The role of cognitive development in the formation of social judgments was investigated in 2 experiments examining children's use of task outcome information in attributional judgments of ability and task difficulty. (SB)

Defines "collective creation" as a collaborative process undertaken by actors/students and their director/teacher and the resulting creative product. Describes a study of a collective creation as an instructional practice. Suggests that collective creation teaching approaches might work effectively to serve social justice purposes in the…

Traditional notions of literacy have been transformed regarding usage, purpose, context, and symbolic meaning. The context of individual reading and writing efforts is always inherently social. To achieve full literacy for all students, students must use texts to empower action, thinking, and feeling in the context of purposeful social activity.…

This article argues that, as a pedagogical practice, homework plays a critical, long-term role in the development of children's achievement motivation. Homework provides children with time and experience to develop positive beliefs about achievement, as well as strategies for coping with mistakes, difficulties, and setbacks. This article reviews…

The authors share results from two longitudinal studies exploring the impact of father's alcohol use on child development. The Michigan Longitudinal Study (MLS) has followed a sample of alcoholic families with 3-5 year old children for 20 years. The Buffalo Longitudinal Study (BLS) has followed a sample of alcoholic and nonalcoholic families…

The use of four types of psychological state words (physiological, emotional, desire, and cognitive) during mother-child play sessions at ages 3, 4, and 5 years was examined in 30 children diagnosed with delayed expressive language at 24-31 months and 15 age-matched comparison children with typical development. The children's mean length of…

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach,…

Self-regulation and self-determination are part of a continuum of behaviors that are acquired through interaction with the social and physical environment and through problem solving based on experiences that begin in infancy and build throughout early childhood. These abilities should be nurtured early for all children, especially within the…

Although childhood death from health-related disorders has decreased dramatically in the United States due largely to advances in medical technology, it is an unfortunate fact of life that children can and do die from medical and health-related problems. A possible role for school psychologists in dealing with this situation is providing direct…

This study explores educators' reflections on professional childcare practice in different national contexts. The data were collected by showing video clips of classroom activities in Japanese, Dutch and German pre-schools to experienced German and Dutch pre-school teachers. The clips were used to elicit their opinions on playing and learning in…

The present study included observational and self-report measures to examine associations among parental stress, parental behaviour, child behaviour, and children's theory of mind and emotion understanding. Eighty-three parents and their 3- to 5-year-old children participated. Parents completed measures of parental stress, parenting (laxness,…

This report presents findings from the Massachusetts Family Child Care study, a two-year evaluation of the impacts of an early childhood education program on providers and children in family child care. The program--"LearningGames"--is designed to train caregivers to stimulate children's cognitive, language, and social-emotional…

The relationship between substantive arts involvement and social, cognitive, and artistic development is positive. Little is known about arts integrated within special education services to improve academic, cognitive, and social skills. We examined arts-based work and its impact on education of students with disabilities. During Study I, we…

Infants represent the acts of others and their own acts in commensurate terms. They can recognize cross-modal equivalences between acts they see others perform and their own felt bodily movements. This recognition of self-other equivalences in action gives rise to interpreting others as having similar psychological states such as perceptions and…

A rating scale is developed for preschool classrooms to assess the physical environment's role in children's development of cognitive and social competency. The scale is tested in 98 classrooms, and children are assessed on two measures of competency in a subsample of these classrooms. Findings indicate that the physical environment is related to…