Developmental Psychology

Achieve Test Prep: Developmental Psychology

Cognitive Development: As a child matures, increased myelination and synapses help a child to improve and refine their behaviors. The increase of myelination and synapses leads to an increase in automaticity (automatic behavior), impulse control, and selective attention. Selective attention is the ability to concentrate on relevant information, such as a lecture, while ignoring outside distractions. Children learn to plan and problem solve effectively. In addition, children begin to recognize their personal skills and weaknesses. Metacognition is the ability to ‘think about thinking’ or to think about a task and decide how best to accomplish the task. Metacognition develops and matures as a child moves through the middle childhood stage. Memory continues to improve during this stage of development. Increased memory is helpful as a child enters higher grade levels and must be able to recall more and more information. Storage strategies and retrieval stages help a child to improve their memories. • Rehearsal: repeating information to make sure it is remembered • Reorganization: regrouping information so it is easily remembered According to Piaget, children are in the concrete operational stage. The significant characteristics are:

• Conservation • Reversibility • Classification: combining objects into categories (toys, food, animals) • Seriation: making an orderly arrangement (large to small) • Compensation: the principle which changes in one dimension can be offset by changes in another dimension

Language: During middle childhood, communication skills of a child increase and multiply. School aged children increase vocabulary and grammar skills while becoming more logical and analytical. Many schools encourage and push children to learn a second language due to bilingualism being shown to improve cognitive development. A younger child’s brain plasticity (ability to learn) enables them to learn a second language easily and a variety of concepts. Intelligence: As children progress through school, achievement tests are administered to measure how much a child has learned of a particular subject. Aptitude tests are designed to measure cognitive

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