Education researchers and practitioners have been exploring for years the key factors impacting children's academic engagement. Still, relatively little is known about the role of children's social cognition in their academic engagement. Accordingly, the current study focuses on the potential indirect associations between young children's social…

Developmental delays in cognitive flexibility early in elementary school can potentially increase vulnerability for subsequent externalizing and internalizing psychopathology. The first goal of the current study was to identify latent subgroups of children characterized by different developmental trajectories of cognitive flexibility throughout…

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states and feelings to others, and to understand that those mental states and feelings affect their behaviour. It is one of three core developmental tasks for children in preschool years, along with emotion self-regulation and relationships with parents and family members. Given there are…

In this study, we investigate the relationship between social preferences (material preference and group preference) and indirect reciprocity and the role of empathy in 3-5-year-old children in China. The first study involved 94 children and aimed to investigate the relationship between social preferences and indirect reciprocity and the…

Despite numerous research findings that support play's positive impact on children's learning, pressure to pass high-stakes tests later in the elementary years has prompted a decrease in the amount of time for kindergarten play. While play proponents work to prioritize play in kindergarten, there is a dilemma. How can educators respond to the…

This study examined the direct and indirect associations among imaginational over-excitability, cognitive play processes, affective play processes, and parent-reported creative potential of Hong Kong Chinese kindergarten children. Participants were 106 parents of local kindergarten children (43.4% girls, mean age = 60.1 months). Parents reported…

Research Findings: The present study analyzes whether child factors are linked to variations in teacher cognitive activation (CA) among individual children in math-related activities within Chinese kindergarten classrooms. The findings show that teachers tend to provide direct CA with high concreteness and that child engagement with tasks is…

Sociocultural competence is the third goal of TWI programs, yet there is a lack of consensus on what it looks like in terms of student outcomes in the classroom. As an inherently social construct, sociocultural competence leads to successful interactions with people who are different from each other along various dimensions. Sociocultural…

Identifying correlates of aggressive behavior in children might help to find potential candidates for interventions in aggression reduction. While some previous studies found that children's Theory of Mind (ToM) and inhibitory control (IC) correlate with aggressive behavior, others did not confirm this relation. One explanation for these mixed…

Background: Among children diagnosed with developmental delays, difficulties in self-regulation are prominent and have been linked to school readiness problems. Objective: The current study sought to examine the impact of the Kids In Transition to School (KITS) school readiness intervention program on self-regulation, with a specific focus on…

Background: Little is understood about how kindergarten students respond to literacy-enriched engineering activities and how engineering-centered literature (picture and story books) can be used to support engineering engagement and content understanding. Purpose: This study sought to understand the effect of engineering-centered literature and…

Recent research has indicated that science-based achievement gaps open early in children's educational careers and are explained largely by malleable factors. Two potentially important variables to consider include children's executive function (EF) and learning-related behaviors exhibited in the classroom. These variables have been identified as…

Perspective taking, defined as the ability to assume another's perspective, can be considered a multidimensional construct which is composed of three different components: cognitive, visual and affective. This study wanted to verify the possibility of promoting perspective taking in preschoolers using ecological training. The maintenance of…

Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that information about intergroup competition is central to children's representations of social categories. Children (N = 99, 5- and 6-year-olds) were introduced to two novel social categories, which were described as having competing or noncompeting goals, by varying the quantity of a resource in…

The ability to understand and effectively interact with others is a critical determinant of academic, social, and life success (DiPerna & Elliott, 2002). An area in particular need of scalable, feasible, usable, and scientifically sound assessment tools is social-emotional comprehension, which includes mental processes enlisted to encode,…