Effective teaching should focus on representational change, which is fundamental to learning and education, rather than conceptual change, which involves transformation of theories in science rather than the gradual building of knowledge that occurs in students. This article addresses the question about how to develop more efficient strategies for…

Differing findings exist on how Defining Issues Test (DIT) scores relate to intelligence. Further study is needed in order to address aspects of intellect not previously considered and to address how these relationships rival studies that have compared indices of intellect with constructs similar to DIT scores. In the present study, a sample of…

This paper explores the public awareness that there presently exists a crisis in mathematics education and a "dumbing down" of the curriculum, examines the nature of this crisis and argues that there has been a lowering of cultural, pedagogical and cognitive expectations with respect to most learners. The notion of cognitive development in…

Children's exposure to mind-related talk has been shown to foster young children's metacognitive understanding and to orient them to the patterns of literate language long before they commence formal literacy instruction at school. In this paper, we report on a longitudinal study of the mind-related talk of 22 mothers when their infants were aged…

A rating scale is developed for preschool classrooms to assess the physical environment's role in children's development of cognitive and social competency. The scale is tested in 98 classrooms, and children are assessed on two measures of competency in a subsample of these classrooms. Findings indicate that the physical environment is related to…

Forty-five children with mathematics learning disabilities, with and without comorbid reading disabilities, were compared to 45 normally achieving peers in tasks assessing basic numerical skills. Children with mathematics disabilities were only impaired when comparing Arabic digits (i.e., symbolic number magnitude) but not when comparing…

Young children's naive beliefs about physics are commonly studied as isolated pieces of knowledge. The current paper takes a different approach. It asks whether preschoolers interlink individual beliefs into larger configurations or Gestalts. Such Gestalts bring together knowledge such as how an object's mass relates to its sinking speed, how an…

Young infants use caregivers' emotional expressions to guide their behavior in novel, ambiguous situations. This skill, known as social referencing, likely involves at least 3 separate abilities: (a) looking at an adult in an unfamiliar situation, (b) associating that adult's emotion with the novel situation, and (c) regulating their own…

A growing body of evidence indicates that for some children, early incidences of challenging behaviors are predictors of later difficulties. These incidences of challenging behaviors may predict mental health issues, social adjustment issues and/or increased challenging behaviors that will impede school success and impact transition to adult life…

This report systematically reviews research on the outcomes of programs that teach young children in a group setting before they begin kindergarten. Study inclusion criteria included the use of randomized or matched control groups, evidence of initial equality, and study duration of at least 12 weeks. Studies included valid measures of language,…

To identify the role of the child's own action in the development of the ability to coordinate perspectives, a spatial localization task was presented to 2 groups of children: 16 children between 18 and 24 months old, and 16 children between 42 and 48 months old. A reward was hidden randomly in one of two identical left-right locations on a…

To examine the link between analytic and holistic modes of processing and the amount of domain knowledge, 2 category-learning studies were conducted with 5-year-old children. In the first study, 26 kindergarten children were classified according to their verbal knowledge about plants and their familiarity with flowers. They then performed a…

This report describes a study which examined the ways in which children interact and make sense of a range of mathematics problems by working in pairs. Studies of collaborative peer dyads' problem solving have generally been influenced by Piagetian or Vygotskian theories and research approaches. It is noted that the process of dyad collaboration…

This longitudinal study analyzed the relationship between structure and content of socio-moral reasoning. Using a system that defines independently the cognitive organizational and content aspects of socio-moral reasoning, the study examined whether persons at different developmental levels make use of different content categories, and whether the…

This document defines memory as a complex, interactive process that is a prerequisite for all higher learning. Without intact memory skills, a host of disorders may ensue ranging from mild learning problems to disorientation and helplessness (Lezak, 1983). Because of the pervasive and central role memory plays in people's lives, school…