This semiotically informed article problematizes the concept of literacy as an aesthetic activity rather than reading skills and offers strategies for assessing young readers' understanding of fictional texts. Although not based on empirical research, the essay refers to and theorizes from extensive field studies of children's responses to…

What is the role and meaning of emotions in the second language learning process? To respond to this question, this article focuses on how learners' emotions manifest in their verbal communication over the course of a semester-long joint task. Recognizing interpersonal, functional, and developmental aspects of emotions, I illustrate how a group of…

An experimental methodology was used to test hypotheses concerning the effects of contextual, cognitive-developmental, and individual difference factors on children's views of whether they have been the target of gender discrimination and the possible consequent effect of such views on two forms of state self-esteem: performance and social…

This study investigated the visual information that children and adults consider while switching or maintaining object-matching rules. Eye movements of 5- and 6-year-old children and adults were collected with two versions of the Advanced Dimensional Change Card Sort, which requires switching between shape- and color-matching rules. In addition to…

This paper reports Grade 12 students' biology learning during interactive teaching classes in 2001 in Taiwan. The researcher as teacher, working within an interpretive framework, set out to improve her senior high school student biology teaching and learning. An intervention based on a social constructivist view of learning was designed,…

Children are believed to construct their causal theories through talk and interaction, but with the exception of a few studies, little or nothing is known about how young children justify and build theories of the world together with same-age peers through naturally occurring interaction, Children's sensitivity to when a pair or group of…

Prior research suggests that children younger than age 3 or 4 do not understand that an agent may be deceived by an object's misleading appearance. The authors asked whether 14.5-month-olds would give evidence in a violation-of-expectation task that they understand that agents may form false perceptions. Infants first watched events in which an…

Adults assess precisely the center of mass (CM) of single-bodied objects and choose grasping points that span an axis through or close to the center of mass when lifting them. The present study examined how children and adults assess the CM when lifting two-bodied objects (barbells) and how this ability develops. Four- to five-year olds, 6- to…

The developmental course in the distance-speed-time domain is still a matter of debate. Traditional stage models are contested by theories of continuous development and adaptive thinking. In the present work, we introduce a formal framework for modelling the developmental course in this domain, grounding on Competence-based Knowledge Space Theory.…

In this article, the remediation of pupils' cognitive skills is studied and a practical framework for educational and remedial work at primary level is introduced. This article is based on a doctorate research that studied by means of action research the development and enhancement of the most low-grade school entrants' reasoning and cognitive…

Argument has been referred to as the umbrella under which all reasoning lies--"the more general human process of which more specific forms of reasoning are a part". In this paper, the authors present an evidence that argumentive reasoning skills can be assessed and developed in facilitative settings. They focus on middle school as an optimal…

The purpose of this research is to determine the effects of home-based programmes aimed specifically at improving developmental outcomes for preschool children from socially disadvantaged families. The authors searched the following databases between 7 October and 12 October 2010: Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (2010,…

This study adds to the growing research on school outcomes associated with individual differences in preschoolers' theory of mind skills by considering whether "costs" of theory of mind (e.g., sensitivity to criticism) actually help to foster children's academic achievement. A group of 60 Italian children was tested during the last year…

The aim of this study was to clarify the features of mental development and autistic behavior in children with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) from the viewpoint of remedial therapy. The Tokyo Child Development Schedule (TCDS) and the Tokyo Autistic Behavior Scale (TABS), designed to be completed by children's caregivers, were used. A…

The author traced an English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher's professional development by examining her narrative and identifying the transformation of her awareness or "kizuki". "Kizuki," which is unique to Japanese culture, implies a sudden feeling of inner understanding of a phenomenon and can be roughly translated as…