This article seeks to amplify Bronfenbrenner's (1979) concerns with concentric structured, nested systems and phenomenology, for Ungar's (2012) extension of resilience to systems based on Bronfenbrenner's (1979, 1995) socio-ecological paradigm. Resilience rests on interconnected assumptions regarding space, agency and system blockage, as well as…

Ideas about temporal (and spatial) scale impact students' understanding across science disciplines. Learners have difficulty comprehending the long time periods associated with natural processes because they have no referent for the magnitudes involved. When people have a good "feel" for quantity, they estimate cardinal number magnitude…

The paper-and-pencil Mental Rotation Test (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) consistently produces large sex differences favoring men (Voyer, Voyer, & Bryden, 1995). In this task, participants select 2 of 4 answer choices that are rotations of a probe stimulus. Incorrect choices (i.e., foils) are either mirror reflections of the probe or…

"Embodied trainings" allowing children to move their whole body in space have recently been shown to foster the acquisition of basic numerical competencies (e.g. magnitude understanding, addition performance). Following a brief summary of recent embodied training studies, we integrate the different results into a unified model framework…

The long-term physical activity in specific sport activities can change the quality of mental rotation performance. This study investigates the influence of "Life Kinetik"--a motion program with tasks of cognition and motor coordination--on mental rotation performance of 44 primary school-aged children. While the experimental group…

The ability to graphically depict objects in two- and three-dimensional space is fundamental to engineering design practice. Historically, engineers have used pencil, paper, and erasers to draft preliminary sketches and to transform initial drafts into precise production drawings. With the proliferation of computer-aided design (CAD) software…

This article highlights the main ideas that underlie the differences in potential pragmatic knowledge constructs students experience when solving problems, between the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and the zone of potential construction (ZPC). This qualitative research is based on a phenomenological approach to finding the meaning of things…

This study aimed to investigate the extent to which WM measured in kindergarten predicts WM measured in second grade (stability of individual WM progress) and the extent to which WM measured at kindergarten predicts academic performance at second grade (N = 94). The results showed that WM skills significantly increase during the time span from…

Previous studies showed that bilinguals tend to score lower on some language tests than monolinguals in each of their languages and outperform monolinguals on some cognitive tasks. We investigated whether short-term and working memory capacities that underlie language abilities differ between sequential bilinguals and monolinguals. We tested…

New technologies are changing the ways that children navigate, find places, make and use maps, and explore the world. This is the geospatial revolution. Children live in a world of rapid technological innovation bringing new opportunities for cognitive development in school geography. Geography learning is an important component of primary school…

This paper describes the results of a four-year follow-up of need-based scholarship awardees at a community college as they made progress toward their goal of associate's degrees and/or bachelor's degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. From 2014 through 2018, through National Science Foundation funding,…

Background: Outcomes of static tests provide an indication of what children have learned in the past, up to the moment of testing, and can therefore underestimate the cognitive abilities of atypically developing children, such as children with language difficulties. In contrast, dynamic tests aim to examine children's potential for learning. The…

Geometry students have few opportunities to apply geometric concepts and solve geometry problems in authentic contexts. We developed a Ubiquitous Geometry (UG) system to teach geometry to elementary students by using it to measure common objects in authentic contexts. The instant study investigates the effects of UG on student geometry estimation…

This report summarizes the findings across two case studies conducted as part of WestEd's evaluation of the California Statewide Early Math Initiative (CAEMI). The case studies aimed to understand the planning and implementation of professional learning and coaching in local communities. They also examined changes in educators' math knowledge,…

Sleep is thought to play an important role in memory consolidation. Here we tested whether sleep alters the subjective value associated with objects located in spatial clusters that were navigated to in a large-scale virtual town. We found that sleep enhances a generalization of the value of high-value objects to the value of locally clustered…