People often speak indirectly. For example, "It's cold in here" might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders' inferences about a speaker's intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker's mental states, that is, "mentalizing?" We…

The structure of executive functions in preschoolers is controversial. Miyake and colleagues found that, in adults, inhibition, shifting, and updating are correlated but distinguishable processes; this finding was sometimes replicated with schoolchildren. Based on schoolchildren data, Im-Bolter, Johnson, and Pascual-Leone proposed a four-component…

Understanding executive functions (EFs) development is of high value to global developmental science. Recent calls for a more inclusive and equitable developmental science argue that tasks and questionnaires that are developed using only a subset of the population are not likely to be appropriate for EFs measurement in global contexts unless…

People associate numbers and horizontal space. This association has been demonstrated by the so-called SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes)-effect, with Western participants responding faster to larger numbers with their right hand and vice versa for smaller numbers. SNARC-like effects have also been reported for preschoolers.…

Verbal morphology has been identified as a particularly vulnerable domain for adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, especially when it involves the selection of subjunctive mood. A minimal amount is known, however, about the potential effects of the variability associated with these forms on the acquisition of related epiphenomena, such as the…

Grounded in the bioecological model of human development and attachment theory, this study examined whether the proportion of time children spend in activity settings in the kindergarten classroom moderated the relationship between teacher-child relationship quality and children's kindergarten academic and social-emotional outcomes. Participants…

This article focuses on the 2019 National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) assessment of student ability in writing. It begins with an overview of the study and its results, then turns to students' use of planning strategies to support their writing. Drawing on research on the association between planning and achievement in writing,…

This study examined the relationship between refutation texts and attention allocation by focusing on the interaction between important reader-and-text characteristics. Specifically, the authors investigated how prior knowledge and text-based interest affect attention allocation on refutation/control statements, topic, and explanatory and…

The goal of the present work is to extend an online reaction categorization task as a research instrument to a formative assessment tool of students' knowledge organization for organic chemistry reactions. Herein, we report our findings from administering the task with undergraduate students in Organic Chemistry II, at a large, research intensive…

Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children's natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool…

Mobile technology is regarded as a helpful tool facilitating language learning. However, the success of mobile technology largely depends on learners' acceptance. This study explored the factors that may affect students' intention formation regarding mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) in the context of higher education through the lens of…

Children and adult learners benefit from viewing hand gestures at instruction across domains (Cook, Duffy, & Fenn, 2013; Huang, Kim, & Christianson, 2019; Ping & Goldin-Meadow, 2008). Within the domain of mathematical learning, gesture at instruction has been shown to benefit children and adults in laboratory and classroom settings…

Whereas many scholars have emphasized the relative importance of "comprehensibility" as an ecologically valid goal for L2 speech training, testing, and development, eliciting listeners' judgments is time-consuming. Following calls for research on more efficient L2 speech rating methods in applied linguistics, and growing attention toward…

The present study investigated the effects of different types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of French grammatical gender attribution. A quasi-experimental study was conducted with 140 participants in six intact French as a second language (L2) classes. The classes received six 80-minute instructional sessions consisting of…

Multimodal learning via the use of smart devices, online social interactions, and intuitive communication platforms are fundamentally changing teaching and learning settings. Consequently, educators face unique challenges around student engagement as learners increasingly look to the use of technology-enabled activities for meaningful…