Children are active learners: they learn not only from the information people offer and the evidence they happen to observe, but by actively seeking information. However, children's information search strategies are typically less efficient than those of adults. In two studies, we isolate potential sources of developmental change in how children…

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability of an individual to make inferences about what others may be thinking or feeling and to predict what they may do in a given situation based on those inferences. Discussions of ToM focus almost exclusively on inferred cognitive structures and processes and shed little light on the actual behaviors…

Effective belief-desire reasoning requires both specialized representational capacities--the capacity to represent the mental states as such--as well as executive selection processes for accurate performance on tasks requiring the prediction and explanation of the actions of social agents. Compromised belief-desire reasoning in a given population…

The study examines the writing of college freshmen on expository, argumentative, and speculative tasks by means of the Crediton cognitive model in order to describe how and why they evoke the range of responses they do, and why particular cognitive strategies are drawn on. Conclusions are presented and discussed. (Author/CT)

This research investigates the development of analogy, in particular, the study of the development of systematicity in analogy. Systematicity refers to the mapping of systems of mutually constraining relations, such as causal chains or chains of implication. A preference for systematic mappings is a central aspect of analogical processing in…

In the literature, learners' cognitive development is mainly discussed with respect to changes in learners' content-dependent knowledge (conceptual change or growth). Additional dimensions of time and complexity may also be taken into account to describe cognitive processes in at least three dimensions. We discuss these three dimensions of…

This paper contends that efforts at educational reform must focus, above all, on the instructional encounter between teachers and students. The argument is presented in triadic sequence: three basic assumptions about learning, three interrelated models of the instructional process, and three practical approaches to promoting cognitive achievement.…