This study examines the mediating effects of parental attributions of children's academic failures in the relationship between maternal failure mind-sets and their parenting styles. Participants were 323 preschool children aged 4-6 years old, with their mothers completing online questionnaires on failure mind-sets, parenting styles, and…

Preschool children are developing social and emotional skills, like recognizing and expressing emotions, building relationships with peers and adults, following directions, and solving problems. To develop these skills, young children rely on support from adults, including teachers, who model and teach children social and emotional skills in the…

Teachers' motivation and the conditions that support their resilience to sustain motivation in the profession impact on their decision-making and outcomes for students. Yet a less commonly explored issue in educational research is the interdependence of the contextual influences on being a teacher and those teachers' thoughts and behaviours. This…

Early childhood practitioners frequently attempt to identify the cause of outcomes experienced by their learners. This is sometimes referred to as causal attribution. Causal attribution may be affected by prior success and failure of a learner, the amount of effort exerted by the learner, the ability level of the learner, and knowledge of any…

The ways in which teachers perceive and subsequently respond to preschoolers' behavior have significant implications for children's experience in the classroom. To further understand the nature and variability of teacher perception of young children's behavior, this study examined how teachers characterized the disruptive behaviors of a large and…

Despite their well-established connections to student motivation and to learning outcomes, attributions, particularly at the task-level, have not garnered much attention in L2 learning research. However, research evidence in educational psychology (e.g., Stajkovic & Sommer, 2000) suggests that L2 task attributions may affect subsequent task…

Extensive research has explored the ability of young children to learn about the causal structure of the world from patterns of evidence. These studies, however, have been conducted with middle-class samples from North America and Europe. In the present study, low-income Peruvian 4- and 5-year-olds and adults, low-income U.S. 4- and 5-year-olds in…

Research and theory suggest that young children are highly attuned to causality. This study explores whether this drive can motivate task engagement. Fifty-six 3- and 4-year-olds completed a motor task as many times as desired, viewing a picture of a novel item upon each completion. Forty-two randomly assigned children then received either: (a)…

The current study estimated the causal links between preschool mathematics learning and late elementary school mathematics achievement using variation in treatment assignment to an early mathematics intervention as an instrument for preschool mathematics change. Estimates indicate (n = 410) that a standard deviation of intervention-produced change…

Preschool programs have expanded rapidly in low- and middle-income countries, but there are widespread concerns about whether they are of sufficient quality to promote children's learning and development. We conducted a large school-randomized control trial ('Quality Preschool for Ghana' -- QP4G) of a one-year teacher training and coaching…

In this article we present results from research on how education environments may influence the propensity of education participants to engage in corrupt practices. We approached this task with the help of a conceptual framework that draws on rational choice and routine activity theory, and on economic models of human behaviour. The framework…

Children rely on both evidence and prior knowledge to make physical causal inferences; this study explores whether they make attributions about others' behavior in the same manner. A total of one hundred and fifty-nine 4- and 6-year-olds saw 2 dolls interacting with 2 activities, and explained the dolls' actions. In the person condition, each doll…

This research adopted observational and experimental paradigms to investigate the relationships between components of emotion knowledge in three- to four-year-old children. In Study 1, 88 children were assessed on the Emotion Matching Task (Morgan, Izard, & King), and two tasks requiring the generation of emotion labels and causes. Most tasks…

An abundance of experience with own-race faces and limited to no experience with other-race faces has been associated with better recognition memory for own-race faces in infants, children, and adults. This study investigated the developmental origins of this other-race effect (ORE) by examining the role of a salient perceptual property of…

The associations among preschool teachers' attributions about child responsibility, intentionality, knowledge, and the seriousness of hypothetical displays of children's aggressive behavior are examined in United States ("N"?=?82) and Vietnamese ("N"?=?91) preschool teachers. The results suggest cross-cultural differences as…