Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Identify the cognitive milestones of middle childhood
- Evaluate the impact of Piaget’s concrete operational stage on middle childhood
- Describe the information-processing perspective on middle childhood
Ayanna is a new second grade teacher and is thinking about her lesson plans. She has a seven-year-old student, Sarah, who struggles with attention and focus in the classroom. Sarah often gets distracted during lessons and has difficulty staying on task. Nonetheless, Sarah seems to thrive during classroom learning games and artistic activities.
Ayanna also teaches James, who has been diagnosed with dyslexia. He struggles with reading and writing tasks; he reverses letters and has trouble with phonemic awareness. James's cognitive challenges impact his confidence and self-esteem, as he feels discouraged by his struggles in comparison to his peers. However, James loves the hands-on science experiments in class and is always eager to help his classmates.
Ayanna knows that all her students are making incredible gains in their abilities to think logically and process information. She can ask children to solve problems that include concrete information. She has also started to teach them basic strategies for memorizing information, but may need to use a variety of teaching strategies to meet the individualized needs of her students.
Children’s abilities to think logically and process information changes throughout middle childhood as they pass through various stages of cognitive development.
Cognitive Milestones
During middle childhood, children make impressive gains in cognitive development. Their ability to think logically and flexibly and remember information increases dramatically. Although their thinking, problem-solving, and language use is becoming more sophisticated, they’re not yet adult-like in their cognitive abilities. Table 7.2 shows some of the major cognitive achievements children will likely make by the end of middle childhood. Some of these milestones develop earlier in middle childhood, such as the ability to tell time, while other milestones develop later in middle childhood, such as the ability to understand and use fractions. Other important milestones are abilities that further develop across early and middle childhood, such as the ability to think symbolically or to recognize and understand the perspectives of others.
| Typical Cognitive Abilities | Example |
|---|---|
| Tell time | Children can learn to read an analog clock. |
| Recognize and understand the perspectives of others | Children can understand that other people may have different beliefs and opinions. |
| Think symbolically about their world | Children can use language and art to represent objects and events. |
| Understand cause-and-effect relationships | Children will understand that if you take an ice cream cone outside on a hot day, it will melt quickly. |
| Read a book and understand paragraphs | Children move from picture books to chapter books. |
| Begin thinking logically and apply improved problem-solving abilities | Children can solve logical problems that involve quantity, such as a math problem. |
| Have longer attention spans | Children’s attention spans increase with age and range from around twelve to thirty-six minutes depending on the task, such as practicing a musical instrument without needing a break. |
| Show significant improvements in memory | Children learn to apply memory strategies like rehearsal to remember information, such as learning a rhyme to remember the number or days in each month of the year. |
| Understand math principles, including manipulation of numbers and whole versus part | Children learn to count backwards, add and subtract whole numbers, and add and subtract fractions. |
| Understand conservation of objects | Children understand that breaking a cookie does not mean that there is more cookie just because there are two pieces instead of one. |
Child development is a dynamic process, influenced by the interactions children have with the world around them. So, a range of ages rather than a single point in time is typically considered “normal” for the development of various skills. The culture in which children develop and the way caregivers share information with children varies dramatically and influences children’s learning and skill development. For example, in the United States, parents use active teaching strategies such as praise to guide children, while parents in Vanuatu, a small island country in the southern Pacific Ocean, are more likely to collaborate with children as a form of teaching (Clegg et al., 2021). Language is another important aspect of cognitive development that is impacted by culture. For example, beginning in infancy, German mothers focus on the individual needs or desires of their child, which highlights their view of the child as a unique individual. Mothers of the Cameroonian Nso focus more on the social environment they and their child are in (Vierhaus et al., 2011). This means that children are likely to show individual and cultural differences in the timing of reaching cognitive milestones.
