7.2 Cognition in Middle Childhood

Learning is rapid in childhood. Young children’s brains are continually growing and their cognitive abilities become more sophisticated. As you read at the beginning of this chapter, by age 11 some children can beat their elders at chess, while others play music that adults pay to hear, publish poems, or solve complex math problems in their heads. In fact, during these years, children can learn almost anything. Adults need to decide how and what to teach. Theories and practices differ, as you will see.

Piaget and Middle Childhood

Piaget called the cognition of middle childhood concrete operational thought, characterized by concepts that enable children to use logic. Operational comes from the Latin word operare, “to work; to produce.”

By calling this period “operational,” Piaget emphasized productive thinking. The 6- to 11-year-old school-age child, no longer limited by egocentrism and static reasoning, performs logical operations. However, thinking at this stage is concrete—that is, logic is applied to visible, tangible, real things, not to abstractions, which are understood at the next stage, formal operations.

A Hierarchy of CategoriesAn example of concrete thinking is classification, the organization of things into groups (or categories or classes) according to some characteristic that they share. For example, children may sort their building blocks by shapes (squares, triangles, rectangles) or sort their Smarties by colour before eating them. Other common classes are people and animals. Each class includes some elements and excludes others, and each is part of a hierarchy.

Piaget devised many experiments to reveal children’s understanding of classification. For example, in one study, an examiner showed a child a bunch of nine flowers—seven yellow daisies and two white roses (revised and published in Piaget et al., 2001). The examiner made sure the child knew the words “flowers,” “daisies,” and “roses.” Then the examiner asked, “Are there more daisies or more flowers?” Until about age 7, most children say, “More daisies.” Young children offer no justification for their answers, but some 6- or 7-year-olds explain that “there are more yellow ones than white ones” or that “because daisies are daisies, they aren’t flowers” (Piaget et al., 2001). By age 8, most children can classify correctly: “More flowers than daisies,” they say, and they can explain why they think so.

Math ConceptsAnother logical concept is seriation, the understanding that things can be arranged in a logical series, such as from smallest to biggest. Seriation is crucial for using the alphabet or the number sequence (not merely memorizing, which younger children can do). By age 5 years, most children can count up to 100, but they cannot correctly estimate where any particular two-digit number would be placed on a line that starts at 0 and ends at 100. Generally, children can do this by age 8 (Meadows, 2006).

Science Project Concrete operational 12-year-olds, like the girls shown here in a Toronto-area school, can be logical about anything they see, hear, or touch. Their science experiment—figuring out how to carry construction materials from the ground to the roof of the school—involves building elevators from Popsicle sticks, straws, tape, glue, and wood. As they work together to solve this problem, the girls discover what works and what doesn’t, document why, and make changes as a result of their discoveries.

PETER POWER/TORONTO STAR VIA GETTY IMAGES

Concrete operational thinking allows children to understand math operations. For example, once children understand conservation (explained in Chapter 5), they realize that 12 + 3 = 3 + 12, and that 15 is always 15. Reversibility allows the realization that if 5 × 3 = 15, then 15 divided by 3 must be 5.

Although Piaget was mistaken, there is no sudden shift between preoperational and concrete operational logic, his experiments revealed that, after about age 6, children use mental categories and subcategories more flexibly and inductively. They are less egocentric and more advanced as thinkers, and are operational in ways that younger children are not (Meadows, 2006).

Vygotsky and Middle Childhood

Like Piaget, Vygotsky felt that educators should consider thought processes, not just the outcomes. He recognized that younger children are confused by some concepts that older children understand because they have not yet learned to process the ideas.

The Role of InstructionUnlike Piaget, Vygotsky regarded instruction as crucial to cognitive development (Vygotsky, 1934/1994). He thought that experts such as teachers and parents who have more advanced skills and knowledge can help children transition from potential development to actualization. Through the use of guided participation and scaffolding, children move through the zone of proximal development to eventually acquire the necessary skills and knowledge, as explained in Chapters 1 and 5.

Confirmation of the role of social interaction and instruction comes from children who, because of their school’s entry-date cut-off, begin kindergarten when they are relatively young or old, not quite 5 or almost 6. Achievement scores of those 6-year-olds who began school relatively young, and thus already had a year of Grade 1, far exceed those of 6-year-olds who were born only one month later but had just completed kindergarten (Lincove & Painter, 2006; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2007). Obviously, children learn a great deal from time in school.

