Often, the evidence we observe is consistent with more than one explanation. How do learners discriminate among candidate causes? The current studies examine whether counterfactuals help 5-year olds (N = 120) select between competing hypotheses and compares the effectiveness of these prompts to a related scaffold. In Experiment 1, counterfactuals…

Emotional expressions are abundant in children's lives. What role do they play in children's causal inference and exploration? This study investigates whether preschool-aged children use others' emotional expressions to infer the presence of unknown causal functions and guide their exploration accordingly. Children (age: 3.0-4.9; N = 112, the…

Previous research on the role of prior skills like proportional reasoning skills for the development of mathematical concepts offers conclusions such as "more (prior skills) is better (for later learning)." Insights, which prior skill "level" goes along with which "level" of learning outcomes, may advance the…

In the present study, we investigated the impact of a word-problem intervention in retention and acquisition of knowledge after the intervention ended. We based analyses upon Grade 4 students experiencing mathematics difficulty (average age at pretest = 8.77) who received one of two variants of a word-problem intervention (with [n = 111] vs.…