Scientific reasoning refers to the thinking skills involved in conceiving and conducting an investigation. This study examined how proficiency in performing these skills develops during the upper-elementary school years. A sample of 157 children (age 7-10) took a performance-based scientific reasoning test in three consecutive years. Four distinct…

The author, a psychology instructor at an American university, describes the internationalization of his course in Human Growth and Development. The author argues that human development cannot be easily summarized by nature (i.e., biological and evolutionary predisposition) or nurture (i.e., learning through environment and experience).…

How do responsive adult-child interactions influence early language development? How do a child's language skills develop in tandem with social-emotional development, executive function, and literacy? What are effective ways to help parents support their child's development? Uncover the answers to these questions in this fascinating book, which…

Recently, biological aging has been quantified in DNA-methylation samples of older adults and applied as so-called "methylation profile scores" (MPSs) in separate target samples, including samples of children. This nascent research indicates that (1) biological aging can be quantified early in the life course, decades before the onset of…

Across diverse cultural contexts, children and adults believe in the existence of religious and supernatural unobservables (e.g., gods, angels) as well as scientific and natural unobservables (e.g., germs, oxygen). In this article, we explore the role of cultural input and testimony in children's developing beliefs in supernatural and natural…

The meaning, mechanism, and function of imitation in early infancy have been actively discussed since Meltzoff and Moore's (1977) report of facial and manual imitation by human neonates. Oostenbroek et al. (2016) claim to challenge the existence of early imitation and to counter all interpretations so far offered. Such claims, if true, would have…

Fredrich Froebel was a scientist, both in instinct and in training, and his life coincided with an important and dynamic period of scientific growth. I take this opportunity to delve both into some history and futurology to examine the heritage and legacy of his work. The usual of interpolation is of reading into data: where there exist some…

In the last century, Jean Piaget proposed one of the most famous theories regarding cognitive development in children. Piaget proposed four cognitive developmental stages for children, including sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and the formal operational stage. Although Piaget's theories have had a great impact on developmental…

To harness the complexity of their high-dimensional bodies during sensorimotor development, infants are guided by patterns of freezing and freeing of degrees of freedom. For instance, when learning to reach, infants free the degrees of freedom in their arm proximodistally, that is, from joints that are closer to the body to those that are more…

Mind in the Making and Vroom are partner initiatives that exemplify a unique "civic science" approach to "bringing developmental science into the world." Mind in the Making offers families and professionals working with children 0-8 access to developmental research, by engaging them in an active process of professional…

Mobile phones and other wireless devices that produce electromagnetic fields (EMF) and pulsed radiofrequency radiation (RFR) are widely documented to cause potentially harmful health impacts that can be detrimental to young people. New epigenetic studies are profiled in this review to account for some neurodevelopmental and neurobehavioral changes…

Recent genetic discoveries offer a new lens through which to study cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social processes that are foundational to children's development. In this article, we review the latest advances in genomics--genome-wide association studies and the polygenic scores that have come out of them--and discuss how these techniques…

B. F. Skinner is the most eminent psychologist of the twentieth century, and it is no exaggeration to say that his discovery of operant learning (conditioning) has influenced the broader field of psychology, as well as other disciplines, including education, neuroscience, and philosophy. Skinner's discovery and elucidation of operant learning has…

The influence of the epistemological beliefs of parents on the development of comprehensive scientific reasoning abilities was investigated in a five-wave longitudinal study from kindergarten to elementary school. The 161 German 5-10-year-olds (89 girls, 72 boys) were assessed yearly on their scientific reasoning abilities using comprehensive…

The etiological forces of development have been a central question for the developmental sciences (however defined) since their crystallization as a distinct branch of scientific inquiry. Although the history of these sciences contains examples of extreme positions capitalizing on either the predominance of the genome (i.e., the accumulation of…