Remember that Vygotsky believed education occurs everywhere—not only in school—through social interaction and technology. Children teach one another as they play together. They learn from people they see in the neighbourhood, from having dinner with their families, from television and computers, and from every other daily experience. In other words, children’s cognitive development and learning is shaped by the everyday activity of their culture. And their culture influences what and how they learn.

An example of knowledge acquired from the social context comes from children in the northeast Indian district of Varanasi, many of whom have an extraordinary sense of spatial orientation—such as knowing whether they are facing north or south even when they are inside a room with no windows. In one experiment, after Varanasi children were blindfolded, spun around, and led to a second room, many of them knew which way they were facing (Mishra et al., 2009). This skill was learned during early childhood because people in that culture refer to the compass orientation to name the location of objects and so on. (Although the specifics differ, a cultural equivalent might be to say that the dog is sleeping southeast, not that the dog is sleeping by the door).

The Importance of Formal Instruction Many child vendors, like this boy selling combs and other grooming aids on the streets of Manaus, Brazil, understand basic math and the give-and-take of social interaction. However, deprived of formal education, they know little or nothing about history and literature.

DAVID R. FRAZIER PHOTOLIBRARY, INC./ALAMY

This amazing sense of direction, or any other skill learned in childhood, does not automatically transfer from one context to another. The blindfolded children retained their excellent sense of direction in this experiment, but a child from Varanasi might become disoriented in the tangle of mega-city streets—still knowing where north is, but not knowing how to get downtown. In addition, a child who is logical about math may not be logical about family relationships.

In North America, as in many parts of the world, adults are particularly concerned that 6- to 11-year-olds learn academic skills and knowledge. For this, Vygotsky’s emphasis on mentoring is insightful. For instance, a large study of reading and math achievement of Grade 3 and 5 children found that high-scoring children usually had three sources of cognitive stimulation:

• their families (parents read to them daily when they were toddlers)
• preschool programs (children were involved with a variety of learning activities)
• Grade 1 (teachers emphasized literacy, with sensitivity to individual needs).

Although low-SES children were less likely to have all three experiences, the achievement scores of those few low-SES children who did have these mentoring advantages were higher than the average of high-SES children who did not have all three advantages (Crosnoe et al., 2010). In other words, active mentoring trumped socioeconomic status.

In addition, culture affects mentors and methods. This was evident in a study of 80 Mexican-American children in California (Silva et al., 2010). Half were from families where indigenous Indian learning was the norm: Children from that culture are expected to learn by watching others and to help each other if need be. The other half were from families more acculturated to U.S. norms; the children were accustomed to direct instruction, not observational learning. They expected to learn from adults and then to work on their own, without collaborating with their peers.

Researchers compared children from both backgrounds in a study in which children waited passively while a teacher taught their sibling how to make a toy. If they tried to help their brother or sister (more common among the indigenous children), they were prevented from doing so. A week later, the children were given an opportunity to make the toy themselves. The children from indigenous Indian backgrounds were better at it, which emphasizes that they learned more from observation than did the other children.

Information Processing and the Brain

As you learned in Chapter 1 the information-processing perspective is more recent than either Piaget’s or Vygotsky’s theories. Information processing benefits from technology, which allows more detailed data and analysis than was possible 50 years ago, particularly in neuroscience (Miller, 2011).

Rather than describing broad stages (Piaget) or contexts (Vygotsky), this perspective was inspired by the knowledge of how computers work. As a result, many information-processing researchers describe each small increment of input, processing, and output.

Connecting Parts of the BrainRecall that the maturing corpus callosum connects the hemispheres of the brain, enabling balance and two-handed coordination, while myelination speeds up thoughts and behaviour. The prefrontal cortex—the executive part of the brain—begins to plan, monitor, and evaluate. All of these neurological developments continue in middle childhood and beyond.

Increasing maturation results, by 7 or 8 years of age, in a “massively interconnected” brain (Kagan & Herschkowitz, 2005). Such connections are crucial for the complex tasks that children must master (M. H. Johnson et al., 2009). In fact, for many activities, children use more parts of their brains than adults do, thus requiring more connections (M. H. Johnson et al., 2009).

One example of a complex task that children must master is learning to read. Reading is not instinctual: Our ancestors never did it. The brain has no areas dedicated to reading, the way it does for talking, gesturing, or face recognition (Gabrieli, 2009). So, how do humans read without brain-specific structures? The answer is the interconnections between parts of the brain that deal with sounds, vision, comprehension, and so on, all coordinated by the prefrontal cortex.

