Educators often use concrete objects to help children understand mathematics concepts. However, findings on the effectiveness of concrete objects are mixed. The present study examined how two factors--perceptual richness and established knowledge of the objects--combine to influence children's counting performance. In two experiments, preschoolers…

Neural changes related to learning of the meaning of Chinese characters in English speakers were examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We examined item specific learning effects for trained characters, but also the generalization of semantic knowledge to novel transfer characters that shared a semantic radical (part of a…

People are capable of thinking about the future, the past, remote locations, another person's perspective, and counterfactual alternatives. Without denying the uniqueness of each process, it is proposed that they constitute different forms of traversing psychological distance. Psychological distance is egocentric: Its reference point is the self…

This paper examines the question of whether there are useful general thinking skills. It offers a working definition of "thinking skill" and identifies ways in which this concept has been over-applied. Thinking skills, used across domains, are not inevitably weak as a result of the generality-power tradeoff. Admitting that thinking skills require…

This study examined the relationship between productive phonological knowledge and generalization learning patterns in nine phonologically disordered children (ages three to five). Although all subjects exhibited equivalent levels of knowledge and received identical training, three different generalization learning patterns were observed.…

The article outlines an approach to memory remediation that attempts to teach memory-impaired patients domain-specific knowledge relevant to their everyday functioning. Studies support the use of a training technique, the method of vanishing cues, in the successful generalization to the workplace of knowledge acquired in the laboratory. (DB)

Two experiments documented that conceptual knowledge influences 3-year-olds' extension of novel words. When objects were described as having conceptual properties typical of artifacts, children extended novel labels on the basis of shape. When same objects were described as having conceptual properties typical of animate kinds, children extended…

A study was conducted to examine the process of the development of knowledge structures concerning events. Specifically, it investigated (1) the ways in which individuals build theories about events as they experience them; (2) the number of events an individual must experience, and how similar those events must be, before he or she begins to…

The paper offers a broad-based behavioral approach to language generalization which is affected by basic cognitive processes, behavioral learning strategies, environmental variables, and the child's present knowledge base. Implications of this approach for application of a systems approach to intervention are discussed. (Author/DB)

The pamphlet reviews cognitive and developmental psychology research in which skilled and less skilled performance patterns and mechanisms have been compared. Knowledge has been described, in theory, in terms of an associative network in which concepts are represented as the nodes of the net, and relations between concepts serve as associative…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…

This volume of the 27th International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education Conference includes the following research reports: (1) Improving Decimal Number Conception by Transfer from Fractions to Decimals (Irita Peled and Juhaina Awawdy Shahbari); (2) The Development of Student Teachers' Efficacy Beliefs in Mathematics during…