This study explored whether a daytime nap aids children's acquisition of letter-sound knowledge, which is a fundamental component for learning to read. Thirty-two preschool children in Sydney, Australia (M[subscript age] = 4 years;3 months) were taught letter-sound mappings in two sessions: one followed by a nap and the other by a wakeful period.…

Questioning is a core component of formal pedagogy. Parents commonly question children, but do they use questions to teach? This article defines "pedagogical questions" as questions for which the questioner already knows the answer and intended to help the questionee learn. Transcripts of parent-child conversations were collected from…

Children acquire general knowledge about many kinds of things, but there are few known means by which this knowledge is acquired. In this article, it is proposed that children acquire generic knowledge by sharing in pretend play. In Experiment 1, twenty-two 3- to 4-year-olds watched pretense in which a puppet represented a "nerp" (an unfamiliar…

Do typical arithmetic problems hinder learning of mathematical equivalence? Second and third graders (7-9 years old; N= 80) received lessons on mathematical equivalence either with or without typical arithmetic problems (e.g., 15 + 13 = 28 vs. 28 = 28, respectively). Children then solved math equivalence problems (e.g., 3 + 9 + 5 = 6 + __),…

Reports the results of one study in which parents taught their two- to four-year-olds basic and superordinate concepts, and another, in which they taught them subordinate concepts. Parents' teaching styles were analyzed in terms of their usefulness for children who are attempting to learn about principles of hierarchical classification. (AS)

Preschool children were trained to acquire transitivity, conservation, and class inclusion of length via feedback to their judgments. Feedback was found to facilitate the learning of all three concepts. (ST)

First graders were taught to read words either in printed sentence contexts or printed singly on flash cards. Post-test scores indicated that context-trained children learned more about the semantic identities of printed words, while flash card-trained children could read the words faster and learned more about orthographic forms. (JMB)