Differences in vocabulary that children bring with them to school can be traced back to the gestures they produced at the age of 1;2, which, in turn, can be traced back to the gestures their parents produced at the same age (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009a). We ask here whether child gesture can be experimentally increased and, if so, whether the…

Argumentation is increasingly recognized as a fundamental intellectual skill, but evidence suggests that few adolescents or adults are skilled arguers. This article reports on an extended (3-year, twice weekly) intervention designed to afford dense practice in dialogic argumentation to middle-school students from traditionally academically…