Social essentialism, the belief that members of certain social categories share unobservable properties, licenses expectations that those categories are natural and a good basis for inference. A challenge for cognitive developmental theory is to give an account of how children come to develop essentialist beliefs about socially important…

Children, 4-6 years of age, in special education kindergartens were randomly assigned to a classification training (n 45) and a comparison (n 49) group. Children in the training group were taught the Classification unit of Bright Start, whereas those in the comparison group received a regular content-oriented curriculum. Both groups were given…

In this study, we used the classification and regression trees (CART) method to draw relationships between student self-reported learning outcomes in 26 field trips to natural environments and various characteristics of the field trip that include variables associated with preparation and pedagogy. We wished to examine the extent to which the…

Task switching requires maintaining readiness to execute any task of a given set of tasks. However, when tasks switch, the readiness to execute the now-irrelevant task generates interference, as seen in the task rule incongruence effect. Overcoming such interference requires fine-tuned inhibition that impairs task readiness only minimally. In an…

A grouping task revealed a chronological progression: color and form determined the 4-year-old children's grouping about equally; form dominated in the 5-year-olds; and 9-year-olds grouped primarily by conceptual attributes. Performance on a memory task showed the developmental shift from color to form to concept, while cued recall showed…