In three studies, 5-10-year-old children and an adult comparison group judged another's certainty in making inductive inferences and guesses. Participants observed a puppet make strong inductions, weak inductions, and guesses. Participants either had no information about the correctness of the puppet's conclusion, knew that the puppet was correct,…

This research explored online graduate students' preferences using the Constructivist Internet-Based Learning Environment Survey (CILES) and how everyday learner attributes affected their preferences. The purpose of this study was to identify graduate students' preferences for various types of learning in order to aid designers with aligning…

The aims of this research were to examine the development of teaching skills in preschool children and to explore the relation between teaching and theory of mind (ToM). After learning a new board game, 3.5-, 4.5-, and 5.5-year-old children (N = 46) were asked to teach a confederate who "doesn't know how to play the game." They also received two…

Used stories involving self-deception, lying, and misleading appearances to examine 4- to 9-year olds' understanding of the relations between false belief, evidence, and epistemic responsibility. Found that younger children who understood false belief understood simpler types of deception but that understanding self-deceivers' epistemic…

This study examines development along Perry's intellectual and ethical scale among three successive graduating classes of students identified as gifted and talented in mathematics and science. Perry posits that intellectual development proceeds from a basic dualism through nine stages ("positions") and culminates with a sense of personal identify…

Children either saw, were told about, or felt the contents of a toy tunnel. They were asked what was in the tunnel and how they knew the contents. Three year olds had difficulty identifying the sources of their knowledge. Questions that involved inference proved to be especially difficult for them. (BC)

This article reports a theoretically based study on the model of development of epistemological understanding proposed by Kuhn (2000) [Kuhn, D. (2000). Theory of mind, metacognition, and reasoning: A life-span perspective. In P. Mitchell & K. J. Riggs (Eds.), "Children's reasoning and the mind" (pp. 301-326). Hove, UK: Psychology…

Using five metamemory question types and the Counting Span Test (CST), this research investigated the effects of metamemory task demands, and the relationship of the amount of information one can hold in working memory to metamemory question performance. One hundred twenty kindergarten, first, third, and fifth grade children served as subjects.…

Explored whether there are changes with age in understanding the specific distinction between natural and human-made phenomena and whether an appreciation of this distinction influences children's beliefs about the possibility of altering or transforming different categories of objects. Found that this distinction, a powerful organizer for adults,…

Two experiments investigated kindergarten through fourth-graders' and adults' ability to evaluate the certainty of deductive inferences, inductive inferences, and guesses, and explain the origins of inferential knowledge. Findings indicated that children rated their own deductions as more certain than guesses, but when judging another person's…

Children aged from 4;10 to 12;9 attending either a Catholic school or a public, secular school in an eastern Spanish city observed a puppet show in which a mouse was eaten by an alligator. Children were then asked questions about the dead mouse's biological and psychological functioning. The pattern of results generally replicated that obtained…