Did You Know...?
Child Development

Read each true/false statement and test your answers by placing your cursor over the question mark.

	Children grow more rapidly during middle childhood than at any other time.
	Most of the variation in children’s growth is due to heredity, gender, and nutrition.
	The best way to get children to lose weight is to increase their physical activity.
	Adopted children whose biological parents were obese but whose adoptive parents are thing will not be obese.
	IQ scores are not very reliable in predicting school achievement.
	One of the first noticeable symptoms of autism is lack of spoken language.
	The crucial factor in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is neurological, a brain deficit that results in great difficulty in “paying attention.”
	Four times as many boys as girls have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
	The diagnosis of a learning disability is based on measured discrepancy between expected and actual performance.
	Mainstreaming is the most effective method for educating children with special needs.
	During middle childhood cognitive processes become more logical and amore abstract.
	One objection to Piaget’s theory is that it ignores the influence of context and instruction.
	Kohlberg’s emphasis on justice and reasoning is too broad.
	Speed of thinking continues to improve throughout the lifespan.
	The basic cognitive processing capacity of schoolchildren does not differ greatly from that of preschoolers.
	The ability to screen out distractions and concentrate on relevant information improves steadily during the school years.
	Most developmentalists agree that there should be a standard educational system for all children.
	Both the phonic and whole-language approaches to learning have been disputed by current research.
	Children who use computers frequently score about the same in math and science as students who rarely use computers.
	The best strategy for teaching a school-age child whose language is a nonstandard form is to conduct all instruction in standard English.
	Schoolchildren become more active than passive participants in the social world.
	School-age children typically are more self-critical than they were as preschoolers.
	Acceptance by their peer group is more important to schoolchildren than having a few close friends.
	Older children change friends more often than do younger children.
	Middle schoolers tend to choose best friends whose backgrounds, interests, and values are similar to their own.
	Bullies and their victims are usually of the same gender.
	Bullies generally are not socially perceptive.
	Bullying during middle childhood seems to be universal.
	Harsh discipline always interferes with the development of a psychologically healthy child.
	Children’s ability to cope with stress may depend as much on their appraisal of events as on the objective nature of the events themselves.