Families and peers are also important influences for cognitive development during middle childhood. For example, parents play an important role in providing a stimulating environment for their children by interacting with them verbally and providing structured activities that allows them to explore their world. Relatively new research has also shown that fathers, as well as mothers, play an important role in the cognitive development of their children by engaging with them through reading, the use of language during interactions, and responsive parenting (Varghese & Wachen, 2016). Whereas mothers tend to use words that are familiar to children, fathers tend to use a larger variety of words, which is helpful for developing the vocabulary of their children (Vernon-Feagans et al., 2010). Fathers also tend to use more affirmations and action directives than mothers (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2012). Of course, as discussed in other chapters, there are many individual differences in families, caregivers, and the roles caregivers may play in fostering healthy cognitive development.
As you will learn in 8.3 Social Contexts: Peers, Family, and Media in Middle Childhood, children begin to spend more time with their peers, and their friendships become an increasingly important influence on cognitive development (Figure 7.7). Children learn new knowledge and skills from each other through interactions and play. They also develop new interests by observing the interests of their peers. In fact, children may learn a great deal from peers, and peer relationships play an important role in learning and cognitive development (Laursen & Veenstra, 2022; Leece et al., 2019). For example, working with peers can enhance problem-solving and creative thinking (Lew-Levy et al., 2023). This peer learning is consistent across cultures even in cultures that emphasize the importance of adult-child transmission of learning (Lew-Levy et al., 2023).
Concrete Operations in the Stage Theory of Cognitive Development
As you’ve learned, cognitive developmental theories focus on the way thought processes change with age, and how these changes in children’s thinking influence the way they understand the world and interact with it. Recall that theorist Jean Piaget proposed a cognitive developmental theory describing stages that reflect qualitatively different ways of thinking. Subsequent cross-cultural research studying areas including Bali, Indonesia, India, and Nepal, found that the sequence of stages is generally the same across cultures, and the cognitive processes within those stages are the same (Dasen, 2022).
Piaget’s concrete operational stage begins around age seven and continues until approximately age eleven, although cross-cultural research has found a fair amount of variation in the age at which children reach its various substages (Dasen, 2022). During this stage, children become capable of using logic to solve concrete problems they can directly experience and that involve tangible objects. For example, when comparing the sizes of objects, children will place them side-by-side to measure the size before lining them up by size. However, they are not yet able to apply logic to abstract or hypothetical situations, such as imagining the consequences of a world made from candy.
Concrete Operational Thought
In the stage of concrete operational thinking, children begin to understand basic logical principles and concepts such as cause-and-effect relationships, size, and distance (Piaget, 1971). They are now capable of operations, cognitive actions that use logic and are reversible, and can accurately imagine the consequences of various actions they observe or experience. One such operation is conservation, the property by which the amount of something does not change even if the appearance of that thing changes.
In Piaget’s famous most well-known example of conservation, a researcher poured liquid from one container into another of a different shape (5.3 Cognition in Early Childhood). Although we understand that the amount of liquid does not change, children who do not yet understand operations believe taller but thinner containers have more liquid than shorter, wider ones. Children in the concrete operational stage, however, understand that the amount of liquid remains the same, indicating they understand conservation of volume.
Children also demonstrate their understanding of conservation with quantities when they recognize that the number of candies does not change whether you spread them out or put them in a pile. They also know that stretching a ball of clay into the shape of a snake does not change the amount of clay. Although an understanding of conservation occurs at similar ages in most countries, the exact age at which children develop it and the type of conservation they first understand does differ across some cultures (Goldschmid et al., 1973). For example, they may learn conservation of shape before conservation of volume based on their experience with the objects around them.
One reason children in this age group come to understand conservation is that they can now focus on more than one aspect of the task, a skill referred to as decentration. In other words, in a conservation of volume task, children at this age can focus on both the height and width of the containers that hold liquid and may make comments like, “The taller glass has the same amount of water as the shorter glass because it’s skinnier.” When a child is unable to decenter, they will often indicate that the taller glass has more liquid because they are only focusing on height and ignoring the width of the glass. They also demonstrate an awareness of reversibility, which is closely related to their understanding of conservation. Reversibility is the process by which we can reverse a sequence of events, returning to the starting point. For example, children who understand reversibility are aware that liquid poured from a shorter, wider container into a taller, thinner one can be poured back, and the amount will not have changed.
