain development: “it is the ongoing interaction of the organism and the environment that guides biological . . . development. Brains do not develop normally in the absence of genetic signaling, and they do not develop normally in the absence of essential and contingent environmental input” (emphasis added; Stiles, 2009, pp. 196–197). Put more positively, genes and experience dynamically interact to influence emerging brain organization (Stiles, Brown, Hoist, Hoist & Jernigan, 2015). There is no simple answer to the question, “Is this brain/behavioral change genetic or determined by experience?” It is both.

Even though the brain is at 95% of its peak size by age 6, it grows measurably in middle childhood (Blakemore, 2012; Mills et al., 2016). Cortical gray areas increase in volume up to about age 9 or 10, at least partly because the surface of the cortex expands (Mills et al., 2016; Ziegler, Ridgway, Blakemore, Ashburner, & Penny, 2017). There is some dispute about whether the cortex thickens during this period as well, or whether it starts to thin from about age 3 (Walhovd, Fjell, Giedd, Dale, & Brown, 2017). But there is no disagreement that much of the growth of the brain during childhood is due to increases in the volume of white matter (Piccolo et al., 2016; Walhovd et al., 2017). These brain changes slow down by late adolescence, although some continue into adulthood.

Let’s consider the growth of white matter in middle childhood. As you learned in Chapter 2, white matter is “white” because of the fatty myelin sheaths that form around the axons, insulating them so that electrical impulses travel faster from one neuron to another. Myelination increases the speed of neural signals dramatically. Also, functional neural networks become more integrated because myelin changes the timing and synchrony of neuronal firing (Giedd & Rapoport, 2010). Overall then, increasing white matter seems to reflect increasing neural connectivity and communication between neurons and between brain areas.

For example, one important area of white matter increase is the corpus callosum. This is the system of connecting fibers (bundles of axons) between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. As the corpus callosum myelinates, the left and right sides of the body become more coordinated. The upshot is that children have much greater motor control, something you can appreciate if you compare the awkward full frontal running of a 3-year-old to the ducking and weaving you might see by Malik and his friends as they avoid capture during a game of tag. Changes in the corpus callosum (along with other brain areas, like the cerebellum) influence and are influenced by the great strides school age children make in both gross motor (e.g., riding a bicycle, skating, climbing trees, jumping rope) and fine motor (e.g., cutting, drawing, writing) skills. Much of this chapter is focused on typical (normative) development in middle childhood, but there are many individual differences among children. Researchers are beginning to link some of these to brain development. For example, children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can show atypical variations in brain development (e.g., Sowell et al., 2003). Between 5% and 10% of school-age children are diagnosed with ADHD based on one or more of a cluster of symptoms that are especially problematic for school performance: poor attentional control (distractibility, problems sustaining attention), restlessness or hyperactivity. , and impulsivity (e.g., Martel, Levinson, Langer, & Nigg, 2016). Studies comparing structural MRIs for children with and without ADHD have found differences in several brain areas. These include the frontal lobes, where normative growth is associated with improvements in attention and other higher order cognitive processes. Other areas include the parietal lobes, basal ganglia, corpus callosum, and cerebellum (e.g., Friedman & Rapoport, 2015; Kumar, Arya, & Agarwal, 2017; Wyciszkiewicz, Pawlak, & Krawiec, 2017).

For many children with ADHD, the “difference” is really a delay, especially in the growth of the cerebral cortex. The middle prefrontal cortex shows the greatest delay, with growth for ADHD children lagging behind typically developing children by as much as 5 years (e.g., Shaw et al., 2007, 2012). Fortunately, about half of ADHD cases diagnosed in childhood remit by late adolescence or early adulthood. For those children, it appears that brain development follows a delayed but typical trajectory. For cases of ADHD that do not remit, researchers have found unusual, progressive loss of brain volume in some brain areas, such as the cerebellum (Mackie et al., 2007; Shaw et al., 2013). Note that there is some disagreement about whether ADHD actually comprises more than one disorder, with different frontal brain areas more affected in one type versus another (see Diamond, 2005).

