Mental Growth in Children

A Sunday School class of fifth-graders had just finished studying Moses. The teacher decided to review the class on important events related to Moses' life and prepared a question-and-answer game. One of the questions was "where is Moses buried?" It was Evan's turn to answer the question. Looking confused, he replied, "Is Moses dead?" Don, another member of the class jumped in and commented, "Course he's dead, dummy. Just because you didn't get an invitation to his funeral doesn't mean he hasn't died." The teacher felt like a failure. How could the class have missed this? The answer to this question can be found in children's mental growth.

Children think differently from adults. Although children between the ages of 6 and 12 have made great strides in their thinking since the preschool years, they still have trouble with certain concepts. One of these is found in the above illustration. Children in elementary school often have difficulty understanding historical time. Let's now look at other ways children think differently from adults and how this develops. Some of the major characteristics of mental growth for children from 6 to 12 include: (1) concrete operations, (2) learning by cooperating and sharing viewpoints, (3) changes in attention, (4) improvements in memory, (5) advances in classification abilities, (6) improvements in evaluation, and (7) major strides in literacy (reading and writing) development.

Concrete operations. Children of elementary age can solve problems, but those problems must be experienced in concrete ways. They are not yet able to solve many abstract questions. For example, the following problem would be difficult for most elementary children. "How many of you use salt and pepper when you eat? Now help me solve this problem. If pepper is white, what color is salt?" Most elementary children are thrown by this question and insist that pepper is black. Even if you say, "I know that pepper is black, but let's pretend it's white." Many children will respond by trying to convince you that pepper is black. They cannot hypothesize like adults. (For more information see Constance Kamii, Young Children Reinvent Arithmetic [New York: Teachers College Press, 2000].)

Learning by cooperating and sharing viewpoints. While most preschool children cannot take the viewpoint of another person, elementary children can. This is important to mental growth because children can now learn from one another by discussing issues and sharing viewpoints. Elementary children are much more likely to remember something if they have to explain their thinking and then consider someone else's ideas. This is especially true in math. Here is an example. If a teacher asks, "How much is 4 + 11 + 18?" a few different answers may be given. If one child says "32" and another child says "33," it is most helpful to let them explain how they got their answers. By doing this, the child who came up with 32 is likely to see how he made his mistake and remember the next time. It is much less helpful if the teacher simply says, "The answer is 33."

While children can explain things, share ideas, and cooperate, such ability does not always come automatically. Teachers must remind children that we must respect one another. For example, when we have differences of opinion, we must listen to one another and show respect.

Elementary school children can benefit tremendously by working in cooperative and collaborative groups. If we want children to work with others, we have to provide opportunities for them to work together on lessons and projects.

How can you arrange your classroom so children will work on projects together? How can you help children develop respect for one another when they have disputes and differences of opinion?

Changes in attention. Younger children are not able to tune out irrelevant information. However, as children reach first and second grade, they are able to tune out unimportant information. You can explore this characteristic with your group. Tell your children that a boy and a girl will both be speaking some different words at the same time. Ask them to pay attention to and remember only what the girl said. Preschool children are much less likely to be able to remember what the girl says. They cannot discriminate as well as elementary children.

Selective attention also increases with age. As children go through school, they get better and better at paying attention to important information and using it in solving problems. They can discern what is important and what should receive their attention in order to achieve the goal at hand.

Since older children are better able to pay attention to more important things, how can you design your classroom to capitalize on this new thinking ability?

Improvements in memory. Memory is important to success in the primary and intermediate grades. Fortunately, children at this age are now capable of developing strategies to help them remember. These include clustering, associating, and chunking.

Clustering occurs when children group things into categories to help them remember information. For example, if elementary children are shown 20 pictures and asked to remember as many as they can, they will usually try to group them. They might try to remember the animals, the plants, the buildings, or any other items which can be clustered together.