Children are also able to accurately complete Piaget’s class inclusion problem between the ages of seven and ten, meaning that they now understand classification groupings and hierarchies, another type of operation. The ability to grasp hierarchical classification allows them to sort objects into both general and more specific groups. For example, children at this age who are shown four apples and three bananas can correctly tell you that there are more apples than bananas, and that there are more total fruits (seven, if you combine the four apples and three bananas) than apples (four). This shows they can simultaneously focus on a larger class (fruit) as well as two subclasses (apples and bananas).
During the concrete operational stage, children also develop the ability to sort objects along multiple dimensions. For example, a child can sort their stuffed animals both by size and by color. This operation involves organizing things in a series, known as seriation. One task Piaget used to test seriation required children to take sticks of different lengths and arrange them from shortest to longest (Figure 7.8) (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). Children can do this quickly and efficiently by the beginning of the concrete operational stage. Children can also demonstrate transitive inference during seriation tasks. This is the ability to use existing knowledge to find missing information. For example, if you ask an eight-year-old, “If Andrew is taller than Brianna, and Brianna is taller than Cleo, who's the shortest?” they can correctly infer that Cleo is the shortest.
Recall that one of the characteristics of the preoperational stage of cognitive development, which includes children from the ages of three through seven, is egocentrism, which means young children struggle to differentiate their thoughts and feelings from those of others. However, during the concrete operational stage, children begin to consider how others might think and feel. In other words, they become less egocentric. In the classic three-mountains task by Piaget (discussed in 5.3 Cognition in Early Childhood), children in the concrete operational stage can describe what the mountain scene would look like from the perspective of a child sitting on the other side of the table.
Evaluation and Impact of the Concrete Operational Stage
Was Piaget’s description of the concrete operational stage and skills that children demonstrate in this stage and age range accurate and informative?
In many ways, Piaget’s description of the concrete operational stage has held up well to scrutiny. However, as discussed earlier, there are differences in how children demonstrate concrete operational skills across the world. Other research has shown that cognitive development may not be as stage-like as the theory suggests. For example, some children show aspects of concrete operational thought before the age of seven, which is earlier than Piaget believed it first appeared (McGarrigle & Donaldson, 1974). Children can achieve earlier understanding of some operations, such as conservation, when they are specifically exposed to tasks in which adults demonstrate them (Dasen, 2022). On the other hand, another study found that many children may reach Piaget’s stages later than they did thirty years ago (Flynn & Shayer, 2018), which may be due to drops in education budgets and in the overall quality of education in many countries. Despite these criticisms, Piaget’s theory offers a window into the many cognitive advancements that happen during middle childhood.
Piaget’s approach to cognitive development among school-aged children has had a tremendous impact on education (Zhang, 2022). Many schools use his principles to determine how to educate children and when to introduce concepts such as addition and subtraction. Many schools also provide students with opportunities to learn through active learning, such as building a volcano in science class, rather than just reading about volcanos. However, despite this understanding of the importance of active learning for children, we are seeing increases in the amount of time that children engage with screens, even in school settings (Muppalla et al., 2023). Screen media use is associated with poorer academic performance, along with other potential adverse effects on development.
It Depends
Are There Cognitive Benefits to Screen Media Usage?
Mobile devices and interactive media have become a part of the everyday lives of children. In fact, we now consider children “digital natives” because they have always been surrounded by mobile and other interactive devices. As a result, parents and professionals who work with children have wondered whether there are any developmental benefits to screen media use by children. Researchers have been exploring this very issue.
Frequent screen use, often defined as more than two hours a day, has been found to have several negative outcomes (Liu et al., 2021). Excessive screen use has been associated with physical, behavioral, and academic problems (Muppalla et al., 2023; Robinson et al., 2017). For example, higher use of screens has been associated with lower cognitive functioning and lower psychological health (Liu et al., 2021).
Given these results, what positive outcomes can children experience from screen use? The answer is that it depends in part on how screens are being used. Not surprisingly, the content matters. Potential positive benefits of screen use include opportunities for increased communication and greater access to information and educational opportunities, especially when parents or schools use technology as a learning tool (Panjeti-Madan & Ranganathan, 2023). For example, children can use online encyclopedias and dictionaries to find answers to questions and can maintain social connections with friends who may live far away. Studies have also shown that when screen media is designed to enhance reading and other cognitive skills it may can improve performance (Muppalla et al., 2023).
