Since 1980, the number of state pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs has more than doubled, with 38 states enrolling more than one million children in 2006 alone. This study evaluates how five state pre-K programs affected children's receptive vocabulary, math, and print awareness skills. Taking advantage of states' strict enrollment policies…

An extensive body of research claims that labels facilitate categorisation, highlight the commonalities between objects and act as invitations to form categories for young infants before their first birthday. While this may indeed be a reasonable claim, we argue that it is not justified by the experiments described in the research. We report on a…

One of most notable features of existing body of research in transition seems to be the absence of a theoretical model. The suggestion we present in this paper--to view and understand the high school to university transition in mathematics as a modern-day rite of passage--is an attempt at defining such framework. Although dominantly reflecting…

Derived changes in genes associated with primary microcephaly (MCPH) have been suggested to be "currently sweeping to fixation" i.e., increasing in frequency in most populations, with the likely outcome that the derived allele will completely displace the ancestral allele over time. Possible causes for this sweep include effects on human reasoning…

Sex differences in the latent general and broad cognitive abilities underlying the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities were investigated for children, youth, and adults ages 6 through 59. A developmental, multiple indicator-multiple cause, structural equation model was used to investigate sex differences in latent cognitive abilities as…

Extant data collected through the Experience Sampling Method--a signal contingent method for gathering data about students' immediate experiences--were analyzed to describe adolescents' subjective experiences doing homework. Analyses were conducted to explore variation in subjective experience in relation to the contexts in which homework was…

This review of literature shows that how often a child is read to is related to subsequent gains in vocabulary. Not only do adults differ in the frequency with which they read to children (quantity), they also vary in reading style (quality). Several studies have proposed that the cognitive demand level of questions children are asked may be…

The Common Ground Multicultural Dialogue program in the Department of Resident Life at the University of Maryland is an innovative peer education program designed to teach skills for engagement through exploration of contemporary multicultural societal dilemmas. The Common Ground Dialogue Program was launched in 2000 to provide undergraduate…

Some arguments are presented why Developmental Science should be seen as integrative part of a general anthropology. This is the reason that developmental science is a boundary opening framework for anthropology, history, cultural sciences and philosophy. The relation between a more culturalistic and naturalistic orientation of developmental…

As one means to combat the dis-integration of the undergraduate experience, the authors make a case for the kinds of integrated education needed to prepare students to respond creatively and with commitment to our society's most critical challenges.

This study tested a sample of 63 children twice in a longitudinal design over 14 months to examine their theory-of-mind (ToM) understanding in relation to their number of child-aged siblings (1-12 years). Age-appropriate batteries of ToM tests emphasising false belief were given at the start of the study, when children had a mean age of 4-2…

The most common behavioral technique used to study infant perception, cognition, language, and social development is some variant of looking time. Since its inception as a reliable method in the late 1950s, a tremendous increase in knowledge about infant competencies has been gained by inferences made from measures of looking time. Here we examine…

It is argued that cognitive development has to be understood in the functional perspective provided by actions. Actions reflect all aspects of cognitive development including the motives of the child, the problems to be solved, and the constraints and possibilities of the child's body and sensorimotor system. Actions are directed into the future…

Background: Little research has been carried out on empathy and theory of mind in offenders with intellectual disability (ID) and these concepts are often poorly defined. Method: Various models of empathy and theory of mind are discussed and scores on 2 empathy and 3 theory of mind tasks are compared for 25 offenders with ID and 25 non-offenders…

Any science about human beings will inevitably entail the integration of various fields of knowledge--philosophy, biology, medicine, anthropology, psychology, pedagogy, and so on. The term that is coming into increasingly widespread use is "humanitarian knowledge," which makes it possible to focus first and foremost on the study of the…