Interconnections are needed for many social skills as well—deciding whom to trust, figuring out what is fair, interpreting ambiguous gestures and expressions. Younger children are not proficient at this. That’s why they are told, “Don’t talk to strangers,” whereas adults use judgment to decide which strangers merit which interactions.

Speed of Thought Reaction time is how long it takes the brain to respond to a stimulus; specifically, how quickly an impulse travels from one neuron to another to allow thinking to occur. Reactions are quicker with each passing year of childhood because increasing myelination and sequences of action reduce reaction time. Speedy reactions allow faster and more efficient learning. For example, school achievement requires quick coordination of multiple tasks within the brain. The result is a child who can listen to the teacher and read notes on the board or the overhead at the same time during a lesson, for example.

Indeed, reaction time relates to every intellectual, motor, and social skill, in school or not. A simple example is being able to kick a speeding soccer ball toward a teammate; a more complex example is being able to determine when to utter a witty remark and when to stay quiet. Young children find both impossible; fast-thinking older children sometimes succeed. By early adolescence, reaction time is quicker than at any later time—few adults can beat a teenager at a video game.

Pay AttentionNeurological advances allow children to do more than think quickly. As the brain matures, it allows children to pay special attention to the most important elements of their environment. A crucial step in information processing occurs before conscious awareness, as the brain responds to input by deciding if it merits consideration.

Selective attention is the ability to concentrate on some stimuli while ignoring others. This improves markedly at about age 7. Older children learn to notice various stimuli (which is one form of attention) that younger children do not (such as the small difference in the appearance of the letters b, p, and d) and to select the best response when several possibilities conflict (such as when a c sounds like an s or a k) (Rueda et al., 2007).

In the classroom, selective attention allows children to listen, answer questions, and follow instructions for a class activity while ignoring distractions (all difficult at age 6, easier by age 10). At home, children can watch their favourite television show and tune out their parents when they are telling them to clean up their toys (although not for long, since most parents have a way of making themselves heard!).

Indeed, selective attention underlies all the abilities that gradually mature during the formative years. Networks of collaborating cortical regions (M. H. Johnson et al., 2009) are required because attention involves not just one brain function, but three: alerting, orienting, and executive control (Posner et al., 2007).

Learning StrategiesOne of the leaders of the information-processing perspective is Robert Siegler, who has studied the day-by-day details of children’s understanding of math (Siegler & Chen, 2008). Remember that some logical ideas explained by Piaget relate to math understanding, but information-processing research finds that those ideas do not necessarily lead to proficient calculations.

Siegler has shown that a child attempts, ignores, half-uses, abandons, and finally adopts new and better strategies to solve math problems. Siegler compares the acquisition of knowledge to waves on a beach when the tide is rising. There is substantial ebb and flow as information is processed (Thompson & Siegler, 2010).

A practical application of the idea that knowledge comes in waves is that children need a lot of practice to master a new idea or strategy. Just because a child says a correct answer one day does not mean that the achievement is permanent. Lapses, earlier mistakes, and momentary insights are all part of the learning process—and adults need to be patient as well as consistent in what they teach.

Remembering their Lines These six girls are rehearsing for their Chatham, Ontario, school’s production of Annie. The girls, ages 9 to 11 years, have a very large capacity for long-term memory—they use a variety of strategies to remember the lines and lyrics of the play.

MICHAEL IVANIN/CHATHAM DAILY NEWS/QMI AGENCY

MemoryOne foundation of new learning appears to be memory, which allows children to connect various aspects of past knowledge. Memory is now often studied with an information-processing approach. Input, storage, and retrieval underlie the increasing cognitive abilities of the schoolchild. Each of the three major steps in the memory process—sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory—is affected by maturation and experience.

Sensory memory (also called the sensory register) is the first component of the human information-processing system. It stores incoming stimuli for a split second after they are received, with sounds being retained slightly longer than sights. To use terms explained in Chapter 3, sensations are retained for a moment, and then some become perceptions. This first step of memory is already quite good in early childhood, improves slightly until about age 10 years, and remains adequate until late adulthood.

Once some sensations become perceptions, the brain selects those perceptions that are meaningful and transfers them to working memory for further analysis. This is called selective memory, the result of selective attention as just described. It is in working memory (formerly called short-term memory) that current, conscious mental activity occurs. Processing, not mere exposure, is essential for getting information into working memory, which is why working memory improves markedly in middle childhood (Cowan & Alloway, 2009).