Many children not diagnosed with ADHD are behaviorally different from average—they have better or worse attentional control or they are more or less impulsive or active than other children their age. Giedd and Rapoport (2010) suggest that “ADHD is best considered dimensionally, lying at the extreme of a continuous distribution of symptoms and underlying cognitive impairments” (p. 730). In line with this argument, they report that for children who are considered typically developing but more active and impulsive than average, brain changes also take place at a slower rate. Thus, researchers are beginning to identify some neurological differences among children that align with their behavioral differences. In general, helpers need to remember that there is a significant amount of unevenness in brain development in middle childhood, both between and within children (e.g., Berninger & Hart, 1992; Myers et al., 2014). It is not unusual for children to show lagging performance in some skills and more rapid advances in other skills than their age mates.

Cognitive Development

When children leave behind the preschool years, they begin to seem more savvy to adults. As you saw with Malik, they can be given fairly complex responsibilities (“Come straight home from school and lock the door after you’re in the house. Don’t forget to have a snack and then do your homework.”). They can participate in discussions of local or world events, and they often appreciate humor that would have been lost on them earlier. The cognitive developments that underlie these new capacities have been described and studied from several different theoretical traditions. We will first present Jean Piaget’s characterization of cognitive change in middle childhood.

Piaget’s View: The Emergence of Concrete Operations

Let’s review the basic points you have already learned about Piaget’s description of cognitive development. One key idea is that knowledge is constructed; it is not just “stamped in” by experience or teaching. Children assimilate new information, meaning that they change it, interpreting it in ways that fit in with what they already know or with the way their thinking is structured. Simultaneously, they accommodate or adjust their existing knowledge structures somewhat. The result can be that when children are presented with new information, what they actually learn and understand about it often is not completely consistent with reality or with the information that adults mean to convey. Gradually, as new experiences are assimilated and accommodated, children’s knowledge and understanding come closer and closer to matching reality.

The Construction of Knowledge in Middle Childhood

Children in the middle years are confronted with lots of new information every day, especially in school. Let’s consider one illustration: the information that the Earth is round. Children all over the world are taught the “round Earth concept” early in elementary school. But the Earth looks flat, so much so that for thousands of years, until Copernicus came along in the 16th century, even scholars believed that it was flat. It will not surprise you then that children start out believing that the Earth is flat. So how do they reconcile what they believe, based on what they perceive, with what they are told? Piaget (1929) and many other researchers since have found that children construct some surprising theories as they try to fit the information their elders give them to the concepts they already have.

For example, Vosniadou and her colleagues did a series of studies interviewing children about how the Earth could be round. Figure 6.1 illustrates a few of the ideas Minnesota children in grades 1 to 5 came up with (Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992). It appears that children begin by trying to fit the information that the Earth is round to their naïve view that the Earth is flat. Some children said the Earth was a flat disc—like a coin. Some thought it was a ball that has a flat surface within it and a domed sky overhead. Others saw the Earth as spherical but with a flattened side where people live. The researchers found that the older the child, the more likely he was to represent the Earth as the sphere that scientists believe it to be. But even in fifth grade, 40% of the children still had some other idea of what it meant for the Earth to be round. Similar ideas have been found among school children from countries around the world, including Israel, Nepal, India, Greece, Samoa, Australia, and China (see Hayes, Goodhew, Heit, & Gillan, 2003; Tao, Oliver, & Venville, 2013), and from different subcultures within the United States (e.g., Native Americans; Diakidoy, Vosniadou, & Hawks, 1997).

It appears that what adults teach is not necessarily what children learn. One of the practical implications of Piaget’s constructivism is that teachers are likely to be more effective in promoting change in children’s naïve concepts if they are mindful of how new information is being assimilated and accommodated by their students. Asking probing questions can be quite useful. Carey (e.g., 2000, 2015) has argued that it helps to know as much about the structure of children’s current conceptual ideas or “theories” as possible. Then, teaching can focus on modifying the pieces of the structure that are, in a sense, supporting each other. So, for example, Vosniadou’s interviews of children about round Earth concepts uncovered that two important beliefs were connected. First, children saw the Earth as flat. Second, children had a simple idea of gravity: Things fall down, not up, which makes it difficult to understand why things wouldn’t fall off the Earth on the “bottom side” of a round Earth. Some of children’s strange models of a round Earth were efforts to integrate the round earth concept with both of these ideas.

