The rate of habituation to food is inversely related to energy intake, and overweight children may habituate slower to food and consume more energy. This study compared patterns of sensitization, as defined by an initial increase in operant or motivated responding for food, and habituation, defined by gradual reduction in responding, for macaroni…

One of the popular misconceptions about giftedness is that the gifted label is a benefit. It is probably a fixed blessing at best and can bring unexpected problems to children, their families, and their teachers. Children who are labeled gifted often have uncertain feelings about the designation and the whole "gifted" experience, if not…

Personal processes, the environment, and individual behaviors of both teachers and students are factors that facilitate students' use of self-regulation learning strategies in reading. Some environmental conditions, such as organization of materials and clear expectations, support the development and use of self-regulation learning (SRL)…

Single trial methods reveal unimpaired free recall of unrelated words in Asperger's syndrome (AS). When repeated trials are used (free recall learning), typical individuals show improved recall over trials, subjective organization of material (SO) and a correlation between free recall and SO. We tested oral (Experiment 1) and written (Experiment…

Increasing working memory (WM) capacity is often cited as a major influence on children's development and yet WM capacity is difficult to examine independently of long-term knowledge. A computational model of children's nonword repetition (NWR) performance is presented that independently manipulates long-term knowledge and WM capacity to determine…

The involvement of genetic and environmental factors to the development of obsessive compulsion symptoms during the adolescent period is examined. Study revealed that individual differences in OC symptoms are heritable during puberty and shared environmental influences played a role only in the beginning of adolescence but no sex differences in…

We evaluated the statistical power of single-indicator latent growth curve models to detect individual differences in change (variances of latent slopes) as a function of sample size, number of longitudinal measurement occasions, and growth curve reliability. We recommend the 2 degree-of-freedom generalized test assessing loss of fit when both…

Developmental exceptionalities span the range of learning abilities and encompass children with both learning disorders and learning gifts. The purpose of this article is to stimulate thinking about these exceptionalities, particularly the complexities and variations within and across people. Investigators tend to view learning disabilities or…

Purpose: The present study examined the extent of genetic and environmental influences on individual differences in children's conversational language use. Method: Behavioral genetic analyses focused on conversational measures and 2 standardized tests from 380 twins (M = 7.13 years) during the 2nd year of the Western Reserve Reading Project (S. A.…

A system of PK-16 parental choice would look much more like the current situation in early education and in postsecondary education than like the system of K-12 neighborhood schools. The changes required would provide more options for a tailored or customized educational experience for each child than those now offered by the K-12 public school…

The purpose of this study was to identify and analyse specific instances of transactive communication as children engaged in a paired melody writing task using a computer-based composing environment. Transactive communication has been identified as one of the features of general collaborative engagement that is most helpful in an educational…

The phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary, and word reading abilities of 19 children with cochlear implants (CI) were assessed. Nine children had an implant early (between 2 and 3.6 years) and 10 had an implant later (between 5 and 7 years). Participants were tested twice over a 12-month period on syllable, rhyme, and phoneme awareness (see…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the differential classroom structure and efficacy reported by general and special educators at the elementary and secondary level. General and special educators (n = 774, return rate of 37%) from a large school district in the southeast US participated in the study. The participants completed a modified…

In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in the use of social networking tools (e.g., Facebook) and social media in general, mainly for social purposes (Smith, Salaway & Caruso 2009). Many educators, including ourselves, believe that these tools offer new educational affordances and avenues for students to interact with each other and…

We examined individual differences in shame responding in early childhood and predictive relations with shame proneness in middle childhood. Child shame responding, parental shaming, and child temperamental inhibition were assessed at Time 1 (n = 225, aged 3-4 years), shame responding was reassessed at Time 2 (n = 199, aged 5-7 years), and shame…