(from “Schools in the Middle” – March 2000)

Middle level students, the 11 to 14-year-olds who attend grades 5-8, experience unique physical, psychological, social, intellectual, moral, and ethical developmental characteristics. These include:

Physical Development

• Accelerated physical development marked by increases in weight, height, heart size, lung capacity, and muscular strength
• Maturation at varying rates of speed
• Faster bone growth than muscle development
• Wide range of differences in prepubertal and pubertal stages of development, with boys lagging behind girls
• Biological development five years sooner than adolescents of the last century
• Responsibility for sexual behavior before emotional and social maturity have occurred
• Changes in bodily features
• Anxiety about physical changes
• Ravenous appetites

Psychological Development

• Erratic and inconsistent behavior
• Chemical and hormonal imbalances
• Easily offended and sensitive to criticism
• Tend to exaggerate and believe that personal problems, experiences, feelings are unique to themselves
• Moody, restless, self-conscious, introspective
• Searching for adult identity and acceptance
• Searching to form a conscious sense of individual uniqueness
• Optimistic and hopeful

Social Development

• Face traumatic conflicts due to conflicting loyalties to peer groups and family
• May be rebellious toward parents but still strongly dependent upon parental values
• Affected by high level of mobility in society
• Often confused by new settings
• Act out unusual behavior at times – aggressive, daring, boisterous, argumentative
• Fiercely loyal to peer group values
• Need frequent affirmation from adults
• Establish positive social relationships with members of same and opposite sex
• Challenge authority figures; test limits

Intellectual Development

• Intensely curious
• Prefer active to passive learning experiences and interaction with peers during learning activities
• Enjoy using skills to solve real-life problems
• Egocentric, argue to convince others; exhibit independent, critical though
• Consider academic goals as secondary to personal and social concerns
• Experience metacognition-the ability to know what one knows and does not know
• Display a wide range of individual intellectual development while making the transition from the concrete-manipulatory stage to the capacity for abstract thought

Moral and Ethical Development

• Essential idealistic with strong sense of fairness in human relationships
• Ask large, unanswerable questions about the meaning of life
• Reflective, analytical, and introspective about thoughts and feelings
• Confront hard moral and ethical questions for which they are unprepared to cope