The literature on human and animal learning suggests that individuals attend to and act on cues differently based on the order in which they were learned. Recent studies have proposed that one specific type of learning outcome, the highlighting effect, can serve as a framework for understanding a number of early cognitive milestones. However,…

Social essentialism, the belief that members of certain social categories share unobservable properties, licenses expectations that those categories are natural and a good basis for inference. A challenge for cognitive developmental theory is to give an account of how children come to develop essentialist beliefs about socially important…

The present study used a cohort-sequential design to examine developmental changes in children's ability to bind items in memory during early and middle childhood. Three cohorts of children (aged 4, 6, or 8 years) were followed longitudinally for 3 years. Each year, children completed a source memory paradigm assessing memory for items and…

Using a nationally representative dataset of young children in the United States (the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Birth Cohort), the purpose of this study was to test the associations between teachers' perceptions of preschoolers' (N = 3350) school readiness and actual academic readiness levels, as measured by math and reading assessments.…

Pre-reading and early childhood literacy skills are important for brain development and fundamental to a child's long-term cognitive and social well-being. As such, the fostering of these skills is an important preventive health measure. Family physicians can play key roles in encouraging parents to routinely read with their children. However, in…

This exploratory study sought to understand the meaning of cognitive presence for graduate students in a blended learning course. Four research questions guided the investigation, which employed a qualitative instrumental case study approach as the research design. Several data sources were used including: semi structured interviews with graduate…

Research Findings: Growing international evidence points to high-quality teacher-child interactions in early learning environments as key contributors to children's learning and development. Little is known, however, about the longitudinal effects of these experiences, particularly in the Chinese context. In this study, we addressed the question…

Though there is extensive research on the health outcomes of individuals who have experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), society at large has not embraced this ground-breaking research and many still believe that the use of harsh punishment for students provides the same intended result as a discipline approach that teaches coping…

This article gives a reflective account of lessons learned from the experiences of three cognitive developmental scientists conducting psychological research in educational settings. First, we describe and analyze four key cultural distinctions between traditional approaches to research in psychology and education: 1) different structures, 2)…

Children in the 21st century are avid users of technology--more so than generations past. This rise in use has led to much attention on the consequences of technology use, and how this impacts children's brains and their socio-emotional, cognitive and physical development. Much of the research in these fields, especially brain-based research, is…

Researchers examined the concurrent and predictive validity of a brief (12-item) teacher-rated school readiness screener, the Kindergarten Student Entrance Profile (KSEP), using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis to examine associations between (N = 78) children's social-emotional (SE) and cognitive (COG) readiness with…

Although dual language learners (DLLs) are linguistically, culturally, and socially diverse, researchers usually study them in aggregate and compare them to non-DLLs. The authors' purpose was to identify subgroups of preschool DLLs using latent class analysis. There were 7,361 DLLs and 69,457 non-DLLs. Results revealed three distinct classes.…

This study investigated whether higher maternal psychological distress, lower provision of psychosocial stimulation and a negative appraisal of parenting experience were associated with lower cognitive, motor, social-emotional and adaptive behaviour development in children under 3 years of age in Kenya. A cross-sectional design was used, with 81…

Intellectual engagement (IE) refers to enjoyment of intellectual activities and is proposed as causal for knowledge acquisition. The role of IE for cognitive development was examined utilizing 2-year longitudinal data from 112 ninth graders (average baseline age: 14.7 years). Higher baseline IE predicted higher baseline crystallized ability but…

Between three and five years of age, both emotional competence (EC) and cognitive self-regulation (CSR) have been documented as undergoing remarkable growth and as being strong predictors of concurrent and future positive outcomes. EC encompasses three interrelated and progressively developing skills: emotion knowledge, emotion regulation, and…