Anti-bias in early education is gaining importance, especially given the volatile social climate amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, Singapore preschools lack focus on anti-bias education despite being a multi-ethnic society. Set in the COVID-19 context, this teacher research developed and examined a curriculum to educate young children on…

The jigsaw classroom is a cooperative learning method designed in the late 1970s to improve the academic performance of minority children by reducing intergroup conflict and increasing self-evaluations. Despite its high popularity, the available evidence for the effectiveness of this method seems scant and mixed, with neither meta-analysis nor…

Numerous studies show empathic concern promotes altruistic motivation and prosocial behavior. Here, we discuss empathic concern, its relation to altruistic motivation, and how empathic concern is invoked in experimental studies. We do this with an eye toward applying laboratory techniques in the classroom, and everyday life, to foster empathic…

This article examines the main ideas presented in Newell's groundbreaking article, published in "Issues in Integrative Studies" in 2001, "A Theory of Interdisciplinary Studies": that complexity is a precondition for interdisciplinary research, that interdisciplinary research utilizes disciplinary perspectives, and that…

The ability to make inferences about what one's peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when reasoning about others' knowledge, in children's estimates of their peers' knowledge. Four- to 7-year-olds were taught the…

Despite the popularity of social justice frameworks, today's polarized socio-political environments call for a justice-forward approach where educators blend equity and culturally-responsive pedagogies with experiential approaches to learning. The TALLS (Toward a Liberated Learning Spirit) model for developing critical consciousness infuses…

This study investigated how taking different perspectives in teacher training courses influences the learning of professional vision, multiperspectivity, and strategic knowledge of classroom management. A total of 134 student teachers analyzed classroom management from one of three different perspectives: 36, from an observer perspective by…

This article starts from the observation that Socratic dialogues in the Nelson-Heckmann tradition can create a sense of belonging or community among participants. This observation has led me to the current argument that Socratic dialogue offers an alternative to more prominent forms of conversation, which I have called 'discussion' and 'discourse…

This article explores the illusory transparency phenomenon in childhood and tests two accounts of the phenomenon: the construal and the naïve (pragmatic) accounts. One hundred nine children between 8 and 13 years old participated in an adapted task of illusory transparency. Children read a story in which a character wrote an ambiguous message to…

Socio-scientific reasoning (SSR) is key to helping students take informed positions around socio-scientific issues (SSI). SSR comprises four competencies: recognising complexity of SSI's, multiple perspectives around SSI's, the need for ongoing inquiry around SSI's, and skepticism around different parties' claims made about SSI's. The Quantitative…

To broaden the appeal of social studies and English content, the authors share how they use multimedia storytelling to increase student engagement, differentiate instruction, and consider multiple viewpoints.

As spatial languages, sign languages rely on spatial cognitive processes that are not involved for spoken languages. Interlocutors have different visual perspectives of the signer's hands requiring a mental transformation for successful communication about spatial scenes. It is unknown whether visual-spatial perspective-taking (VSPT) or mental…

The current study assessed the impact of three brief interventions aimed at influencing implicit gender bias in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. The reduction of this bias is a key consideration as it remains a major barrier to gender equality in STEM. The interventions (psychoeducation, exposure to positive…

This study examined the role of: (1) empathic concern for victims of relational aggression (ECV); and (2) perspective taking (PT) in explaining self- and peer-reported relational aggression (RA) and relational inclusion (RI) in a sample of 345 adolescents. The direct association among ECV, PT and self- and peer-reported RA and RI was investigated.…

The development of a mind-reading ability, known as theory-of-mind (ToM), has been recognized as following a universal process, but the age at which the false-belief task is passed has been reported to have wide inter-group variabilities. Japanese children have been reported to acquire a false-belief understanding at a slightly older age than…