This study explored and compared attitudes toward animals between primary school students and primary school prospective teachers, focusing on educational and cognitive influences. A cross-sectional survey of 100 primary school students and 102 primary school prospective teachers assessed animal behavior, animal attitudes, species conservation…

The application of 360° videos raised the attention of educators and researchers, as it appears to be an approachable option to mediate complete environments in educational settings. However, challenges emerge from the perspective of educational psychology. Learning irrelevant cognitive strains might be imposed because it is necessary to navigate…

The aim of this study was to examine the role of aesthetic practice in elementary school and the consequences for children's meaning-making in science. More specifically, we intended to scrutinise what science learning emerges within the process, to target the consequences of adopting art practice in science class and to explore these two…

This study examines how third-graders' conceptions about the origin of species are affected by formal instruction and whether children can learn not only about evolution but also about natural selection. We interviewed the same group of third-grade children (8-9 years old) twice, before and after following a curriculum about these topics.…

In the lesson on which this practical article is based, third grade students constructed a "lift-the-flap" page to explore food webs on the prairie. The moveable papercraft focused student attention on prairie animals' external structures and how the inferred functions of those structures could support further inferences about the…

Little research has been conducted on how to address the complex topic of death when teaching science to children. The present paper addresses this issue by examining how three elementary teachers discuss the death of wild animals during science read-aloud sessions. Our findings reveal the variety of ways in which nonhuman death can be…

We compared the performance of 3- and 5-year-old children with that of chimpanzees in two tasks requiring collaboration via complementary roles. In both tasks, children and chimpanzees were able to coordinate two complementary roles with peers and solve the problem cooperatively. This is the first experimental demonstration of the coordination of…

The development of a diachronic conception of biology has rarely been explored during childhood, except by Maurice-Naville and Montangero (1992). The aim of the present study was to further explore this issue. In the course of an interview, 163 children aged between 6 and 11 expressed their diachronic conceptions of the growth and death of several…

Children take years to learn symbolic arithmetic. Nevertheless, non-human animals, human adults with no formal education, and human infants represent approximate number in arrays of objects and sequences of events, and they use these capacities to perform approximate addition and subtraction. Do children harness these abilities when they begin to…

This study investigated the effects of experimentally modifying interpretation biases for children's cognitions, avoidance behavior, anxiety vulnerability, and physiological responding. Sixty-seven children (6-11 years) were randomly assigned to receive a positive or negative interpretation bias modification procedure to induce interpretation…

Investigations of people's understanding of the evolution of species have focused mainly on secondary school and university students. Very few investigations have taken into consideration younger students, and none have related children's ideas about the origin of species to formal instruction on this topic. To help fill this gap, the present…

Since the early 1980's, the number of picture books that present Queer characters and themes has grown. Correspondingly, the number of challenges to these books has also increased. "And Tango Makes Three," the true story of two male penguins who hatch and raise a chick in New York City's Central Park Zoo, is one such picture book that has received…

Two separate bodies of research suggest that young children have (a) a broad tendency to reason about natural phenomena in terms of a purpose (e.g., Kelemen, 1999c) and (b) an orientation toward "creationist" accounts of natural entity origins whether or not they come from fundamentalist religious backgrounds (e.g., Evans, 2001). This…