This investigation concerns two questions: (i) is simple educational programming with children, compared to working on mathematical tasks, more effective in increasing scores in mathematical abilities, spatial awareness and working memory? (ii) is educational programming on a digital device, compared to similar paper and pencil programming…

Community-based research and learning can never be prescribed. The study entitled "Intergenerational Learning in Indigenous Textile Communities of Practice," funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, illustrated this point in many ways. Although it was conceived as community-based research, it was not initially…

Oral language provides a foundation for reading comprehension. Story comprehension is a fundamental oral language skill; it covers making inferences, identifying main ideas, monitoring, perspective-taking, and applying working memory capacity. Complex reasoning and perspective-taking are key factors in deep reading comprehension. Preliterate…

This paper explores what we can learn from research that early cognitive processes support the development of children's mathematics skills. The role of two cognitive processes in working memory in the development of early mathematics was investigated: executive functions (EF) and visual-spatial (VS) ability. Children's mathematical skills were…

Laboratory evidence of a positive effect of sleep on declarative memory consolidation suggests that naps can be used to boost school learning in a scalable, low-cost manner. The few direct investigations of this hypothesis have so far upheld it, but departed from the naturalistic setting by testing non-curricular contents presented by…

The phenomenon of insight is frequently characterized by the experience of a sudden and certain solution. Anecdotal accounts suggest that insight frequently occurs after the problem solver has taken some time away from the problem (i.e., incubation). However, the mechanism by which incubation may facilitate insight problem-solving remains unclear.…

What, exactly, is learned knowledge? And why does it matter in history teaching? Does it matter? Michael Fordham seeks to use the general tenets of cognitive psychology to inform the debate about how history teachers might get the best from their students, in particular in considering the role of memory. Fordham surveys the latest research…

The current research examined how Arabic diglossia affects verbal learning memory. Thirty native Arab college students were tested using auditory verbal memory test that was adapted according to the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and developed in three versions: Pure spoken language version (SL), pure standard language version (SA), and…

Experience-based cues, such as perceptual fluency, have long been thought to influence metacognitive judgments (Kelley & Jacoby, 1996; Koriat, 1997). Studies found that manipulations of perceptual fluency via changes in font and volume alter Judgments of Learning (JOLs) without influencing memory performance (Rhodes & Castel, 2008, 2009).…

In short-term-memory (STM)-search tasks, observers judge whether a test probe was present in a short list of study items. Here we investigated the long-term learning mechanisms that lead to the highly efficient STM-search performance observed under conditions of consistent-mapping (CM) training, in which targets and foils never switch roles across…

Working memory is a basic cognitive process that predicts higher-level skills. A central question in theories of working memory development is the generality of the mechanisms proposed to explain improvements in performance. Prior theories have been closely tied to particular tasks and/or age groups, limiting their generalizability. The cognitive…

The concept of modularity is used to contrast the approach to working memory proposed by Truscott with the Baddeley and Hitch multicomponent model. This proposes four sub components comprising the "central executive," an executive control system of limited attentional capacity that utilises storage based on separate but interlinked…

The importance of parent-child reminiscing for young children's social and cognitive development has been well established, but despite the increasing numbers of children attending formal early childhood settings such as nurseries and preschools, there has been surprisingly little research exploring educator-child reminiscing in these contexts.…

A story's space or setting often determines and constrains the actions of its characters. We report on an experiment with 106 children of 7-8 years old in which, using a novel enactment task, we measured children's representation of a story character's movement during story listening. We found that children were more likely to enact movements that…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare the motivation to change in relation to hearing problems in adults with normal hearing thresholds but who report hearing problems and that of adults with a mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. Factors related to their motivation were also assessed. Method: The motivation to change in…