As Siegler’s waves metaphor suggests, memory strategies do not appear suddenly. Gradual improvement occurs from toddlerhood through adolescence (Schneider & Lockl, 2008) (see TABLE 7.1). Children develop strategies to increase working memory (Camos & Barrouillet, 2011), and they use these strategies occasionally at first, then consistently over time.

Cultural differences are evident here as well, with children learning ways to master whatever their culture expects. For example, many Muslim children are taught to memorize all 80 000 words of the Quran, and they develop strategies to remember long passages—strategies that non-Muslim children may not know. On the other hand, drawing faces is forbidden in Islam, while it is a valued skill among other groups—and those children develop strategies to improve their work, such as learning the ratio of distance between the forehead, eyes, mouth, and chin.

Finally, information from working memory may be transferred to long-term memory, to store it for minutes, hours, days, months, or years. The capacity of long-term memory—how much can be crammed into one brain—is very large by the end of middle childhood. Together with sensory memory and working memory, long-term memory organizes ideas and reactions, with more effective brain functioning over the years of middle childhood (Wendelken et al., 2011).

Crucial to long-term memory is not merely storage (how much material has been deposited) but also retrieval (how readily past learning can be brought into working memory). For everyone, at every age, retrieval is easier for some memories (especially memories of vivid, emotional experiences) than for others. And for everyone, long-term memory is imperfect: We all forget and distort memories.

KnowledgeAs information-processing researchers have found, the more people know, the more they can learn. Having an extensive knowledge base, or a broad body of knowledge in a particular subject, makes it easier to master new, related information.

Three factors facilitate increases in the knowledge base: past experience, current opportunity, and personal motivation. Because of motivation, children’s knowledge base is not always what their parents or teachers would like. Lack of motivation helps explain why some students don’t remember what they learned in science class but do remember the scores for their favourite hockey team.

Specific examples of the results of motivation on the knowledge base include that many schoolchildren memorize words and rhythms of hit songs, know plots and characters of television programs, and can recite the names and histories of hockey players—yet they may not know whether World War I occurred in the nineteenth or twentieth century, or whether Afghanistan is in Asia or Africa.

This provides a clue for teachers: New concepts are learned best if they are connected to personal and emotional experiences (Schneider & Lockl, 2008; Wittrock, 1974/2010). Parents likewise need to do more than tell children what they want them to know; they need to be actively involved with them.

Control ProcessesThe mechanisms that combine memory, processing speed, and the knowledge base are control processes; they regulate the analysis and flow of information within the system. Control processes include emotional regulation (part of impulse control, explained in Chapter 9) and selective attention, explained earlier in this chapter.

Equally important is metacognition, sometimes defined as “thinking about thinking.” Metacognition is the ultimate control process because it allows a person to evaluate a cognitive task, determine how to accomplish it, monitor performance, and then make adjustments.

Metacognition and other control processes improve with age and experience. For instance, in one study, children took a fill-in-the-blank test and indicated how confident they were of each answer. Then they were allowed to delete some questions, making the remaining ones count more. Already by age 9, the children were able to estimate correctness; by age 11, they were skilled at knowing what to delete (Roebers et al., 2009). That is metacognition, knowing which of one’s ideas are solid and which are shaky.

Long-term memory is imperfect. Gradually children become more adept at differentiating what they know with certainty and what they only imagine. Unlike younger children who sometimes can’t distinguish dreams from reality, older children use control processes to know that a certain thought was just a hope, fantasy, or dream.

Control processes can allow knowledge in one domain to transfer to another domain. This is the case for bilingual children, who learn to switch from one language to another. They are advanced not only in language, but also in other measures of executive control (Bialystok, 2010).

Information processing improves spontaneously during childhood, but children can learn explicit strategies and memory methods, as mentioned earlier. TABLE 7.1 notes memory improvements from birth to age 11 years. How much of this improvement involves metacognition? Sometimes teaching of memory is explicit, more so in some countries (e.g., Germany) than in others (e.g., the United States) (Bjorklund et al., 2009). Often children with special needs require help learning control processes (Riccio et al., 2010). Genes matter as well. Children with the long allele of dopamine D4 benefit from knowing how well they are doing in each learning task—that seems to help them control their effort. Children without that allele are not affected by immediate feedback (Kegel et al., 2011).