Remembering to carry out intended actions in the future, known as prospective memory (PM), is an important cognitive ability. In daily life, individuals remember to perform future tasks that might rely on effortful processes (monitoring) but also habitual tasks that might rely on more automatic processes. The development of PM across childhood in…

To explore the potential contribution of parents' causal talk to preschooler's emerging scientific literacy and related interests, we observed 153 parent-child dyads playing together in a museum and in the lab. As in previous work, the frequency with which parents referenced causal information in their speech predicted the strength of their…

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) commissioned this Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) with a view to understanding what is known from the research literature concerning learning a foreign language (FL) and its impact on students' wider academic outcomes. The key questions addressed examine: (1) the research identifying what approaches to…

Pollution phenomena are complex systems in which different parts are integrated by means of causal and temporal relationships. To understand pollution, children must develop some cognitive abilities related to system thinking and temporal and causal inferential reasoning. These cognitive abilities constrain and guide how children understand…

Young children tend to judge improbable events to be impossible, yet there is variability across age and across individuals. Our study examined parent-child conversations about impossible and improbable events and links between parents' explanations about those events and children's possibility judgments in a reasoning task. Regression analyses…

Students' thinking about the relation between effort and ability can influence their motivation, affect, and academic achievement. Students sometimes think of effort as inversely related to ability (such that people with low ability must work harder than people with high ability) and other times think of effort as positively related to ability…

In an examination guided by cognitive developmental and attribution theory of how explanations of wealth and poverty and perceptions of rich and poor people change with age and are interrelated, 6-, 10-, and 14-year-olds (N = 88) were asked for their causal attributions and trait judgments concerning a rich man and a poor man. First graders, like…

The influence of intelligence, self-concept, and causal attributions on metamemory and the metamemory-memory behavior relationship in grade-school children was studied. Following the assessment of intelligence, self-concept, and causal attributions, 105 children each from grades 3, 5, and 7 were given a metamemory interview and a sort-recall task.…