Background: Traditionally, Physical Education (PE) has adopted a multiskills approach, where children generally engage in decontextualised practice of sport techniques to develop specific movement skills and facilitate sports participation. This approach has been critiqued for having a weak conceptual and philosophical justification, and a lack of…

Values, defined by Schwartz (1994) as basic motivational cognitive structures, guide life goals, transcend contexts, and affect individuals' courses of action differently depending on their preferred values. With young children, an important question that emerges is what factors underlie the linkages between their preferred motivations (i.e.,…

Young children have been described as critical consumers of information, particularly in the domain of language learning. Indeed, children are more likely to learn novel words from people with accurate histories of object labeling than with inaccurate ones. But what happens when informant testimony conflicts with a tendency to see the world in a…

Fluency, the subjective experience of ease associated with information processing, has been shown to affect a host of judgments. Previous research has typically focused on specific factors that affect the use of a single, specific fluency source. In the present study we examine how cognitive mindsets, or processing modes, moderate fluency…

This study provides the first direct evidence of cognitive continuity for multiple specific information processing abilities from infancy and toddlerhood to pre-adolescence, and provides support for the view that infant abilities form the basis of later childhood abilities. Data from a large sample of children (N = 131) were obtained at five…

When students are faced with learning abstract contents, creating meaningful teaching and learning opportunities is a challenge for many educators. Concerns for how to get students to connect theoretical constructs and apply them to the "real world" is especially critical for those students studying to be teachers. This descriptive study…

Aim: This study investigated prediction of separate cognitive abilities at the age of 5 years by cognitive development at the ages of both 2 and 3 years, and the agreement between these measurements, in very preterm children. Methods: Preterm children (n=102; 44 males; 58 females) with a gestational age less than 30 weeks and/or birthweight less…

Theories accounting for the development of analogical reasoning tend to emphasize either the centrality of relational knowledge accretion or changes in information processing capability. Simulations in LISA (Hummel & Holyoak, 1997, 2003), a neurally inspired computer model of analogical reasoning, allow us to explore how these factors may…

The effects of 3 weeks of social (control), postural, or object-oriented experiences on 9- to 21-week-old infants' (N = 42) reaching, exploration, and means-end behaviors were assessed. Coders recorded object contacts, mouthing, fingering, attention, and affect from video. Postural and object-oriented experiences advanced reaching, haptic…

Crick and Dodge's (Psychological Bulletin 115:74-101, 1994) social information processing model has proven very useful in guiding research focused on aggressive and peer-rejected children's social-cognitive functioning. Its application to early childhood, however, has been much more limited. The present study responds to this gap by developing and…

This paper critically engages with the theme of "process over product"--a theme that is argued to be increasingly problematised as an influential narrative in the construction and transmission of a philosophy of early education. The importance of producing children of "competence" through appropriate educational processes is associated with…

The Arsenio and Lemerise (this issue) proposal integrating social information processing (SIP) and domain theory to study children's aggression is evaluated from a domain theory perspective. Basic tenets of domain theory rendering it compatible with SIP are discussed as well as points of divergence. Focus is directed to the proposition that…