Logical Reasoning and Cognitive Abilities

Componential: Analytic Aspect

• Small class sizes benefit students as they process information more efficiently, helping them solve problems, monitor solutions, and evaluate results.

Analytical Aspect

• Intellectual Disability: significantly subnormal cognitive functioning, determines how people approach novel or familiar tasks.
• Intervention programs have helped many people with mild or moderate intellectual disability to hold jobs, live in the community, and function in society.

Contextual: Practical Aspect

• Learning Disabilities: difficulty in learning that involves understanding or using spoken or written language, and the difficulty can appear in listening, thinking, reading, writing, and spelling.
• Dyslexia: most commonly diagnosed Learning Disability, severe impairment in reading and spelling abilities.
• Dysgraphia: difficulty in handwriting.

Age and Development

• Middle Childhood (5-13 years):
  • Developing a sense of industry involves learning to work hard to achieve goals.
  • Maladaptive Tendency: Narrow Virtuosity – children who aren't allowed to "be children" and are pushed into one area of competence.
  • Malignant Tendency: Inertia – suffering from inferiority complexes.
• Children become more aware of their own and other people's feelings, and develop a clearer idea of the difference between guilt and shame.
• Emotional Self-Regulation: voluntary control of emotions, attention, and behavior.
• Children tend to become more empathetic and more inclined to prosocial behaviors.

Moral Development

• Kohlberg's Moral Development Levels:
  • Post-conventional Reasoning: highest level, personal ethics, and individuals engage in deliberate checks on their reasoning to ensure it meets high ethical standards.
  • Care Perspective: moral perspective that views people in terms of their connectedness with others and emphasizes interpersonal communication and relationships.
  • Domain Theory of Moral Development: different domains of social knowledge and reasoning, including moral, social conventional, and personal domains.

Social and Emotional Development

• Social Phobia or Social Anxiety: extreme fear and/or avoidance of social situations.
• Generalized Anxiety Disorder: children worry about everything, tend to be self-conscious, self-doubting, and excessively concerned with meeting the expectations of others.
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: obsessed by repetitive, intrusive thoughts, images, or impulses, or may show compulsive behaviors.
• Childhood Depression: disorder of mood that goes beyond normal, temporary sadness.

Cognitive Development

• Inhibitory control: the voluntary suppression of unwanted responses.
• Inductive and Deductive reasoning:
  • Inductive Reasoning: involves making observations about particular members of a class and then drawing conclusions about the class as a whole.
  • Deductive Reasoning: starts with a general statement about a class and applies it to particular members of the class.
• Piaget believed that children in the concrete operations stage only used inductive reasoning.
• Memory:
  • Working memory increases greatly in middle childhood.
  • Mnemonic Device: strategy to aid memory.
  • External Memory Aids: writing down things to remember.
  • Rehearsal: conscious repetition.
  • Organization: placing information into categories.
  • Elaboration: children associate items with something else.

Intelligence and Assessment

• Psychometric Approach: Assessment of Intelligence using individual tests, such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV) and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales.
• Language and Literacy:
  • Children use increasingly precise verbs, simile, and metaphor.
  • Understanding of rules of syntax becomes more sophisticated with age.
  • Boys tend to use more controlling statements, negative interruptions, and competitive statements.
  • Girls phrase their remarks in a more tentative, conciliatory way and are more polite and cooperative.

Self-Efficacy and School Performance

• Self-Efficacy: an individual's belief that they can execute behaviors necessary to attain specific performance.
• Doing well in school increases self-efficacy.
• Girls tend to do better in school than boys.