What does all this tell us about the impact of screen use and interactive media on children? Professionals and caregivers must acknowledge the possible disadvantages of excessive screen use. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP, 2021) no longer has strict recommended limits for screen time. Rather, they recommend that parents make an informed decision about how children should use media outside of a school setting, keeping in mind that children need adequate sleep and physical activity. They also advise that media consist of high-quality programming with an educational focus. Parents can manage screen time by setting limits, monitoring content, and encouraging children to use more educational media tools. Finally, caregivers should add alternate activities that allow children to improve their physical, cognitive, linguistic, and socioemotional development in other ways.
Information Processing Perspective
Recall that information processing theory (1.3 Major Theories and Theorists) compares the way people think to how computers process, store, and retrieve information. Information processing theory informs our understanding of memory, attention, and executive functions, such as the ability to plan how to approach large projects or organize time. All these aspects of cognition are developing rapidly during middle childhood and become increasingly relevant as children begin formal schooling.
Unlike Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, which focuses on the qualitative differences in development that occur as children grow older, information processing theory describes quantitative changes in cognition. In other words, information processing theory describes how children become faster and more efficient in their reasoning and use of memory. It posits that cognitive development is continuous, rather than consisting of discrete stages. Also, unlike Piaget’s theory, information processing theory is not the work of one theorist. Instead, it is based on the research and ideas of multiple researchers who shared an interest in understanding how humans develop reasoning and processing skills.
As you might expect, school-aged children can process information more accurately and rapidly and are more efficient at retaining that information than they were during early childhood. They also show significant gains in
- their ability to determine what information to attend to,
- their ability to attend to information for longer periods,
- their grasp of how their memory works, and
- their use of strategies to improve retention and recall.
Here you’ll consider the development of other cognitive abilities, including attention, memory, metacognition, and executive functions in more detail. You will also consider how theory of mind changes in middle childhood.
Attention
Selective attention is the ability to stay focused on one thing while ignoring distracting information that is not relevant to the task at hand. Although this skill shows steady improvement throughout childhood and into adolescence, many individual differences among children exist. Considerable research has shown that the child’s temperament is associated with selective attention (Rothbart & Prueda, 2005). For example, children with better self-regulation skills perform better on tasks involving selective attention (Rueda et al., 2005).
Sustained attention is the ability to attend to a single task for extended periods of time (Figure 7.9), while the ability to shift from one task or stimulus to another is called divided attention. Although these skills are also improving throughout childhood and into adolescence (Carlson et al., 2013), children have a limited capacity for attention, influenced by many factors, including anxiety, the task’s level of difficulty, and their existing skills (Sternberg & Sternberg, 2011). For example, you may remember being distracted at school and gazing out the window at other children on the playground when you were supposed to be focusing on your schoolwork.
Memory
Related to improvements in attention are the gains in children’s working memory and their use of encoding strategies to improve memory. Recall from 3.4 Cognition and Memory in Infants and Toddlers that short-term memory allows us to store information in our mind for a short time, and long-term memory is a more permanent storage of information. Working memory combines aspects of attentional control with short-term memory storage and involves an active manipulation of information. During middle childhood, working memory improves. For example, if you recite a list of ten items such as (fork, frog, horse, plate, cup, dog, cat, spoon, knife, bowl) to a child, they can repeat it back to you by organizing the information into categories (dishes and animals). The process of transferring information from short-term/working memory to long-term memory is called encoding. Middle childhood is the time when children begin using more effective encoding strategies to improve their ability to move information from short-term/working memory to long-term memory (Bjorklund et al, 2008). Encoding strategies include rehearsing items, grouping items into categories, and spending more time studying harder items rather than easy ones. Children can start using these strategies around five to six years of age, but they are able to use them more efficiently around age seven, after which this ability continues to increase through age ten (Schneider et al., 2009). Children continue to use more complex encoding strategies as they move through middle childhood. Some of the more frequently used memory strategies are rehearsal, elaboration, and organization. Descriptions and examples of each of these are provided in Table 7.3.
