Humans routinely use external thinking tools, like pencil and paper, maps, and calculators, to solve cognitive problems that would have once been solved internally. As many youth face unprecedented exposure to increasingly capable technological aids, there is a growing pressure to understand children's cognitive offloading capacities and…

Solving word problems is challenging for many children, but particularly for those with language difficulties. The objective was to examine the nature of the challenges experienced by children with language difficulties as they solved word problems in the context of a developmental-trajectory instructional sequence. We recruited 45 third graders…

Mathematical problem-solving places heavy demands on children's developing working memory capacity. This review examines how offloading numerical information using embodied (e.g. finger counting) or external tools (e.g. manipulatives) can reduce cognitive load and improve mathematical task performance. Strategic offloading emerges in childhood;…

Playing games can be one of the most important activities for children to improve their social problem-solving (SPS) skills. Studies that have examined the empirical evidence of playing games concerning children's SPS skills have tended to focus on the function of a single game. Therefore, an overview study is needed to generalize the data by the…

Recent work suggests that common knowledge is an important cognitive mechanism for coordinating prosocial behavior, in part because it reduces uncertainty about others' cooperative behavior. However, it remains unclear whether children also rely on common knowledge to solve coordination problems. Here we examined whether 6- to 9-year-old children…

When children engage in play, they develop essential skills like creativity, flexibility, imagination, and problem-solving. Children who engage in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) activities also build similar skills. Both play and STEAM enable children to ask questions, try different solutions, and develop explanations for…

Children's responses to new, unfamiliar social interactions should be influenced by their cognitive appraisals and physiology, though little is known about how these constructs interrelate. To investigate these links, we examined whether children's appraisals of recalled events and resting parasympathetic physiology predicted social…

The human capacity for technological innovation and creative problem-solving far surpasses that of any species but develops quite late. Prior work has typically presented children with problems requiring a single solution, a limited number of resources, and a limited amount of time. Such tasks do not allow children to utilize one of their…

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) emphasizes the teaching of "Big Ideas" in mathematics. This study focuses on the part-part-whole (PPW) relationship as a crucial aspect of word problem solving involving addition and subtraction. This study, conducted in the United States, evaluated the effects of conceptual…

Every teacher aspires to create the ideal lesson! You want to convey the knowledge and skills in the best possible way while also keeping learners motivated. In our design case, we focus on the complex skill of collaborative problem-solving (CPS). In today's complex world, the acquisition of CPS competencies is considered an important learning…

We investigated the role of children's conflict monitoring skills in revising an intuitive scientific theory. Children aged 5 to 9 (N = 177; 53% girls, data collected in Germany from 2019-2023) completed computer-based tasks on water displacement, a concept prone to misconceptions. Children predicted which of two objects would displace more water…

Differential observing responses (DORs) are additional response requirements used to promote orientation to a stimulus in a discrimination task. Farber and Dickson (2023) recently provided a DOR taxonomy, and these authors reported that no prior research has compared the effects of distinct DOR requirements. We compared the effects of two DOR…

Do children consider how others learned when seeking help? Across three experiments, German children (N = 536 3-to-8 year olds, 49% female, majority White, tested 2017-2019) preferred to learn from successful active learners selectively by context: They sought help solving a problem from a learner who had independently discovered the solution to a…

Lexical alignment, a communication phenomenon where conversational partners adapt their word choices to become more similar, plays an important role in the development of language and social communication skills. While this has been studied extensively in the conversations of preschool-aged children and their parents in Western, Educated,…

Although Computational Thinking (CT) is considered an essential 21st century skill, little is known about teaching CT to students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and/or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). To address this gap in the research, we conducted a scoping review to identify those approaches promoting programming skills…