The world is facing complex global societal challenges including accelerating climate change, a pandemic, rising social inequalities also in well-functioning welfare states, cultural and linguistic diversity, and a renewed call for racial justice. Developmental psychology can make strong contributions to address these and other global challenges…

Philosophy for Children (P4C) is an educational program founded by Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp in the 1970s to improve judgment in children by sharpening their critical, creative, and caring thinking skills. As children's engagement in philosophical dialogue is an essential component of the program, the teacher has a facilitative, rather than an…

Self-assessment practices have been advocated in recent Irish educational documents due to their potential to enhance school children's learning and self-regulatory skills. However, the literature has highlighted how some children struggle to make accurate self-assessments of their academic work, which diminishes such positive effects (Keane and…

Children are active learners: they learn not only from the information people offer and the evidence they happen to observe, but by actively seeking information. However, children's information search strategies are typically less efficient than those of adults. In two studies, we isolate potential sources of developmental change in how children…

Although Eriksonian theory suggests that adolescents' sense of fidelity is a key component of healthy development, research on this psychosocial construct has been limited. The current study developed an index of youth fidelity, examined the developmental course of this construct, explored the influence of contextual factors on different fidelity…

Immigrant-origin adolescents represent the fastest growing segment of youth population in the United States, and in many urban schools they represent the majority of students. In this 3-wave longitudinal study, we explored trajectories of internalizing mental health symptoms (depression, anxiety, and somatic symptoms). The participants included…

This study analysed the gradual emergence of the teaching/learning process by examining theory of mind (ToM) acquisition and age effects in the preschool period. We observed five dyads performing a jigsaw task drawn from a previous study. Three stages were identified. In the first one, the teacher focuses on the execution of her/his own task…

The relation between short-term and long-term change (also known as learning and development) has been of great interest throughout the history of developmental psychology. Werner and Vygotsky believed that the two involved basically similar progressions of qualitatively distinct knowledge states; behaviorists such as Kendler and Kendler believed…

We investigated changes in midlife parents' intergenerational ambivalence toward a focal child and its influence on their psychological well-being over 14 years, as the focal child moved from adolescence into young adulthood. We estimated growth curve models using three waves of data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 1,510…

The chapters in this volume address the need for a better understanding of the development of intersecting identities over age and context. The chapters provide valuable insights into the development of identities, particularly group identities. They highlight common processes across identities, such as the role of contrast and comparison and the…

Youth and adolescence are associated with significant changes in a person's life. According to risk theory, the changes experienced by young people today are fundamentally different from those experienced by previous generations and entail a greater degree of uncertainty. In this paper, survey and interview data are used to describe how…

In this paper, we consider how the life story develops through the creation of self-event connections in narrating experiences. We first outline the ways in which such connections have been implied by existing work on the life story, and then consider the varieties of such connections that we see in our own work. That work suggests that self-event…

How do the goals we once cherished but can no longer pursue relate to maturity? The authors asked adults who have experienced challenging life transitions to describe the life goals they once sought but no longer do and those goals that motivate their lives now. The authors conducted research which examines how adults' views of their lost and…

Reviews Thelen and Smith's book and its account of "how knowing develops from doing." Concentrates on the nature of dynamic systems. (DR)

This study examined the metacognitive developmental patterns of Hong Kong school students. Students rated their own metacognitive competencies by responding to an inventory of six motivational- and cognitive-metacognitive subscales. Results showed that students' metacognitive competencies decreased with age--from primary 4 (age 9) to secondary 5…