Background: Intra-individual variability reflects temporal variation within an individual's performance on a cognitive task. Children with developmental disorders, such as ADHD and ASD show increased levels of intra-individual variability. In typical development, intra-individual variability decreases sharply between the ages 6 and 20. The tight…

One possible way of evaluating set curricula is to examine the consistency of study programmes with students' psycho-cognitive development. Three theories were used to evaluate matching between developmental theories and content proposed in the mathematics programmes (geometry section) for primary and the beginning of secondary education. These…

Background: Children with language impairment (LI) show heterogeneity in development. We tracked children from pre-school to middle childhood to characterize three developmental trajectories: resolving, persisting and emerging LI. Methods: We analyzed data from children identified as having preschool LI, or being at family risk of dyslexia,…

It is difficult to get a good grasp of the topic of kindergarten entry assessment because there are such great differences in the purpose for the instruments, how they are constructed, and how the data is used. Even so, in many states and communities, there is cause for concern. Until the paradigm of education moves from a preoccupation with…

There is ample evidence that children born to poorer families do not succeed at the same rate as children born to the middle class. On average, low-income children lag behind on almost every cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and health measure. These gaps start early--some of the newest research suggests that cognitive gaps are detectable in…

We discuss the limitations of hypothesis testing using (quasi-) experiments in the study of cognitive development and suggest latent variable modeling as a viable alternative to experimentation. Latent variable models allow testing a theory as a whole, incorporating individual differences with respect to developmental processes or abilities in the…

Recent second/foreign language (L2) research has witnessed the application of sociocultural tenets to L2 classrooms. This study aimed to probe whether Iranian L2 learners' engagement in ZPD-activated collaborative dialogue, or "languaging", mediates their learning process and, specifically, their appropriate use of metadiscourse to…

In primates and adult humans direct understanding of others' action is provided by mirror mechanisms matching action observation and action execution (e.g. Casile, Caggiano & Ferrari, 2011). Despite the growing body of evidence detailing the existence of these mechanisms in the adult human brain, their origins and early development are…

Three experiments assessed the development of children's part and configural (part-relational) processing in object recognition during adolescence. In total, 312 school children aged 7-16 years and 80 adults were tested in 3-alternative forced choice (3-AFC) tasks. They judged the correct appearance of upright and inverted presented familiar…

This article describes an initiative undertaken by a coalition of psychologists (Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education) from the American Psychological Association (APA) to identify the top 20 principles from psychological science relevant to teaching and learning in the classroom. This article identifies these principles and their…

The relations among various spatial and mathematics skills were assessed in a cross-sectional study of 854 children from kindergarten, third, and sixth grades (i.e., 5 to 13 years of age). Children completed a battery of spatial mathematics tests and their scores were submitted to exploratory factor analyses both within and across domains. In the…

Neuroscientists have long believed that there are sensitive periods in development during which the effects of experience play a critical role. And developmental psychologists have argued for the importance of early experience in the first years of life as being critical for brain and behavioral development. Most of the neuroscience research…

The integrated use of spatial and temporal information seems to support the separation of two sensory streams. The present study tested whether this facilitation depends on the encoding of sensory stimuli in externally anchored spatial coordinate systems. Fifty-nine children between 5 and 12 years as well as 12 young adults performed a crossmodal…

Head Start enhances school readiness during preschool, but effects diminish after children transition into kindergarten. Designed to promote sustained gains, the Research-based Developmentally Informed (REDI) Parent program (REDI-P) provided home visits before and after the kindergarten transition, giving parents evidence-based learning games,…

Looking is a fundamental exploratory behavior by which infants acquire knowledge about the world. In theories of infant habituation, however, looking as an exploratory behavior has been deemphasized relative to the reliable nature with which looking indexes active cognitive processing. We present a new theory that connects looking to the dynamics…