The objective of this study was to examine in what ways and to what extent preschoolers (5-6 years of age) manifest early Engineering Habits of Mind (EHoM) while engaging in an open-ended problem-solving construction task. The study comprised 228 children (120 boys and 108 girls). The study implemented a quantitative approach. The main research…

Purpose: According to Vygotskian theory, verbal thinking serves to guide our behavior and underpins critical self-regulatory functions. Indeed, numerous studies now link inner speech usage with performance on tests of executive function (EF). However, the selectivity of inner speech contributions to multifactorial executive planning performance…

Differences exist between engineering and liberal arts students because of their educational backgrounds. Therefore, they solve problems differently. This study examined the brain activation of these two groups of students when they responded to 12 questions of verbal, numerical, or spatial intelligence. A total of 25 engineering and 25 liberal…

This study further extends scaffolding research to mother-child dyads (N = 51) in poverty, examining relationships between maternal scaffolding and 4-year-old Head Start children's own later scaffolding behaviors. At Time 1, experimental group children received maternal scaffolding during problem-solving tasks, whereas control group children…

The present study explores the effects of parental scaffolding of children's problem solving on the development of executive function (EF). Eighty-two children were assessed at 2, 3, and 4 years of age on a variety of EF tasks and, at ages 2 and 3, on a problem-solving puzzle with which parents offered structured assistance (i.e., scaffolding).…

Does solving subtraction problems with negative answers (e.g., 5-14) require different cognitive processes than solving problems with positive answers (e.g., 14-5)? In a dual-task experiment, young adults (N=39) combined subtraction with two working memory tasks, verbal memory and visual-spatial memory. All of the subtraction problems required…

The involvement of working memory (WM) was examined in two types of mental calculation tasks: exact and approximate. Specifically, children attending Grades 3 and 4 of primary school were involved in three experiments that examined the role of verbal and visuospatial WM in solving addition problems presented in vertical or horizontal format. For…

The paper presents findings of primary school children's performance on classification and generalisation tasks to demonstrate the fundamental connection between their verbal thinking processes and problem-solving, on the one hand, and the practical activities of their society and culture, on the other. The results reveal that, although children…

This study evaluated the influence of the frequency of reading and writing habits (RWH) associated with education on the performance of adults in brief neuropsychological tasks. A sample of 489 Brazilian subjects, composed of 71% women, aged 21-80 years, with 2-23 years of formal education, was evaluated by the Brazilian Brief Neuropsychological…

This study investigated intellectual development in 4-7 years old Greek and Chinese children. They were examined on speeded performance, working memory, reasoning, and self-awareness tasks in order to investigate possible effects of learning the Chinese logographic system on possible differences in intellectual development between these ethnic…

Children's performance on multidimensional classification tasks was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, preschool, first-, and third-grade children were shown a standard stimulus and were then asked to judge whether several comparison stimuli were the same as or different from the standard. Comparison stimuli differed from the standard…

A six-process theory of analogical reasoning was tested by administering verbal analogy items to students in grades 3 through college. The items were classified according to five verbal relations: synonyms, antonyms, functional, linear ordering, and class membership. A new method of componential analysis that does not require precueing was used to…