SUMMARY

Building on Theory

1. According to Piaget, middle childhood is the time of concrete operational thought, when egocentrism diminishes and logical thinking begins. School-age children can understand classification, conservation, and seriation.

2. Vygotsky stressed the social context of learning, including the specific lessons of school and learning from peers and adults. Culture affects not only what children learn but also how they learn.

3. An information-processing approach examines each step of the thinking process, from input to output, using the computer as a model. This approach is useful for understanding memory, perception, and expression.

4. Memory begins with information that reaches the brain from the sense organs. Then, selection processes, benefiting from past experience, allow some information to reach working memory. Finally, long-term memory indefinitely stores images and ideas that can be retrieved when needed.

5. A broader knowledge base, logical strategies for retrieval, and faster processing advance every aspect of memory and cognition. Control processes are crucial. Children become better at controlling and directing their thinking as the prefrontal cortex matures. Metacognition and executive processing improve over the years of middle childhood and beyond.

Language

6. Language learning advances in many practical ways, including expanded vocabulary. Words are logically linked together and an understanding of metaphors begins.

7. Children excel at pragmatics during middle childhood, often using one code with their friends and another in school. Many children become fluent in the school language while speaking their first language at home.

8. Children of low SES are usually lower in linguistic skills, primarily because they hear less language at home and because adult expectations for their learning are low. This is not inevitable for low-SES families, however.

Teaching and Learning

9. Nations and experts agree that education is critical during middle childhood. Almost all the world’s children now attend primary school. Schools differ in what and how they teach, especially with regard to religion, languages, and the arts.

10. International assessments are useful as comparisons, partly because few objective measures of learning are available. Reading is assessed with the PIRLS, math and science with the TIMSS. On both measures, children in East Asia excel and children in the United States are in the middle ranks.

11. In the United States, the No Child Left Behind Act and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) attempt to raise the standard of education, with mixed success. The Common Core, developed with the sponsorship of the governors of the 50 states, is an effort to raise national standards and improve accountability.

12. Nations differ in how much overall control the central government has on education and how much choice and influence parents have. Unlike almost all other countries, in the United States, each state, each district, and sometimes each school retains significant control. Education is a political issue as much or more than a developmental one.

13. Disagreements about the best type of school are frequent; some parents choose charter schools, others prefer private schools, and still others opt for home schooling. However, some parents value particular aspects of schooling (class size, homework) more than do many educators. More research is needed to discover what is best.