In this paper we direct attention to 5-6-year-olds' learning of arithmetic skills through a thorough analysis of changes in the children's ways of encountering and experiencing numbers. The foundation for our approach is phenomenographic, in that our object of analysis is differences in children's ways of completing an arithmetic task, which are…

A documented transcript and a series of still images from two spontaneous, incidental and intra-active pedagogical encounters in a preschool are the focus and the source of this article. A turning over of data generated through a piece of doctoral research that explored intra-active learning as a phenomenon makes visible the agency of names and…

In the study, the authors addressed two areas of inquiry: the influence of enlisting three underlying cognitive learning processes in alphabet learning, and order effects for letter name and letter sound instruction. Alphabet instruction was designed to enlist paired-associate learning (PAL) only, PAL plus orthographic learning, or PAL plus…

This study investigated: 1) the influence of alphabet instructional content (letter names, letter sounds, or both) on alphabet learning and engagement of English only and dual language learner (DLL) children, and 2) the relation between children's initial status and growth in three underlying cognitive learning processes (paired-associate,…

Does valence play a role in children's sensitivity to and use of moral information in the service of selective learning? In the present experiment, we explored this question by presenting 3- to 5-year-old children with informants who behaved in ways consistent or inconsistent with sociomoral norms, such as helping a peer retrieve a toy or…

Preschoolers' causal learning from intentional actions--causal interventions--is subject to a self-agency bias. The authors propose that this bias is evidence-based, in other words, that it is responsive to causal uncertainty. In the current studies, two causes (one child controlled, one experimenter controlled) were associated with one or two…

In this article, we suggest that self-reflection and self-control--studied under the rubric of "executive function" (EF)--have the potential to transform the way in which learning occurs, allowing for the relatively rapid emergence of new behaviors. We describe 2 lines of research that indicate that reflecting on a task and its affordances helps…

Two studies investigated the relationship between learning names and learning concepts in preschool children. More specifically, we focused on the relationship between learning the names and learning the intended functions of artifacts, given that the intended function of an artifact is generally thought to constitute core conceptual information…

Individuals diagnosed with autism suffer from numerous social, affective and linguistic impairments. It has also been suggested that they have a global imitation deficit. That hypothesis, however, is compromised by the fact that individuals with autism suffer from various motor impairments. Here we describe an experiment on cognitive imitation, a…

Research supported by Grant HD-01570 and by USPHS Post-doctoral Fellowship Grant 1-F2-MH-29, 557-01, and reported at the annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association (Boston, April 1967).

The purpose of this study was to ascertain (1) whether young children are able to recognize a need to check response accuracy and memory verification and (2) what strategies they use. A model of the nursery room was used to assess 37 preschoolers' recognition, recall, and spatial memory for school objects. Children were asked to verify their…

What children do in play is simultaneously influenced by the properties of the play object and the skills of the child. Properties of objects lend themselves to re-engagement in investigative play or support for shared action. Repeated play with particular objects increases the number of actions possible with these objects. The process of…

Reports the results of one study in which parents taught their two- to four-year-olds basic and superordinate concepts, and another, in which they taught them subordinate concepts. Parents' teaching styles were analyzed in terms of their usefulness for children who are attempting to learn about principles of hierarchical classification. (AS)

Seeks to discover whether listening to songs over an extended period of time contributes to a greater integration of words and music in memory among preschool children. Finds more accurate recognition of songs performed without text when they had heard them previously with texts and that melodic content influenced song-recognition ability. (DSK)

The purposes of this study were to examine priority of recall of newly learned items (PRNI) from a developmental standpoint and to investigate whether preschool children are capable of using the attentional strategy employed by adults in free recall learning (FRL) of new items. In the first experiment the PRNI effect was examined from a…