For decades, developmental psychologists and educators have emphasized that learning about counterintuitive phenomena may be a critical driving force for cognitive development. Thus far, little is known about the specific content that children seek to enrich their knowledge. Using a novel book-choice paradigm, we directly examine children's…

Trajectories of cognitive and neural development suggest that, despite early emergence, the ability to extract environmental patterns changes across childhood. Here, 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 211, 110 females, in a large Canadian city) completed a memory test assessing what they remembered after watching a stream of shape triplets: the…

Research Findings: There are sparse data on children's use of executive function (EF) and spatial skills in block play. However, there are important implications for studying EF and spatial skills with blocks across cultures, especially regarding best practices for supporting social-cognitive development in under-resourced populations and…

Parents have the option of enrolling their children in the first stage of early childhood education (from 0 to 3 years of age). However, not all parents decide to do so, waiting until the second stage of early childhood education to enrol them in the education system (from 3 to 5 years of age), or even until compulsory education when their…

HIV-exposed uninfected (HEU) children during the preschool and early school ages may be at-risk for neurodevelopmental challenges due to in utero and perinatal exposure to HIV and/or antiretroviral (ARV) medications. HEU children and HIV-unexposed uninfected (HUU) children from the community were recruited and tested at 3 to 4 and 5 to 6 years of…

There is now wide consensus that the quality of family relationships is involved in the development of child executive functioning (EF), a set of cognitive skills that bear critical importance for social and academic adjustment at school. This body of research has, however, focused almost exclusively on dyadic parent-child interactions and failed…

Formal climate education without consideration of the ocean is incomplete. The effectiveness of a new climate lesson for youth that includes the ocean-climate nexus was examined by delivering the lesson to nine classes situated in separate British Columbia, Canada public schools and assessing the students' understanding of basic climate concepts…

An important aspect of perspective-taking ability is the appreciation that mental states such as beliefs, desires, and knowledge change over time. The current study focused specifically on 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' understanding that they will have knowledge in the future that they do not currently possess--for example, that when they are…

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and its companion projects serve colleges and universities committed to monitoring and improving the quality of the undergraduate experience. While participating institutions receive detailed customized reports, the "Annual Results" series presents noteworthy aggregate findings from the…

The present study sought to investigate the family, individual, and dyad-specific contributions to observed cognitive sensitivity during family interactions. Moreover, the influence of cumulative risk on sensitivity at the aforementioned levels of the family was examined. Mothers and 2 children per family were observed interacting in a round robin…

It is important to account for timing of puberty when studying the adolescent brain and cognition. The use of classical methods for assessing pubertal status may not be feasible in some studies, especially in male adolescents. Using data from a sample of 478 males from a longitudinal birth cohort, we describe the calculations of three independent…

In 2015, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) collected responses from more than 315,000 first-year and senior students attending 585 bachelor's degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. This report presents selected NSSE results from students at 541 U.S. institutions or subsets of that group where…

The way children evaluate the reporting of peers' transgressions to authority figures was investigated. Participants, ages 6-11 years (N = 60), were presented with a series of vignettes, each of which depicted a child who committed either a minor transgression (such as not finishing the vegetables at lunch) or a more serious transgression (such as…

The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants' and young children's earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a…

The authors took a population-based approach to testing how commonly studied neighborhood socioeconomic conditions are associated with the language and cognitive outcomes of residentially stable rural and urban children tracked from kindergarten (ages 5-6) to Grade 4 (ages 9-10). Child-level kindergarten Early Development Instrument (EDI) data…