The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) commissioned this Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) with a view to understanding what is known from the research literature concerning learning a foreign language (FL) and its impact on students' wider academic outcomes. The key questions addressed examine: (1) the research identifying what approaches to…

Students' thinking about the relation between effort and ability can influence their motivation, affect, and academic achievement. Students sometimes think of effort as inversely related to ability (such that people with low ability must work harder than people with high ability) and other times think of effort as positively related to ability…

Argues that causal understanding is a developmental primitive: children develop core concepts of causality at a very early age, causality plays a necessary role in subsequent development across many domains, and basic causal processes can be activated automatically or implicitly. (HTH)

Examines cues which guide the discovery of simple cause-effect relations, beginning with the properties (suggested by Hume) of temporal precedence, covariation and contiguity; explores variables which can influence simple causal judgments; and discusses developmental evidence regarding inference principles associated with causal schemata.…

Reconsiders interpretive and theory versions of children's theory of mind. Shows that many college students provide interpretive explanations on theory of mind tasks and that young children rely on background experientially-based knowledge to interpret such tasks. Argues that a logical-causal theory of human action based on mental states is a…

Reviews research on the theory of internal-external (IE) control expectancies over the past 30 years. Relates the IE to the following current attributions and personal styles: (1) perceived control; (2) helplessness; and (3) optimism, particularly in regard to health. (FMW)

This document is a literature review discussing research on locus of control, particularly as it relates to early childhood education. Some measures of children's sense of locus of control are discussed, including the Optimism-Pessimism Test Instrument and the Stanford Preschool Internal-External Scale. A discussion of how an educator's sense of…

Different research traditions on social cognition are reviewed to determine how they can be used in the study of classroom life. A structural-developmental perspective is more applicable to the study of the social cognitive outcomes of schooling than to the explanation of student behavior in the classroom. The information processing approach…

Research literature on childrens' causal understanding in oral and written settings is reviewed. Results show that maturation and task complexity both influence childrens' causal understanding. However, the findings are contradictory, and no generalizations could be made about which factors influence causal understanding and at which ages they are…

One component of psychotherapy is the type of psychotherapeutic atmosphere created by the therapist. The various character structures of patients require different psychotherapeutic atmospheres. Three character structures are identifiable, each distinguished by a style of social cognition which parallels a stage of cognition in the child as…

The concept of self-regulation--the process whereby students activate and sustain behaviors and cognitive paths which are systematically oriented toward attainment of learning goals--is increasing in importance among educators. Self-regulation includes activities such as attending to instruction; organizing, coding, and rehearsing information;…