The field of children's learning was thriving when the Merrill-Palmer Quarterly was launched; the field later went into eclipse and now is in the midst of a resurgence. This commentary examines reasons for these trends, and describes the emerging field of children's learning. In particular, the new field is seen as differing from the old in its…

Based on data from eleven thousand faculty members, this study shows that general education courses place greater emphasis on developing intellectual skills, personal and social responsibility, deep approaches to learning, and diverse interactions. In contrast, other courses emphasize practical skills and are linked with greater levels of…

This article examines how children's construction of relationships in exploring materials helps to explain the constructivist foundations of the Reggio Emilia approach. A quasi-naturalistic study of 12 preschool children, ages 3 and 4 years, individually exploring different kinds of collage papers reveals a range of constructivist categories…

Though it is being widely argued that expanding young people's capacity to learn is a viable and desirable goal of education, it it not always clear what this means, how it is to be achieved, and how the effectiveness of interventions is to be assessed. It is argued that the capacity to learn should be interpreted as a portmanteau term that…

Schools are a central interface between evolution and culture. They are the contexts in which children learn the evolutionarily novel abilities and knowledge needed to function as adults in modern societies. Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of how an evolved bias in children's learning and motivational systems influences their…

Most students in most schools today study subject matter. They and their teachers conceive of the educational task as committing to memory large numbers of facts, formulas, and figures. A far more sophisticated perspective emphasizes teaching disciplines and disciplinary thinking. The goal of this approach is to instill in students the disposition…

An examination of how new knowledge is acquired reveals that knowledge is organized in global conceptual constructs called schemata, and that the process of knowledge acquisition can be conceptualized as the articulation and restructuring of these schemata. Assuming that a schema is a generative structure with implications beyond what is…

The component selection procedure developed by Hale and Morgan was used to assess children's use of selective attention at six levels of learning ranging from undertraining to overtraining. This function was examined at each of ages 4, 8, and 12. (SBT)

The development of the ability to use taxonomic, phonemic and sense impression categories as dimensions of encoding was investigated using third and fifth graders and college students. (ED)

To investigate task performance and the use of private speech and to examine the effects of a cognitive training approach, 30 learning disabled (LD) and 30 nonLD Ss (7 to 8 years old) were given a 17 piece wooden puzzle rigged so that it could not be completed correctly. Six variables were measured: (1) proportion of private speech that was task…

This paper reviews the biological origins of the critical period hypothesis and the neurophysiological evidence which was initially supplied in support of a critical period for the acquisition of language. Noting the inconclusive nature of neurophysiological evidence, the author suggests that we look to the interplay of affective and cognitive…

Ten kindergarten and 46 first grade children were given two-choice object discrimination problems, during which a prompt indicated the positive (rewarded) object, P. Guided by the prompt, all Ss subjects displaced P and therefore observed only its reward value; no direct observation was made of the reward value of the negative (nonrewarded)…

Young children were studied in tasks that required them to select one object as "different" from another. Children systematically selected maximally similar objects until about 3 years of age, and thereafter performed correctly. Additional data derived from the children's verbal justifications and refusals to select suggested a 4-stage model in…

Sixty-four 8-year-old children were divided into fast and slow learner groups and trained on a tactile simultaneous discrimination task. Selective attention was measured in terms of percentage contact time per trial to the relevant dimension. Inter- and intracouplings per trial were also recorded. A multivariate analysis was carried out to examine…

Research has shown that a behavior may be acquired through observing and imitating a model. A behavior which has already been acquired may be inhibited, disinhibited, or elicited by observing and imitating. A definition of imitation is given, and the effects of imitation on learning and performance are summarized. Research on factors which affect…