Children tend to select a novel object rather than a familiar object when asked to identify the referent of a novel label. Current accounts of this so-called "disambiguation effect" do not address whether children have a general metacognitive representation of this way of determining the reference of novel labels. In two experiments…

It is often argued that metacognition includes 2 components: monitoring and control. However, it is unclear whether these components can operate independently, or whether they always operate as part of a hierarchy. The current study attempts to address this issue. In Experiment 1 (N = 90), age-related differences were assessed to examine the…

It is often argued that metacognition includes 2 components: monitoring and control. However, it is unclear whether these components can operate independently, or whether they always operate as part of a hierarchy. The current study attempts to address this issue. In Experiment 1 (N 90), age-related differences were assessed to examine the…

Purpose: Narrative skill represents a higher-level linguistic skill that shows incremental development in the preschool years. During these years, there are considerable individual differences in this skill, with some children being highly skilled narrators (i.e., precocious) relative to peers of their age. In this study, we explored the…

One of the lawlike regularities of psychological science is that of developmental progression--an increase in sensorimotor, cognitive, and social functioning from childhood to adulthood. Here, we report a rare violation of this law, a developmental reversal in attention. In Experiment 1, 4­- to 5­- year ­olds (n = 34) and adults (n = 35) performed…

Instead of enrolling for four or more years to get a bachelor's degree, what if individuals could work their way toward a degree gradually? First, they would attend college or a trade school for six months or a year and earn a certificate that prepares them for an entry-level job in various fields. Then, they would pursue additional knowledge and…

How do people learn categories and what changes with development? The current study attempts to address these questions by focusing on the role of attention in the development of categorization. In Experiment 1, participants (adults, 7-year-olds, and 4-year-olds) were trained with novel categories consisting of deterministic and probabilistic…

Bullying prevention in schools has arguably met with limited success in the United States. Diversity negatively impacts the success of bullying prevention programs. Furthermore, researchers do not agree upon intervention timing and appropriate grade-level to implement bullying prevention and social-emotional learning and skill-building programs.…

Research Findings: The amount of time and type of program that children experience in early childhood settings may be associated with children's kindergarten-entry skills, or kindergarten readiness. Taking a person-centered perspective, in the present study, we examined the extent to which reliable and unique profiles of early childhood…

The purpose of this study was to empirically examine the dimensionality of language ability for young children (4-8 years) from prekindergarten to third grade (n = 915), theorizing that measures of vocabulary and grammar ability will represent a unitary trait across these ages, and to determine whether discourse skills represent an additional…

Does category representation change in the course of development? And if so, how and why? The current study attempted to answer these questions by examining category learning and category representation. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were trained with either a classification task or an inference task and their…

Too often, teachers are using educational technology resources for administrative purposes instead of using these resources in a constructivist manner to enhance student learning. The study site was well behind the national average in overall educational technology use categories. The purpose of this explanatory correlational research was to…

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 authors explored how midlifers and older adults perceive wellness by factor analyzing the Perceived Wellness Survey (PWS; Adams, Bezner, & Steinhardt, 1997). Results indicated a 4-factor solution different from the 6 originally proposed wellness dimensions of the PWS, suggesting that wellness perceptions change as people age. Suggestions…

Speech productions of 40 English- and 40 Japanese-speaking children (aged 2-5) were examined and compared with the speech produced by 20 adult speakers (10 speakers per language). Participants were recorded while repeating words that began with "s" and "sh" sounds. Clear language-specific patterns in adults' speech were found,…