The purpose of this article was to synthesize the available research regarding the development of complex schemata in individuals with autism across its entire developmental process beginning with prototype formation, followed by categorization, and finally the development of schema. Specific research questions addressed the quality of research…

Difficulties in understanding evolution are often rooted in early childhood, arising from naïve assumptions and cognitive biases. However, literature reviews mainly focus on school and university students' understanding of evolution, with only limited comprehensive reviews on children in early childhood aged up to 7 years. This systematic review…

A systematic review was carried out to examine the use of robots in early childhood and lower level education. The paper synthesizes the findings of research studies carried out in the last ten years and looks at the influence of robots on children and education. Four major factors are examined--the type of studies conducted, the influence of…

Science educators have long been concerned with how formal schooling contributes to learners' capacities to engage with science after school. This article frames productive engagement as fundamentally about the coordination of claims with evidence, but such coordination requires a number of reasoning capabilities to evaluate the strength of…

The authors explore how children's play can support the development of the foundations of mathematics learning and how adults can support children's representation of--and thus the "mathematization" of--their play. The authors review research about the amount and nature of mathematics found in the free play of children. They briefly…

Suggests practical applications of Piagetian theory to reading instruction. (FL)

Presents a model of the development of desociocentering, decentering relative to the social group, which is based on Piagetian research and theory and Wernerian concepts. (Author/SS)

Derives a theoretical statement about children's understanding of the mind from Wittgenstein's private-language argument that understanding the mind involves acquiring rules governing the use of linguistic expressions about the mind. Presents developmental evidence illustrating Wittgenstein's argument and its differences from the simulation and…

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)

The effectiveness of color cuing strategies is analyzed in terms of learner aptitudes, the type of learning required, the category of color cuing employed, and the relationship between color cues and other feature cues. (Author/JEG)

Considers assumptions underlying current cognitive science research on concepts: (1) novel information is first processed via similarity judgments and later by explanatory components; (2) children initially have a similarity-based component for learning concepts--the explanatory component develops on its foundation. Argues that these assumptions…

Current educational reform trends, particularly those for social studies instruction, have tended toward a fact-laden curriculum which constrains students' development and application of ideas and higher-level thinking. Concepts as well as facts must be included if schooling is to encourage students' understanding of themselves as well as society.…

The paper reviews research which presents evidence that learning disabled (LD) children, like other groups that show performance deficiencies, do not spontaneously employ appropriate goal directed task strategies in many situations. (Author/PHR)

This paper suggests that language study focus its attention more on the pedagogical needs of educators by offering them a more comprehensive dialectical and unifying theory of language development that could then present the process as a holistic endeavor instead of as a set of separate linguistic acquisitions. Specifically, it suggests the use…

This paper describes the rule-assessment approach to cognitive development. The basic question that motivated the rule-assessment approach is how people's existing knowledge influences their ability to learn. Research using the rule-assessment approach is summarized in terms of eight conclusions, each illustrated with empirical examples.…