I'm back. Sorry it was such a long break. I finally have a new computer and can get back to posting again. So let's just dive right back in and start off where we left off. Last post we discussed children and motivation. Now lets discuss cognitive abilities.
Middle school is considered to be between the ages of six and eleven or twelve. It's a time that's filled with transitions but most particularly cognitive abilities. The progress children make in their cognitive abilities affects their attitudes and beliefs. A cognitive area that develops to help children is spatial thinking. When children are encouraged and taught to sharpen their skills in analyzing problems and recognizing spatial relationships, parents can help children develop positive, confident attitudes. Spatial thinking is a child's ability to see pictures of words. It's a child's ability to participate in problem solving and use pattern recognition using objects and spatial relationships. For example, being able to use spatial thinking to parallel park.
Another way children grow in cognitive abilities that helps children progress in attitudes and beliefs is cause and effect thinking. Cause and effect thinking indicates a child's ability to understand the sequences of events as they pertain to logical order. For example, if you don't brush your teeth you get cavities. The ability to think problems through in a way that moves a situation forward is important in influencing a child's attitudes and beliefs. Children need to be able to internally process the consequences of their actions based on what they identify to be right or wrong and act appropriately. When children work through this stage, parents and other members of their micro-system can help them talk it through in order to better prepare them for the future.
Parents need to be aware that cognitive development has the potential to cause children to generalize attitudes and beliefs in ways that may not be true. Racial and gender issues come into play when this happens because cultural messages from outside environments and a child's community may be persuading children that generalizations are true. Some people use informal logic to make their arguments which can confuse a child. Logic is the study of reasoning and examines the structure and content of arguments. Logic helps describe various types of arguments and evaluates why good arguments work and bad ones fail. In the next post we'll discuss logic, and informal logic and how to tell the difference.
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