Sustained attention (SA) is an endogenous form of attention that emerges in infancy and reflects cognitive engagement and processing. SA is critical for learning and has been measured using different methods during screen-based and interactive contexts involving social and nonsocial stimuli. How SA differs by measurement method, context, and…

Two aspects of real-world visual search are typically studied in parallel: category knowledge (e.g., searching for food) and visual patterns (e.g., predicting an upcoming street sign from prior street signs). Previous visual search studies have shown that prior category knowledge hinders search when targets and distractors are from the same…

This article describes an assignment used in an undergraduate Advanced Exercise Physiology course for seniors. Students' backgrounds in chemistry varied from adequate to almost nonexistent. This presented several challenges for teaching and students' understanding of aerobic oxidation of a glucose molecule. This article presents an assignment for…

Children first establish the foundations of subsequent social interactions by learning basic toy manipulations skills (Weiss and Harris, 2001). Once the child has established these skills in isolation, they can then be expanded into the symbolic and dramatic levels of play. For children who do not display these foundational toy play skills, the…

Purpose: Much remains unknown about how young children orient to computational objects and how we as learning scientists can orient to young children as computational thinkers. While some research exists on how children learn programming, very little has been written about how they learn the technical skills needed to operate technologies or to…

Tangible coding toys have been promulgated as useful learning tools for young children to learn computer science and mathematics concepts and skills. Although research shows coding toys can support mathematics for early childhood aged children, little is known about the specific design features of coding toys that afford mathematical thinking…

Recommendations for achieving generalized instructional outcomes often overlook the capacity for generative learning. We sought to demonstrate how decontextualized and logically organized instruction would lead to derived and contextually appropriate recombinative generalization and arbitrarily applicable relational responding (AARRing) in…

This study utilises diversity dolls to elicit young children's perceptions of visual disabilities. The study which involved 20 participants aged between six to seven years old suggests that although many children have positive attitudes towards peers with physical disabilities, attitudes are often grounded in the deficit medical model, with…

This article feeds on new materialisms, especially the work of Barad, while re-turning and exploring child/LEGO/pedagogue/(re)searcher intra-actions in kindergarten and drawing attention to both human and non-human organisms as agentic forces that produce diffractions, affects and effects when they clash. The article places a special focus on one…

This study examines whether the Internet of Toys (IoToys) (de)limits children's make-believe play and whether the functionality and manipulatives offered by the IoToys serve as motivational pleasure (tactile, virtual and visual) for children to engage in make-believe play. Combining Piagetian and Vygotskian ideas of play as a unity of cognition…

Kids are drawn to dolls and dump trucks, and crashing the two together might just be a child's favorite pastime. Who knew such a simple pleasure could serve as an accessible, compelling phenomenon for instigating investigations of force and motion. With a few inexpensive materials straight out of the toy box (literally, a doll, a dump truck, a…

Play is a place of diverse meaning-making for young children and often central to family life. This paper reports on a family study in which the authors analyse Author One's family photos of young children's play across four generations. The photo analysis shows continuity and transformations in the types of play activities the young children…

Over the past decade the market for children's digital play activities focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has grown exponentially. One benefit to the growth in digital STEM play is that it can provide children opportunities to engage the cognitive skills and practices that can be valuable for formal STEM learning.…

The purpose of this study was to explore how kindergarten students (aged 5-6 years) engaged with mathematics as they learned programming with robot coding toys. We video-recorded 16 teaching sessions of kindergarten students' (N = 36) mathematical and programming activities. Students worked in small groups (4-5 students) with robot coding toys on…

The authors explore children's symbolic play that involves themes of fear and darkness, and they investigate the nature of children's binary oppositions, particularly between self and other. Their account is based on a year-long qualitative study they conducted with seven children, four to ten years of age. They observed the children engage with…