Logical Thinking and Problem Solving in Middle Childhood

You’ll recall that despite the gradual construction process that Piaget described, in which knowledge structures are continually changing, he considered there to be stages of thought development, so that within a relatively broad period of time, children’s thinking about many different things has some similar organizational properties. We have already discussed some of the characteristics that Piaget attributed to the sensorimotor (0 to 2 years) and preoperational (2 to 6 or 7 years) stages (see Chapter 3). In this chapter, we will consider his view of children’s thinking in the concrete operational stage, the period spanning the elementary school years from about age 6 to 12.

To understand how Piaget described the thinking of school-aged children, recall the limitations of the younger, preoperational thinker. Generally, preschoolers focus on one salient dimension of a situation at a time, and so they often miss the important relationships among aspects of a situation. Logical thinking is difficult to characterize, but it certainly includes the ability to recognize and take into account all of the relevant information in a problem situation and then to identify how those pieces of relevant information are related to each other. Consider the following simple problem in deductive logic: “All glippies are annoying. George is a glippy. Is George annoying?” To answer correctly, you must take into account a number of pieces of information—that there are glippies, that they are annoying, that there is an individual named George, and that George is a glippy. The important relationship you are then in a position to identify is between George and the characteristics of glippies: If he’s one of them, he must be like them. From there you can infer that George is, indeed, annoying.

As we saw in Chapter 3, in very simple situations, even preschoolers can sometimes take into account more than one piece of information at a time. For example, sometimes they can solve very simple deductive inference problems, like the glippy problem (e.g., Blewitt, 1989; Smith, 1979). But more often, their thinking is centered, making it seem quite illogical. Remember the number conservation problems that Piaget invented? Three-year-olds actually think that the number of candies in a row increases if the row is spread out. They focus (center) on the change in length, but they fail to note the corresponding change in the density of the row.

When children are in the concrete operational stage, they usually answer number conservation questions correctly. They may look at the “spread out” row of candies and say “it looks like more,” but they can logically conclude that it remains the same number of candies as before. Piaget argued that their logic is dependent on being able to understand the relationship between the row’s increasing length and decreasing density (the candies are not as close together). Because children can decenter (think about more than one dimension of the situation at once), they can discover the relationships among those dimensions.

The compensatory relationship between the length and density of the row of candies is a kind of reversible relationship. In essence, one change reverses the effects of the other change. Piaget thought that being able to recognize reversible relationships is especially important for solving many kinds of logical problems, allowing children a deeper understanding of the world around them. For example, preschoolers can learn the following two number facts: “2 + 1 = 3” and “3 – 1 = 2.” But only when a child recognizes reversible relationships is he likely to realize that the second fact is the inverse of the first and therefore that they are logically connected. If the first fact is true, then the second fact must be true. To put it differently, knowing the first fact allows the child to deduce the second one if he can think reversibly. When children’s thinking becomes efficient enough to decenter, and thus to identify reversible relationships, children can begin to draw logical conclusions in many situations. This is the hallmark of the concrete operational child.

Piaget also identified limits to concrete operations. School-aged children seem to be most capable when the problems they are solving relate to concrete contents, and they seem to expect their solutions to map onto the real world in a straightforward way. But when a problem is disconnected from familiar, realistic content, these children have a difficult time identifying the relevant aspects of the problem and finding how those aspects are related to each other. Here are two versions of the same logical problem. (Logicians call it a modus tollens conditional reasoning problem.) The first version is completely abstract—disconnected from any familiar content. The second is framed in terms of familiar, concrete events (adapted from Markovits, 2017). Try to solve the first one before reading the second one.

1. Suppose it is true that if P occurs, then Q occurs. And suppose that Q has not occurred. Has P occurred?

2. Suppose that it is true that if a rock is thrown at a window, then the window will break. And suppose that the window is not broken. Has a rock been thrown at the window?

3. The logical relationship among the pieces of information is the same for each problem, and the answer to each is the same: “No.” Concrete operational children can usually give the right answer to the second problem, but not the first. You may have found the first problem more difficult too; most of us find completely abstract problems a challenge. But we adults are much more likely to solve them correctly than elementary school children.

