Learning requires effort, but children cannot try hard at everything. Here, we evaluated whether children use their improvement over time to decide whether to stick with a challenge. To eliminate the effect of individual differences in ability or prior knowledge, we created a novel paradigm that allowed us to surreptitiously control children's…

Children's beliefs about the contribution of effort and ability to success and failure shape their decisions to persist or give up on challenging tasks, with consequences for their academic success. But how do children learn about the concept of "challenge"? Prior work has shown that parents' verbal responses to success and failure shape…

Humans tend to avoid cognitive effort. Whereas evidence of this abounds in adults, little is known about its emergence and development in childhood. The few existing studies in children use different experimental paradigms and report contradictory developmental patterns. We examined effort-related decision-making in a sample of 79 five- to…

Making better decisions typically requires obtaining information relevant to that decision. Adolescence is marked by increasing agency in decision-making and an accompanying increase in impulsive decisions, suggesting that one characteristic of adolescent decision-making is a tendency to make less-informed decisions. Adolescents could also be…

Fractions are a challenging mathematics topic for many elementary and middle school students, and even for adults. However, a growing body of developmental research suggests that young children can reason about visually presented proportions, well before fraction instruction, providing insight into how fractions might be introduced to improve…

We investigate whether a spatial representation of a search task supports 4- to 7-year-old children's information-search strategies, relative to their performance in a question-asking game. Children played two computationally and structurally analogous search games: a spatial search task, the maze-exploration game, in which they had to discover…

Rehearsal is a form of self-talk used to support short-term memory. Historically, the study of rehearsal development has diverged from the study of self-talk more generally. The current experiment examines whether two characteristics of self-talk (impact of task difficulty and self-talk's narrative vs. planning purpose) are also observed in…

Younger children have more difficulty in sharing attention between two concurrent tasks than do older participants, but in addition to this developmental change, we documented changes in the nature of attention sharing. We studied children 6-8 and 10-14 years old and college students (in all, 104 women and 76 men; 3% Hispanic, 3% Black or African…