Oral retelling portrays what one understands from reading or listening to a text. The retold stories of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show macrostructural (overall story structure) difficulties. The study's purpose was to compare macrostructure oral story retelling, after reading (visual modality) or listening (auditory…

One potential contributor to student achievement that has garnered recent attention is students' mindset. A recent review of the literature on the effect of a growth mindset intervention on students' academic achievement has shown small effects, but limited research has been conducted with young students. This study investigated whether students…

We told ninety-nine 4- and 5-year-olds stories in which speakers told lies and truths in two contexts: those told to deny a transgression (misdeeds) and those told to spare another's feelings (politeness). Participants identified each statement as a lie or as the truth, morally judged it as good or bad, and decided whether or not to assign…

Based on a theoretical model of instructional quality this study investigates the influence of different dimensions of instructional quality in the school entrance phase on students' language development taking into account child and family background factors as well as structural characteristics of the classroom and teacher's educational beliefs.…

Background: Recent studies have suggested that teachers' psychological attributes can be an indicator of teacher quality (Rimm-Kaufman and Hamre in "Dev Psychol" 45(4):958-972. doi: 10.1037/a0015861 , 2010), and teachers' child-centered beliefs have been associated with children's academic achievement (Burchinal and Cryer in "Early…

Theory of mind (ToM) development, assessed via "litmus" false belief tests, is severely delayed in autism, but the standard testing procedure may underestimate these children's genuine understanding. To explore this, we developed a novel test involving competition to win a reward as the motive for tracking other players' beliefs (the…

Research Findings: This study investigated the association between Mexican American maternal education and socioeconomic status (SES) and child vocabulary as mediated by parental reading beliefs, home literacy environment (HLE), and parent-child shared reading frequency. As part of a larger study, maternal reports of education level, SES, HLE, and…

Children's lie-telling behavior and its relation to false-belief understanding was examined in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD; n = 26) and a comparison group of typically developing children (n = 27). Participants were assessed using a temptation resistance paradigm, in which children were told not to peek at a forbidden toy while…

This study reports on a new false belief measure in a sample of 124 children and adolescents with or without high functioning autism (HFASD). In the classic paradigm, a participant predicts in which of two discrete locations a deceived protagonist will look for an object. In the current Sandbox task, the object is buried and reburied in a sandbox,…

Building on Vinden's pioneering research [(2001). Parenting attitudes and children's understanding of mind: A comparison of Korean American and Anglo-American families. "Cognitive Development", 16, 793-809], we examined how parents' use of authoritative versus authoritarian styles of discipline related to their children's development of…

This study investigated the relations among preschool children's ability to understand that other people see things differently than they do, that other people can believe things differently than the children know to be true, and that they can manipulate others' beliefs through intentional lying. Children between the ages of 3 and 5 were given…

Two studies investigated the influence of age, language, and family background on the development of preschoolers' social cognitive skills. Study 1 examined variability in economically disadvantaged preschoolers' understanding of fantasy and evaluated the relation of age and language to children's skill in this area. Children were shown drawings…