| Memory Strategy | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Rehearsal | Practicing to learn new information | Children repeat a vocabulary word over and over to learn it for a vocabulary quiz. |
| Elaboration | Connecting new information to existing knowledge | Children help with baking at home and may recognize fractions in math class from the recipes they have used. |
| Organization | Arranging bits of information in an ordered manner, such as using groups or categories | Children learn the acronym “ROY G BIV” to help remember the order of the colors in the spectrum. |
Metacognition
Another reason children develop more sophisticated cognitive skills during middle childhood is that they are also developing metacognition, or knowledge about how we think and learn, and how we use that awareness to become better thinkers and learners. For example, children begin to understand that they may need to reread a paragraph if they didn’t understand it after the first reading.
As they move into middle childhood, children show a grasp of metamemory, an understanding of how memory works (Kvavilashvili & Ford, 2022). For example, they recognize that it is easier to remember short lists than long lists and that they have involuntary memories (memories they can retrieve with no deliberate effort). Younger children tend to think they are better at a task than they are and that they have better memories than they possess, but the ability to accurately evaluate their cognitive skill continues to improve into adolescence. Then again, adults often struggle with these same issues!
Executive Functions
Executive functions are the cognitive skills we need to control or self-regulate our behavior and to work toward goals. They include skills such as working memory and attentional control, and others such as inhibition, problem-solving, self-control, mental flexibility, and planning and organization.
Executive functions begin to develop during the preschool years but continue to mature through middle childhood and into adolescence. In fact, middle childhood is an important period for the development of executive functions because of the increasing social and academic demands associated with formal schooling. These skills are closely tied to maturation of the prefrontal cortex in the brain that is taking place during the preadolescent years, and they are also influenced by the presence of warm and responsive parents and by cognitively stimulating environments (Bourrier et al., 2018; Fay-Stammbach et al., 2014). Executive functions are also associated with school readiness, academic achievement, and social behavior (Poon, 2018). Thus, schools or intervention programs that target executive functions may see significant rewards as children use those skills to be successful in academic and social settings.
Theory of Mind
Another cognitive ability related to frontal lobe functioning and executive functions is theory of mind: the awareness of your own mental states and the understanding that others have thoughts, beliefs, and perspectives different from your own (Figure 7.10). As discussed in 5.3 Cognition in Early Childhood, theory of mind typically emerges between the ages of four and five. However, it continues to develop for the next several years. Children are increasingly able to predict what others are thinking and feeling and develop an understanding of complex mental abilities from various perspectives.
Theory of mind has been linked to better academic achievement. There are several explanations for this (Lecce & Devine, 2022). First, theory of mind is likely associated with better relationships with peers and teachers which may increase school engagement. Second, children who understand their own mind as well as the minds of others have higher levels of reading comprehension because they understand the message that the author is intending to convey and the minds of the characters in the texts that they read (Kim, 2017). Similarly, theory of mind is associated with scientific reasoning. Children who understand the minds of others are better able to create and evaluate hypotheses (Kyriakopoulou & Vosniadou, 2020).
There are individual differences in the development of theory of mind. For example, children diagnosed with some developmental disabilities, including autism spectrum disorder and social anxiety disorder, often have deficits in theory of mind (Spek et al., 2010; Washburn et al., 2016). Understanding these differences can provide therapists, teachers, and parents with information to help understand the thoughts and behaviors of children with these disorders and can aid in planning teaching strategies to explicitly teach perspective-taking.
Cultural differences also exist. Children in collectivist cultures like China and India tend to recognize later than children in individualistic cultures like the United States and Australia that others have different beliefs and opinions (Shahaeian et al., 2011). A recent systematic review of studies on cultural variations in theory of mind and related constructs such as empathy and perspective-taking indicated that cross-cultural differences in language use, cultural values, and parenting styles may lead to differences in development of these skills (Aival-Naveh et al., 2019). A likely reason is that individualistic cultures emphasize recognizing differences in opinions, thoughts, and beliefs more than collectivist cultures do.
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