Associating has to do with relating information to what they already know. For example, if children are asked to spell the word separate, they may think, I know how to spell rat and there's a rat in separate.

Chunking occurs when someone groups things in a series to remember it better. An example is numbers. If a child is supposed to remember his grandparents' telephone number (including area code), he might chunk the numbers into groups of three or four such as 504-555-6721. Elementary children are better at chunking information than younger children. Younger children do not use chunking and therefore usually remember strings of numbers one by one or they simply forget it.

Since elementary children are better able to remember things, how can you make sure that what you are asking them to know and remember is truly important?

Advances in classification abilities. Children's classification abilities really increase from ages six to twelve. A preschooler can classify things in only one or two ways, but elementary children can classify things in multiple ways. As children get older, they are better able to classify things included in other things. Younger children simply do not have the thinking abilities to do this. Here are two examples. As children increase in age, they can better classify that they live in a particular state or province, a county, and a city. The state includes the county and city, and the county includes the city. A much more important example for Christian education is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit (although as we know, this is more complex than state, county, and city).

What should children be asked to think about and classify with regard to the Bible at this age? Why is this important?

Improvements in evaluation. Older children are less impulsive than younger ones in evaluating concepts. Younger children are more likely to blurt out any answer without thinking. Older children have much greater capacities at reflection in answering questions and solving problems. However, this has to be encouraged and developed.

In what ways are you asking children really to think and evaluate what they are learning? How can you better prepare your work so children can reflect and evaluate the topic at hand?

Major strides in literacy (reading and writing). A major milestone during the primary and intermediate years is the increasing ability and achievements in reading and writing. Today we believe that reading and writing are closely connected, and so we combine these two terms to refer to literacy. In a later article in this resource, we consider the relationship of technology to literacy. As we have seen, technology has changed what children can do and are expected to do. Becoming literate involves several steps or stages. These include (1) functional literacy, (2) cultural literacy, and (3) critical literacy.

Functional literacy is "walking around literacy." It is just enough literacy to keep one out of trouble or alive! Functional literacy includes labels, signs, billboards, coupons, and just enough reading recognition or writing skill to get by. With functional literacy, children rely on pictures, drawings, or shapes to help them recognize products, rest rooms, or other things they encounter on a daily basis.

Cultural literacy is the next step for children after they develop functional literacy. There are basically two types of cultural literacy. These are mainstream and marginalized. Mainstream literacy is what children learn in traditional schools and settings. For example, most children read in their social studies texts that Columbus discovered America in 1492. Children read traditional or standard stories about history, science, government, and economics. More recently marginalized stories have been included. They most often represent competing views of history and science. For example, these stories say Columbus did not discover America in 1492 if people were already here. Marginalized stories discuss viewpoints that paint a different picture from mainstream literacy.

Critical literacy follows. It is not enough for elementary children to learn to read. They need to be taught how to evaluate critically what they read. Critical literacy moves far beyond the memorization of either mainstream or marginalized cultural literacy to having students ponder, consider, and make critical judgments about what they are reading. Children are taught to be skeptical (not cynical) about everything they read. For example, many school systems teach things and provide textual content that children need to evaluate critically. Unfortunately, few children are taught critical literacy in school.

Do you believe critical literacy is important? Why or why not? How can you help children think about what they read? How do you work with children whose interpretations are different from what you expected or wanted?

One more important topic needs to be mentioned about literacy. Children should never be asked to read aloud without a purpose in mind. Many of us remember how boring reading was in school when we did round-robin reading. Round-robin reading occurred when the teacher asked one student to read a page, the next student to read the next page, and so on. This is not an effective method of teaching. There are reasons children might read aloud. Some of these include choral or responsive reading, rehearsing a play, or reading (singing) songs. Always ask yourself why you are asking children to read. If there is not a positive reason, many other strategies mentioned in Teaching Children: Laying Foundations for Faith will be more appropriate for using time prayerfully and wisely.