Exam 11: Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

You are a first­grade teacher and notice your students are having trouble remembering how to spell words for their spelling lists and seem to keep forgetting the key terms in your social studies unit on the community. What should you do?

Explain the correlation between increased mental capacity and the competence of children in middle childhood to meet increased parental expectations.

Describe cross­cultural differences in the acquisition of conservation. What factors are important in evaluating children from nonindustrialized cultures?

Synaptic pruning refers to:

Concrete operational thinking allows children to mentally:

All of the following factors can slow down physical growth in middle childhood EXCEPT:

The shorter Chinese words for the digits may be the reason that Chinese 4­ to 6­year­olds outperformed 4­ to 6­year­olds from the United States. This provides evidence for which view of expanded memory capacity in middle childhood?

How does an increased knowledge base contribute to improvements in memory? Provide an example from the work of Michelene Chi.

A study by Stauder and colleagues on conservation tasks found that:

To test the intelligence of a !Kung child, a translation of an IQ test from English to !Kung would be sufficient.

What do researchers currently believe is the BEST way to diagnose obesity accurately?

A cross­cultural study by Raphael Nyiti (1982) comparing performances of 10­ and 11­year­ old children from different cultural groups on a conservation task, suggests that developmental lags may be due to:

Memory changes in middle childhood are brought about by all of the following EXCEPT:

Describe cultural differences in memory. What factors are involved in memory ability in nonindustrialized cultures?

Metacognition refers to:

A 6­year­old child who says it is easier to remember the lesson her teacher taught her yesterday than the lesson taught several months ago is demonstrating:

In a series of studies using the Tower of Hanoi, researchers found that:

A cross­cultural regularity in middle childhood is that during this period children take on new responsibilities.

Psychologists' use of the term rehearsal refers to:

When 5­year­olds and 8­year­olds are shown a set of pictures and asked if they will be able to remember them: