Reviews studies of children's and adolescents' understanding of peace and war. Maintains that findings are influenced by measurement procedures and design and by a number of variables. Notes that recent studies suggest a relationship between understanding of interpersonal relationships and understanding of peace. Other variables such as social…

Three experiments investigated whether theory-of-mind deficits and weak central coherence might be functionally related. Found that theory-of-mind performance was inversely related to a measure of central coherence bias in the general population. Poor theory-of-mind performance was linked to weak central coherence among children with typical…

Examined relations between phonological processing and emerging individual differences in math computation skills. Found that phonological memory, access rate to phonological codes in memory, and phonological awareness were uniquely associated with growth in number of computation procedures mastered from 92.5 to 134.8 months. Phonological…

The present study investigates the performance of 96 Cantonese-speaking three- to five-year-old preschoolers on three false belief tasks--a deceptive object, a change of location, and an unexpected contents task encompassing a variety of task factors. Most importantly, the research examines the possibility that false belief performance depends on…

The explosion in the rate of multiple births has led to new questions about how adequately prepared parents are for the demands of raising triplets and the implications for the healthy development of the infants. The authors examined the relationship between mothering, infant social behavior, and cognitive development in a longitudinal study of 23…

This study investigated children's practices and ideas or perceptions about self-regulation for two particular aspects of schoolwork: completing homework and learning for a class test. Subjects were 86 Anglo children (ages 7, 9, and 11) who were interviewed about their practices and ideas concerning homework completion and test preparation.…

A causal model of reactions to violence that incorporated the role of attribution processes, emotions, in-group bias, and cognitive development was studied with children 8-12 years old. Participants were 121 third and sixth graders who attended a private elementary school in southern California. In groups of six, subjects were presented one of a…

Parents, educators, psychologists, and linguists are concerned about the effects of bilingualism on children, particularly young children. Although it is generally agreed that the minority-language child should develop bilingual and bicultural competence, there is disagreement concerning the role the two languages should play in the child's early…

Three dimensions of school children's viewpoints on grades were examined in a developmental framework: (1) sentiment and attitudes about being graded, (2) causal perceptions and attributions about why students get good grades; and (3) comprehension of simple and complex grading systems. A total of 293 boys and girls drawn from fourth through…

This study investigated the development of students' abilities to integrate information in stories as an aspect of reading comprehension. Students aged 8, 11, 14, and 18 judged the importance of key statements, which varied in their causal relations within an episode, between episodes, and in a higher-order structure, yielding three levels of…

Television's impact on children and the positive role of parents in moderating that impact is discussed in terms of: (1) the view that television has a largely negative impact on children; (2) the importance of television literacy; (3) ways in which parents are molding television's impact to their purposes; (4) variation in television's impact…

In 1983, the Institute of Education in Singapore started a nine-year longitudinal project funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation in Holland to study the cognitive and social development of pre-school children in Singapore. Each phase of the project was to last 3 years. Phase One (July 1983 through June 1986) concentrated on the collection of…

Predicting that when presented with a general context children and adults would produce different specific inferences, a study examined children's and adults' script representations of a common event and the use of representation in comprehension. In the first phase of the study, 23 fourth grade and 48 college students were asked to generate…

Two studies of concept development and categorization among 1-, 2-, and 3-year-old children suggest that concept formation is a socially guided process involving convergence on an adult model. Convergence in labeling is an early strategy for shaping children's category boundaries, while later, more elaborate linguistic means are used to…

The effect of month of birth on skill development in language, reading, and mathematics was examined separately for kindergarten and first grade children. The study looked at the strength of the relationship at the beginning and end of the school year and as a function of the type of program in which the child was enrolled. One hundred and…