We recently proposed the Creative Reasoning Test (CRT), a test for reasoning in ill-defined problem spaces. The test asks children who first performed the Standard Progressive Matrices test (SPM) to next generate an SPM-style test item themselves. The item is scored based on different aspects of its complexity. Here we introduce a method to…

Children may be capable of understanding the value of emotion regulation strategies before they can enlist these strategies in emotion-evoking situations. This study was designed to extend understanding of children's judgment of the efficacy of alternative emotion regulation strategies. Children aged six and nine ("N" = 97) were…

Children's (N = 275) use of retrieval, decomposition (e.g., 7 = 4+3 and thus 6+7 = 6+4+3), and counting to solve additional problems was longitudinally assessed from first grade to fourth grade, and intelligence, working memory, and in-class attentive behavior was assessed in one or several grades. The goal was to assess the relation between…

Insects are fascinating creatures--especially when you and your students get up close and personal with them! To that end, the authors facilitated an inquiry-based investigation with an emphasis on identification of the different types of insects found in the school yard, their characteristics, their habitat, and what they eat, while engaging the…

The authors' primary aim was to investigate a potential causal relationship between spatial ability and math ability. To do so, they used a pretest-training-posttest experimental design in which children received short-term spatial training and were tested on problem solving in math. They focused on first and second graders because earlier studies…

Previous studies have found that children have difficulty solving proportional reasoning problems involving discrete units until 10 to 12 years of age, but can solve parallel problems involving continuous quantities by 6 years of age. The present studies examine where children go wrong in processing proportions that involve discrete quantities. A…

Although equal sharing problems appear to support the development of fractions as multiplicative structures, very little work has examined how children's informal solutions reflect this possibility. The primary goal of this study was to analyze children's coordination of two quantities (number of people sharing and number of things being shared)…