The effect of time pressure on metacognitive control is of theoretical and empirical relevance and is likely to allow us to tap into developmental differences in performances which do not become apparent otherwise, as previous studies suggest. In the present study, we investigated the effect of time pressure on metacognitive control in three age…

Testing of previously studied information potentiates subsequent learning of new information, a phenomenon referred to as the "forward testing effect" (FTE). The current study aimed to investigate the developmental trajectory of the FTE and whether the reset-of-encoding process contributes to the FTE. Younger children, older children,…

Age is an essential factor in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), impacting the success of students and instructional methods. The purpose of this study is to examine the age factor in SLA by examining three age categories -- children, adolescents and adults. In doing so, the study considers the Critical Period Hypothesis as a base of linguistic…

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks…

Three studies explored the abilities of 205 children (5-11 years) and 74 adults (18-72 years) to distinguish directly versus indirectly acquired information in a scenario where an individual grew up in isolation from human culture. Directly acquired information is knowledge acquired through firsthand experience. Indirectly acquired information is…

This study focuses on relations between 7- and 9-year-old children's and adults' metacognitive monitoring and control processes. In addition to explicit confidence judgments (CJ), data for participants' control behavior during learning and recall as well as implicit CJs were collected with an eye-tracking device (Tobii 1750).…

Converging developmental decision-making studies have demonstrated that until late adolescence, individuals prefer options for which the risk of a loss is low regardless of the final outcome. Recent works have shown a similar inability to consider both loss frequency and final outcome among adults. The current study aimed to identify developmental…

This research brief explores how emotions and relationships drive learning and are a fundamental part of how our brains develop. The authors explain how emotionally safe and cognitively stimulating environments contribute to brain development; how brain development that supports learning depends on social experiences; and how sensitive periods in…

Children with reading comprehension difficulties display impaired performance on semantic processing tasks. These impairments are assumed to reflect weaker knowledge about abstract semantic associations between words in poor comprehenders [Nation, K., & Snowling, M. (1999). Developmental differences in sensitivity to semantic relations among good…

Much of the research on orphan and vulnerable children in sub-Saharan Africa has focused on their risks and vulnerabilities. This article describes the "funds of knowledge" (Moll and Greenberg, 1990) and means of acquiring new knowledge of children living in child-headed households in Uganda's Rakai District. Using ethnographic methods,…

Background: Media culture touches most aspects of the lives of children growing up today, beginning at the earliest ages. It is profoundly the lessons children learn as well as how they learn, thereby contributing to what this article characterizes as "remote control childhood." Educators need to understand remote control childhood so…

Used physical systems with effects of continuous magnitude to examine development of causal prediction in 30 children of 5 and 9 years and adults. There were clear age differences in the ability to integrate information about potency and resistance into sophisticated causal predictions of the magnitude of an effect. (RJC)

An investigation of the effects of passive and active rehearsal on developmental processing differences for movement reproduction indicated that active and mature rehearsal had positive results for the younger child. A discussion of the three methods of rehearsal that were used is included. (Author/DF)

Children's learning from television was studied in 343 fourth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students who viewed an edited version of a television program and took a posttest. It was hypothesized that children would learn more plot-relevant information (central learning material) as they moved from concrete operational to formal operational…

Tests Ausubel's (1960) subsumption theory of learning in the context of children's use of causal and logical connectives. Predicts that the acquisition of prior cognitive structure organizers would facilitate the learning and retention of subsequently presented concepts and logical operations and lead to a decrease of syncretic reasoning and…