Impact of Psychological Development on Middle Childhood

1. Introduction

1.1. Introduction to the development stage (Middle Childhood)

Children grow and develop rapidly in four main areas of development which are motor (physical), communication and language, cognitive, and lastly social and emotional. Social-emotional development includes the child’s experience, expression, and management of emotions and the ability to establish positive and rewarding relationships with others (Cohen, et, al., 2005). It focused on how children start to understand who they are, how their feelings, and what to expect when they interact with others. Children who do not experience appropriate social-emotional development will have limitations in their ability to learn and they are less involved in learning environments. Thus, in this study, we will look at the socio-emotional development in middle childhood. Giudice (2014) states that middle childhood, conventionally from about 6 to 11 years old.

1.2. Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence Theory

Daniel Goleman is another scholar who focused on an aspect of socio-emotional development in human beings. He come out with Emotional Intelligence Theory, expanded from previous scholars, John Mayer and Peter Solovey in 1990. Goleman emphasized five components of emotional intelligence which are emotional self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Among these components, empathy and social skills are related to socio-emotional development, especially in the middle childhood stage. According to Goleman (1995), the definition of empathy included not only understanding others’ feelings and behaviors but also intelligently using that understanding to forge stronger interpersonal relationships and make better decisions. In the middle childhood stage, the children develop an awareness of their emotional states, attributes and abilities that contribute to empathy. Damon (1988), he described how sharing develops during their first year when the children share, it is usually not for the reason of empathy but for the fun of social play, ritual or out of imitation. Then at about 6 years old, they develop a sense of empathy. The children may care for others or comfort others in distress (Spinrad & Gal, 2018). If the children do not develop a sense of empathy, later on when they grow up they may become selfish by not understanding others’ feelings.

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The other component emphasized by Goleman is about social skills. Social skills refer to have a good interaction with others. It requires understanding ourselves and others’ feelings in order to communicate and engage on a daily basis. This social skill connects us with other people. Gresham & Elliot (1984) noted that there are three general types of social skills definition; (i) peer acceptance definition which social skills are behaviors of children and adolescents who are accepted by or are popular with their peers, (ii) behavioral definition state that social skills are situation specific responses which increase the probability of positive reinforcement and decrease the probability of punishment and (iii) social validity indicate that social skills are situation-specific behavior which predicts and/or correlate with important social outcomes. Kumar, Dines & Devi, and Sarita (2016) stated that social skills contribute to success in life and self-efficacy. Emotional intelligence can be thought of as a set of skills that help children to be successful in school, at work and in relationships. By this stage, it shows that the children at the stage in finding friends. If their social skills does not worked out it may affect the children whereby they can be so shy to interact with others. They may feel lonely and depressed by the end of the day.

1. 3 Howard Gardner: Theory of Multiple Intelligence

Basically, the theory of multiple intelligences was developed by Howard Gardner in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He claimed that every person possessed eight bits of intelligence, which are verbal-linguistic intelligence, logical-mathematical intelligence, musical intelligence, spatial intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence, and naturalist intelligence. Gardner (1993) mentioned that ones have the element of eight intelligence, they are not particularly having only certain elements of intelligence. It is because each intelligence does not work by itself in real situations. Intelligence always interacts with one another. In Gardner’s theory, the most intelligence related to socio-emotional development in the middle childhood stage is interpersonal intelligence, which the ability to understand and engage with others. When they know how to engage with others, they will be easily accepted by any social group.

However, in school, they only focused on through two elements of intelligence, which are verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical. Nicolson-Nelson (1998) stated that the school system has depended on the IQ test over the years and as a sequence, schools emphasize linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence. Students who can read, write, speak and do basic mathematical skills are considered more successful in school. This situation can be related to socio-emotional development, especially in the middle childhood stage, whereby if they more academic successfully, the more satisfied they will be. The study shows that children who have higher life satisfaction earned higher final grades in the exam (Quinn & Duckworth, 2007).