Here is another example of how important concrete experience is for elementary school children to think logically. In a classic study, Osherson and Markman (1975) asked children to say whether certain statements were true, false, or “can’t tell.” The experimenter made statements such as “The [poker] chip in my hand is either green or it’s not green.” Sometimes the poker chip was visible; at other times the chip was hidden in the experimenter’s fist. If the chip were hidden, children in the elementary school years would usually say, “can’t tell,” asking to see the chip to judge the statement. But the statement’s truth was not determined by the actual color of the chip; it was determined by the linguistic elements in the sentence and the relationships between them (e.g., “either-or”). No check with the concrete world was necessary or even helpful. A chip, any chip, is either green or it’s not. In other words, the abstract, formal properties of the statement, not concrete objects, were the contents of importance. Concrete operational children find it difficult to think logically about abstract contents, and they seek out concrete or realistic equivalents to think about in order to solve a problem.

Children’s tendency to “hug the ground of empirical reality” (Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 1993, p. 139) is especially obvious when they need to think logically about their own thinking. Suppose for a moment that you are a child who believes you have a pair of lucky socks. You think that if you wear your lucky socks, you’re more likely to hit a home run playing baseball than if you don’t wear them. To test this theory scientifically, you would need to weigh the evidence, pro and con. But before you could do this effectively, you would need to recognize that your belief about your lucky socks is really an assumption or a theory, only one of many possible theories. As such, it could be wrong. Because you already believe your theory, it will seem like a fact to you. You would need to apply careful logical thinking to your own thought processes, first to distinguish your belief from true facts or observations and then to see the relationship between your theory and those facts. However, if you are 8 or 9 years old, you have trouble thinking logically about anything abstract, and theories (or thoughts) are certainly abstract. So, logically evaluating any of your own beliefs or theories is not likely to be easy for you.

Children’s tendency to “hug the ground of empirical reality” (Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 1993, p. 139) is especially obvious when they need to think logically about their own thinking. Suppose for a moment that you are a child who believes you have a pair of lucky socks. You think that if you wear your lucky socks, you’re more likely to hit a home run playing baseball than if you don’t wear them. To test this theory scientifically, you would need to weigh the evidence, pro and con. But before you could do this effectively, you would need to recognize that your belief about your lucky socks is really an assumption or a theory, only one of many possible theories. As such, it could be wrong. Because you already believe your theory, it will seem like a fact to you. You would need to apply careful logical thinking to your own thought processes, first to distinguish your belief from true facts or observations and then to see the relationship between your theory and those facts. However, if you are 8 or 9 years old, you have trouble thinking logically about anything abstract, and theories (or thoughts) are certainly abstract. So, logically evaluating any of your own beliefs or theories is not likely to be easy for you.

As a result, researchers have found that although elementary-school-aged children can think scientifically sometimes, identifying simple theories and checking them against evidence, they make a muddle of it if they already believe a certain theory (e.g., Kuhn & Franklin, 2006; Moshman, 2015). Children get better at evaluating their own theories as they move into adolescence and become capable of what Piaget called formal operational thought—logical thought about abstract material. As you will see in Chapter 9, adolescents often extend their logical thought processes to many kinds of highly abstract contents, including their own thinking. As you have already seen though, even adolescents and adults find this kind of abstract thinking a challenge and may make some of the same errors as concrete thinkers.

Even though middle childhood has its cognitive limitations, Piaget was on to something in identifying it as a time when children can be expected to think logically. In every culture in the world, adults seem to recognize that somewhere between ages 5 and 7 children become more sensible, reliable problem solvers. In societies with formal schooling, kids are sent to school to work at serious tasks that will prepare them to take their place in the community of adults. In societies without formal schooling, children are given real work to do by age 6 or 7, tasks that are essential to the community (such as watching younger children, planting, or shepherding).

Piaget’s description of the concrete operational child as a logical thinker about concrete contents has proved a useful one, and it seems to capture the typical cognitive characteristics of middle childhood quite well. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, some of Piaget’s own research and much of the newer work makes it clear that there are no sharply defined stages in development. Just