Learning progressions have become increasingly prevalent in mathematics education as they offer a fine-grain map of possible learning pathways a child may take within a particular domain. However, there is an opportunity to build upon this research in ways that consider learning from multiple perspectives. Many current forms of learning…

Wordless picture book reading is one of the common literacy practices for young children that happen at schools and homes. This dissertation of three studies explores the reader-text transactions between young children and wordless picture books in three ways: a content analysis of wordless books potentially featuring characters of color, a…

Purpose: To align with the artificial intelligence and robotics (AIR) research and policy agenda, this paper puts forth an adapted five big ideas framework specifically tailored to teaching young children about artificial intelligence (AI) via robotics. Design/Approach/Methods: Grounded in early childhood education research, the proposed framework…

This position paper proposes that a relationship between young children's embodied mathematical concepts and their awareness of mathematical pattern and structure (AMPS) (Mulligan & Mitchelmore, 2009) develops through play. Theoretical perspectives on the development of schematic patterns, the embodiment of mathematical understandings, and the…

Psychological intuitions about natural category structure do not always correspond to the true structure of the world. The current study explores young children's responses to conflict between intuitive structure and authoritative feedback using a semi-supervised learning (Zhu et al., 2007) paradigm. In three experiments, 160 children between the…

In this paper, we investigate children's learning of reflectional symmetry in a dynamic geometry environment. Through a classroom-based intervention involving two 1-h lessons, we analyse the changes in the children's thinking about reflectional symmetry: first, they developed dynamic and embodied ways of thinking about symmetry after working with…

"Improving Mathematics in the Early Years and Key Stage 1" reviews the best available evidence to offer five recommendations for developing the maths skills of 3-7-year olds. Recommendations include integrating maths into different activities throughout the day -- for example, at registration and snack time -- to familiarise children…

Water is fascinating, fun, and multifaceted. Children can play with it endlessly. But play, for play's sake, is not water's only value (Crosser, 1994, Tovey, 1993). Indeed, water play is a compelling focus of study for young children (Chalufour & Worth, 2005). The concepts that young children learn from water play are essential for early childhood…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether physicality (actual and active touch of concrete material), as such, is a necessity for science experimentation learning at the kindergarten level. We compared the effects of student experimentation with Physical Manipulatives (PM) and Virtual Manipulatives (VM) on kindergarten students'…

Two studies examined how 3-6-year-olds understand the process of learning. In study 1 examined how children spontaneously talk about learning via a CHILDES language analysis. Talk about the learning process increased between the ages of 3-5. Talk specifically about learning in terms of desire decreased during this period. This suggests the…

Observationally induced concept acquisition and generalization were studies in 132 second graders, using a clustering task. Groups were provided with a live or target model and different types of verbal coding. (ST)

Addresses Nelson's commentary on Ward, Vela, and Hass' study of children's category learning (both of which are in this issue). Discusses the issue of whether a holistic processing view provides a better account of children's learning than does an analytical view. (PCB)

Three experiments examined the modes of processing that children and adults use in learning family-resemblance categories. Children and adults exhibited primarily analytic, rather than holistic, modes of learning. (PCB)

Comments on this issue's article by Ward, Vela, and Hass on children's category learning. Suggests that aspects of the authors' methodology may have led them to underestimate holistic processing. (PCB)

After learning to categorize a set of alien-like stimuli in the context of a story, a group of 5-year-old children and adults judged pairs of stimuli from different categories to be less similar than did groups not learning the category distinction. In a same-different task, the learning group made more errors on pairs of non-identical stimuli…