The purpose of this study is to examine children's cognition within the creative process in dance and to examine how dance making affects cognitive development in children. Data on children's thinking were gathered from fifth graders participating in an artist-in-residence program in a public school in Pennsylvania. Both the inquiry and the data…

The purpose of this study was to identify problems and motivation sources and strategies of decision-making of the students' attending preschool education teacher department, was to determine the relationship between learning motivation and strategies of decision-making, academic achievement of students, was to determine whether strategies of…

Employing multiple methods, including a comparison group pre/posttest design and student interviews and self-reflections, this study represents an initial attempt to investigate the efficacy of a social and emotional learning self-regulation strategy relative to the general reading ability, reading self-concept, and social and emotional well-being…

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a topic of increased policy interest in the Slovak Republic where improving quality in the ECEC sector is a subject of growing importance. The OECD has identified five effective policy levers to encourage quality in the sector: 1) quality goals and regulations; 2) curriculum and guidelines; 3)…

Research has demonstrated that second language immersion is an effective means of facilitating primary school students' second language acquisition without undermining their competence in their first language. Despite the rapid growth of Chinese-English bilingual programmes in China, limited empirical research has been conducted thus far by which…

The digital world is full of both possibility and peril, with rules of engagement being hashed out as we go. While schools are still "hesitant to embrace new technologies as a backlash from the significant, and largely ineffectual, investment in classroom computers as an instructional panacea during in the mid-1990's" (Collins and Halverson 2009),…

Background: A music education program with a goal of enhancing cognitive development of preschool-aged children enrolled in local preschools is evaluated by The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University. The budget for the evaluation was small, and therefore presented several challenges to the evaluation team. Purpose: Through a case study…

Objectives: Attempts to understand the effects of maltreatment subtypes on childhood functioning are complicated by the fact that children often experience multiple subtypes. This study assessed the effects of maltreatment subtypes on the cognitive, academic, and mental health functioning of preadolescent youth in out-of-home care using both…

Background: Associations among cognitive development and intrapersonal and environmental characteristics were investigated for 89 longitudinal study participants with Down syndrome to understand developmental patterns associated with cognitive strengths and weaknesses. Materials and Methods: Subtest scores of the Stanford-Binet IV collected…

The Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (LCTSR) was used to gauge the relative effectiveness of three different methods of pedagogy, "Reading, Presenting, and Questioning" (RPQ), "Experimenting and Discussion" (ED), and "Traditional Methods" (TM), on increasing students' level of scientific thinking. The…

Humans are adept at inferring the mental states underlying other agents' actions, such as goals, beliefs, desires, emotions and other thoughts. We propose a computational framework based on Bayesian inverse planning for modeling human action understanding. The framework represents an intuitive theory of intentional agents' behavior based on the…

The institutional machine of contemporary activity theory currently appears to be constrained by centring on the structure of mediated activity first voiced by Vygotsky. As a centring, such a principle, it is argued, continually restores the equilibrium of the institutional machine in alignment with its possible development in the polysemy of…

We investigated whether 16-month-old infants' past experience with a person's gaze reliability influences their expectation about the person's ability to form beliefs. Infants were first administered a search task in which they observed an experimenter show excitement while looking inside a box that either contained a toy (reliable looker…

For adults, prior information about an individual's likely goals, preferences or dispositions plays a powerful role in interpreting ambiguous behavior and predicting and interpreting behavior in novel contexts. Across two studies, we investigated whether 10-month-old infants' ability to identify the goal of an ambiguous action sequence was…

Previous research has shown that preschoolers extend labels and internal properties of objects based on those objects' causal properties, even when the causal properties conflict with the objects' perceptual appearance [Nazzi, T., & Gopnik, A. (2000). "A shift in children's use of perceptual and causal cues to categorization." "Developmental…