In many cultural contexts, judging another as conscious or not has profound practical, legal, and philosophical consequences. However, little research focuses on how our ability to make such judgements arises. Thirty years ago a classic set of studies by Flavell et al. demonstrated that children do not develop a complex understanding of conscious…

A lesson plan is a design problem for a teacher. The desired solution to this problem is to design an instructional process that can guide students in constructing an understanding of scientific concepts through their own thinking. This article demonstrates a practical approach to designing an effective lesson plan. The approach has five phases:…

The study sought to investigate conceptual change process. It is specifically aimed to probe children's initial ideas and how or to what way those ideas alter in the long run. A total of 18 children volunteered and participated in the study. Individual interviews were conducted. The children were asked to define the concept of evaporation, explain…

Developing "Thinking and Understanding in Young Children" presents a comprehensive and accessible overview of contemporary theory and research about young children's developing thinking and understanding. Throughout this second edition, the ideas and theories presented are enlivened by transcripts of children's activities and conversations taken…

University and high school students not pursuing a science, technology, engineering, and/or mathematics (STEM) course of study demonstrate less developed scientific reasoning than their STEM-based peers. Previous studies show that the majority of non-STEM students can be classified as either concrete operational or transitional reasoners in…

In this study the authors investigated whether training preschool children in the use of mental state lexicon plays a significant role in bringing about advanced conceptual understanding of mental terms and improved performance on theory-of-mind tasks. A total of 70 participants belonging to two age groups (3 and 4 years old) were randomly…

This paper advances the thesis that high level thinking in classrooms happens when students become conscious of experience and knowledge realities and decide to pursue them flexibly and creatively. The specific research focuses on the author's conviction that effective stimulators of student reflection will accommodate knowledge encounters that…

Two experiments compared preschoolers' awareness of knowledge transitions involving behavioral changes to those involving vocabulary or general knowledge changes. Found that children tended to report they had learned something new when novel information was behavioral (e.g., counting in Japanese) and tended to claim prior knowledge when the novel…

Preschool children were asked to choose the figure most resembling a real man from three figures drawn according to formulas used by children to depict humans. Results suggest development of drawing systems influences children's conceptions about objects or events. (Author/DB)

The main purpose of this study was to trace the development of children's awareness that they can learn and to describe the forms of their ideas of learning. A complementary aim was to account for the extent to which such conceptions can be found at different levels of development. The investigation consisted of two observational studies and a…

Presents a framework within which to organize and synthesize existing knowledge about children's understanding of the mental states of imagination, pretense, and dreams. Concludes that by the age of three, children understand important fundamental aspects of the mental nature, origin, and truth-relation of fictional mental states, but that their…

A collaborative research study was designed to facilitate, at the local school level, a mathematics teacher's development of a "constructivist" pedagogy. This paper discusses the nature and influence of the teacher's professional beliefs on his attempts to create a classroom learning environment congruent with the principles of a constructivist…

Tested 32 4-year-olds and 32 6-year-olds for free and cued recall following either play-and-remember or sort-and-remember instructions and assessed them for their metamemory of the efficacy of conceptual and perceptual sorting strategies. Younger children recalled more items under sort-and-remember, whereas no recall differences were found for the…

Four experiments investigated children's ability to notice and remember events in which the acquisition of factual information occurs. Results indicated that children tend to report they have known newly learned information for a long time, suggesting that children have some understanding of knowledge acquisition, but not at the level of adults.…

The ability to express one's mathematical thoughts in writing and computational proficiency can be viewed as reflecting different aspects of an individual's understanding of mathematics. Computational proficiency is the primary means used by educators to assess students' understanding of mathematics and thus in the mathematics classroom, cognitive…