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…

The topic of testimony has gained increased prominence in recent years in epistemology, where it is typically taken to refer to the possible acquisition of knowledge through the understanding and acceptance of someone else's judgement. There is no doubt that learning in this way is a prominent feature of education. This conception of testimony…

This study examined the extent of perspective taking and language features represented in secondary students' text-based analytical writing. We investigated: (1) whether perspective taking is related to writing quality, accounting for language features in writing; (2) whether students' English learner status is related to perspectives represented…

This investigation examined the role of students' social-emotional need satisfaction in relation to academic engagement and social-emotional skills. Among a sample of 501 secondary school students (and their parents/carers), several need satisfaction variables were examined: perceived social-emotional autonomy, perceived social competence,…

Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience associated difficulties in reading comprehension. This may be due to the social nature of fictional texts, which require the reader to interpret what characters are thinking and feeling and to make inferences about the cause and effect between events in a story. This paper outlines…

Research Findings: This study explored the developmental pattern, latent profiles of young children's sympathy development, and the associated family factors. Altogether 1408 Shanghai parents completed the Children's Sympathy Assessment Scale-Parents (CSAS-P). The descriptive results indicated an age-related increase in sympathy and a significant…