In the 1998 reauthorization of Head Start, Congress mandated that the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) determine, on a national level, the impact of Head Start on the children it serves. As noted by the Advisory Committee on Head Start Research, this legislative mandate required that the impact study address two main research…

The purpose of this study was to examine how the infusion of theatre arts into the language arts and social studies curricula in grades 4 and 5 impacted the cognitive and prosocial development of special populations, as well as the students' attitudes toward learning. An experimental/control group design was employed. Various instruments were used…

Researchers studied components of a two-year school-wide Striving Readers intervention aimed at bolstering middle school teachers' use of literacy strategies to raise students' reading achievement. Although students of intervention teachers had significantly higher Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) scores than students of non-participating…

Jaak Panksepp, known best for his work on animal emotions and coining the term "affective neuroscience," investigates the primary processes of brain and mind that enable and drive emotion. As an undergraduate, he briefly considered a career in electrical engineering but turned instead to psychology, which led to a 1969 University of…

This study examined contributions of maternal personality and infant temperament to infant vocabulary and cognitive development both directly and indirectly through parental stress. Participants were recruited at birth and included 63 infant twin pairs and their mothers. Assessments were completed at 6, 9, 12, and 18 months of age and included…

Researchers have been able to link working memory to many important cognitive abilities throughout the life span. Two of the unanswered questions about working memory are what cognitive processes function during working memory task performance and how do these processes directly relate to intelligence? A recent model (Unsworth & Engle, 2006)…

Recent structural and functional imaging studies have provided evidence for continued development of brain regions involved in social cognition during adolescence. In this paper, we review this rapidly expanding area of neuroscience and describe models of neurocognitive development that have emerged recently. One implication of these models is…

Through play, children develop cognitively, socially, emotionally and physically. Preschoolers go on a journey of self-discovery during play activities, learning self-regulation and how to accurately represent themselves in the environment. This study explored the play behaviours of eight different children in two different schools. Four children…

Prodigies are individuals with exceptional mental abilities. How is it possible that some of these people mentally calculate exponentiations with high accuracy and speed? We examined CP, a mental calculation prodigy, and a control group of 11 normal calculators for moderate mental arithmetic tasks. CP has additionally been tested for exceptionally…

This paper discusses concepts of learning through "collaborative multimodal dialogue". It draws on an ESRC-funded study (RES-000-22-2451) investigating 3- and 4-year-old children's encounters with literacy as they engage with a range of printed and digital technologies at home and in a nursery. The study goes beyond analysis of spoken language,…

Recent research has demonstrated that infants' attention towards novel objects is affected by an adult's emotional expression and eye gaze toward the object. The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigated how infants at 3, 6, and 9 months of age process fearful compared to neutral faces looking toward objects or averting gaze away…

Conductive education (CE) is widely reported as having a range of benefits. In the last two decades, it has expanded internationally. Educational psychologists may well encounter parents requesting this specialist intervention which is not normally offered within Local Authority special needs provision, for children with cerebral palsy and other…

There is widespread belief that exposure to television has harmful effects on children's cognitive development. Most studies that point to a negative correlation between hours of television watching and cognitive outcomes, fail to establish causality. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) we study young children between 5 and 10…

The Test of Logical Thinking (TOLT) and the Group Assessment of Logical Thinking (GALT) are two of the instruments most widely used by science educators and researchers to measure students' formal reasoning abilities. Based on Piaget's cognitive development theory, formal thinking ability has been shown to be essential for student achievement in…

The development of theory of mind use was investigated by giving a computerized task to 177 female participants divided into five age groups: Child I (7.3-9.7 years); Child II (9.8-11.4); Adolescent I (11.5-13.9); Adolescent II (14.0-17.7); Adults (19.1-27.5). Participants viewed a set of shelves containing objects, which they were instructed to…