2. Self-emotional learning scale (SELS)

In this study, the name of the scale which are chosen to measure socio-emotional in early childhood is Social-Emotional Learning Scale (SELS). SELS was developed in 2009 by Chris L. S. Coryn, Jessica K. Spybrook, Stephanie D. H. Evergreen, and Meg Blinkiewicz. SELS was designed to assess the social-emotional learning needs of elementary-aged students. The purpose of the development of SELS was to establish and to appraise an instrument planned to measure the social-emotional status and learning needs of elementary-aged students.

The SELS is a self-report instrument in which it is composed of 20 items. These 20 items are ranged by Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The SELS was constructed to measure three aspects of social-emotional learning which are Task Articulation, Peer Relationship, and Self-Regulation. There are six subscales of Task Articulation, meanwhile, there are seven subscales each for Peer Relationship and Self-Regulation. The Task Articulation subscale are complementary of responsible decision making, meanwhile, the Peer Relationship subscale are pertinent of social awareness and relationship skills. Lastly, the Self-Regulation subscale are related to self-awareness and self-management. The sample stem of items that are being used in this scale were: TA which is task articulation with 6 stems,one of the sample stem is “Understand situations that cause me to feel happy, sad, angry, or frustrated”. The second item is SR which stands for a social relationship which contained 7 stems in which one of them is “Figure out different solutions to personal problems”. The last item that are being used in this scale is PR which is peer relationship with 7 stems. For example one of the sample stems for PR is “Can help solve problems among my friends in a positive way.''

The sample used to assess the scale consists of 633 grade four to six elementary students from 11 public schools in the Midwestern United States city. Fifty percent of the sample was male and another fifty percent was female. There are 33% of fourth-grade students, 33% of fifth-grade students, and 34% of sixth-grade students. The samples also consist of 38% of White/Caucasian, 31% of African-American, 11% of Hispanic/Latino, 6% of American Indian, and 14% of Other.

The scoring of the scale is by the addition of all 20 items. Higher scores of the SELS mean a higher level of socio-emotional of the children. Meanwhile, lower scores of the SELS mean a lower level of socio-emotional of the children. The Cronbach's alpha was also conducted to test the reliability. Basically, all those items are reliable. Firstly, for the six-item of Task Articulation, α= .79 which indicates the questionnaire is acceptable. Next, the seven items for Peer Relationship, α = .86, and the seven items of Self-regulation, α = .87 which both show the reliability is at a good level.

3. Conclusion

The scale tends to measure the social-emotional of student in primary school based on validity since this scale was psychological-based observation and require demonstrating beyond the internal consistency in which need to be supported by further instruments. According to Messick (1989) and Bryne (1996) as cited in Coryn et al, (2009) that evidence to support construct validity can be based on the relationship between the latent unobservable construct and its measured indicators under the theoretical model that the researcher hypothesized. Thus, by building a reasonable hypothesis based on the psychological basis and supported by empirical evidence will help the further validity of this scale.

The strength of the scale based on the three subscales measured which is the strongest one will be the PR or peer relationships that supported by the clear items regarding on how well one can work along with their peers. This based on the items “Can identify differences among cultural groups,” and “Know different ways to make and keep friends” (Coryn, 2009). The items for SR or social relation also have the strongest validity in which the items being used have a relation with how an individual manage themselves in coping with the social. The relevance of the theory that being used at the beginning of this paper with the scale that been chosen can be seen in which the emotional intelligence theory developed by Daniel Goleman that emphasis on empathy and social skills that can be closely related to the items being measured in the scale which are SR or self-regulation and PR or peer relations. Furthermore, the second theory by Howard Gardner called theory of multiple intelligence that if an individual have the elements of intelligence they will be attained self-satisfaction that will fulfill their self-regulation and task articulation. Thus, they already develop their psychological aspects of social-emotional. The scale also has several limitations since it only used 20 items which seems quite limited in order to measure the variables accurately. Hence, in this study the researcher only used single sample sampling in which the sample only include midsized of primary school in Midwestern U.S. city. Thus, the things that need to be taken into account in order to study this scale further by adding more items in different subscale that relate to the evaluation of the social-emotional or emotional intelligent. The multiple sample also needs to be used in order to have cross-cultural accuracy and validity.

4. References

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