The number of applied behavior analysis (ABA) classrooms for students with autism is increasing in K-12 public schools. To inform instruction of students with autism in public school settings, this study examined the relation between performance on mastery learning assessments and standardized achievement tests for students with autism spectrum…

Despite consensus that development shapes every aspect of coping, studies of age differences in coping have proven difficult to integrate, primarily because they examine largely unselected age groups, and utilize overlapping coping categories. A developmental framework was used to organize 58 studies of coping involving over 250 age comparisons or…

Means-end behavior occurs when the child can carry out a sequence of steps, including the removal of a physical obstacle, to achieve a goal. The development of means-end knowledge occurs in three stages: transitional, intentional, and comprehensive. Comprehensive means-end is achieved when the child can generate solutions without demonstration of…

Two experiments examined pictorial humor as an unusual but legitimate way to approach the study of children's representational activity and the transition from implicit to explicit knowledge. In both experiments, the participants were 3- and 4-year-old children. Experiment 1 studied the understanding of two pictorial jokes using two conditions,…

Transactional theories of development suggest that displaying high levels of antisocial behavior early in life and persistently over time causes disruption in multiple life domains, which in turn places individuals at risk for negative life outcomes. We used longitudinal data from 1,137 primarily African American urban youth (49.1% female) to…

Behavioral, neuropsychological, and brain imaging research points to a dedicated system for processing number that is shared across development and across species. This foundational Approximate Number System (ANS) operates over multiple modalities, forming representations of the number of objects, sounds, or events in a scene. This system is…

Although the "efficacy" of Intensive Behavioral Intervention (IBI) for young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has been well documented in small model programs, IBI's "effectiveness" (i.e., does it work in the "real world"?) has been less studied and may not be as impressive, e.g. Bibby, Eikeseth, Martin,…

Background: Accumulating evidence indicates that prenatal maternal and fetal processes can have a lasting influence on infant and child development. Results from animal models indicate that prenatal exposure to maternal stress and stress hormones has lasting consequences for development of the offspring. Few prospective studies of human pregnancy…

A popular theoretical account of developmental language and literacy disorders implicates poor auditory temporal processing in their etiology, but evidence from studies using behavioral measures has yielded inconsistent results. The mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the auditory event-related potential has been recommended as an alternative,…

A forced-choice observer-based testing procedure was used to determine pure-tone hearing thresholds for 2- to 4-week-old infants. Stimuli were 500-ms tone bursts of 500, 1,000, or 4,000 Hz with 500-ms intervals between tone bursts. Stimuli were presented monaurally by means of an insert earphone. Each 15-s trial consisted of 5 tone bursts,…

Finds that the object concept scores of 104 infants were relatively independent of IQ and background variables, showing that object concept is the most stable developing function in infants and an accurate reflection of infant cognitive potential. (RL)

The present research investigated whether 13.5-month-old infants would attribute to an actor a disposition to perform a recurring action, and would then use this information to predict which of two new objects--one that could be used to perform the action and one that could not--the actor would grasp next. During familiarization, the infants…

A study was undertaken to determine how children of different ages used drawing to present an atypical situation, to what extent children's responses were governed by their increasing cognitive competence, and to what extent children's responses reflected an increasingly articulate grasp of the medium itself. A total of 137 children in…

This study examined research on children's block play, using content analysis to review 75 documents that focused on such play. Each document was coded by type (empirical study or nonempirical article) and by 15 topics and 76 subtopics grouped into 4 broad categories: (1) environment/ecology; (2) block play and the school curriculum; (3) block…

This report describes a series of studies concerned with preschool children's art. Preliminary work was based on observation of sessions in which one child would draw a picture in the presence of an adult. Major findings were that: (1) the children did not have preconceived notions of what they would draw; (2) they did not try to capture a moment…