This paper provides a historical review of the interview research that has been used by science educators to investigate children's basic astronomy knowledge. A wide range of strategies have been developed over the last 120 years or so as successive teams of researchers have endeavoured to overcome the methodological difficulties that have arisen.…

This article describes the case of a deaf native signer of American Sign Language (ASL) with a specific language impairment (SLI). School records documented normal cognitive development but atypical language development. Data include school records; interviews with the child, his mother, and school professionals; ASL and English evaluations; and a…

This report describes the first prospective study specifically designed to assess children's verbal memory for a unique event 6 years after it occurred. Forty-six 27- to 51-month-old children took part in a unique event and were interviewed about it twice, after 24-hr and 6-year delays. During the 6-year interview, 9 children verbally recalled the…

A problematic issue for forensic interviewers is that young children provide limited information in response to open-ended recall questions. Although quantity of information is greater if children are asked more focused prompts and closed question types such as yes/no or forced choice questions, the quality of their responses is potentially…

The abilities of past and future episodic thinking develop hand in hand across the preschool years and are intimately connected in adults. Little is known, however, about the development of episodic thinking in middle childhood and how it is influenced by sociocultural factors. In the present study, one hundred sixty-seven 7- to 10-year-old…

The authors examined the relation between children's narrative ability, which has been identified as an important contributor to memory development, and suggestibility. Across 2 studies, a total of 112 preschool-aged children witnessed a staged event and were subsequently questioned suggestively. Results from Study 1 indicated that children's…

Outlines five perspectives addressing alternate aspects of the development of children's source monitoring: source-monitoring theory, fuzzy-trace theory, schema theory, person-based perspective, and mental-state reasoning model. Discusses research areas with relation to forensic developmental psychology: agent identity, prospective processing,…

Reports results of an exploratory study in which a total of 80 children (in kindergarten, first, third and fifth grades) were interviewed in order to sample their knowledge of how certain classes of variables act and interact with one another to affect the quality of an individual's performance on a retrieval problem. (ED)

Two studies examined progression in children's and adults' ability to monitor attempts to recall event details and the dependence of metamemory on question format. Only with an unbiased question format did subjects give higher confidence ratings after correct than after incorrect answers. When interviews contained misleading questions, children…

Reasoning and logical thinking can be defined and explained from different perspectives. Three approaches are reviewed in this report; they are: (1) the logical structure approach; (2) the Piagetian approach of developmental stages; and (3) the information processing or memory approach. Four hypotheses related to these approaches were investigated…

This article reviews research on children's development of cognition, memory, and language; development of knowledge about the legal system; developmental and motivational factors influencing children's willingness to make sexual abuse reports in legal settings; reports of abusive touch; and strategies used to prepare children for medical…

The influence of intelligence, self-concept, and causal attributions on metamemory and the metamemory-memory behavior relationship in grade-school children was studied. Following the assessment of intelligence, self-concept, and causal attributions, 105 children each from grades 3, 5, and 7 were given a metamemory interview and a sort-recall task.…