Metacognition plays an essential role in adults' cognitive offloading decisions. Despite possessing basic metacognitive capacities, however, preschool-aged children often fail to offload effectively. Here, we introduced 3- to 5-year-olds to a novel search task in which they were unlikely to perform optimally across trials without setting external…

Metacognition--knowledge, monitoring, and regulation of cognition--is key to learning and academic achievement. This is robustly supported for K-12 and higher education learners while empirical evidence in early childhood is encouraging but limited. To address these gaps in the literature, our first goal was to investigate early metacognition…

Argumentation is an important aspect in the field of education because of its impact on learning processes. At the same time, argumentation is a complex activity in terms of cognitive, relational, emotional and social dynamics. In this paper, I investigate and I describe possible difficulties encountered by children during the argumentative…

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…

Transfer is not static but a dynamic process of learning. In this article, the concept of transfer and the implications of its study are reconsidered from the theoretical basis of the complex dynamic system approach. We describe "transfer" as an emergent process that implies not a copy of knowledge applied to a new situation, but a new…

Several teaching moves have been suggested to support young children's simple addition and subtraction performance, including use of a number path, directly modeling addition and subtraction, using mathematical symbols, and modifying problem difficulty. In the present study, teacher-researchers implemented an early arithmetic activity, "Big…

Relational reasoning is a hallmark of human higher cognition and creativity, yet it is notoriously difficult to encourage in abstract tasks, even in adults. Generally, young children initially focus more on objects, but with age become more focused on relations. While prerequisite knowledge and cognitive resource maturation partially explains this…

Relational reasoning is a hallmark of human higher cognition and creativity, yet it is notoriously difficult to encourage in abstract tasks, even in adults. Generally, young children initially focus more on objects, but with age become more focused on relations. While prerequisite knowledge and cognitive resource maturation partially explains this…

The importance of parental autonomy support to children's development and learning has been widely studied among Western school-age children, while scant research has been conducted among young children in other cultural contexts. To address this research gap, the primary aim of the present study was to examine the role of parental autonomy…

The objective of this study was to examine in what ways and to what extent preschoolers (5-6 years of age) manifest early Engineering Habits of Mind (EHoM) while engaging in an open-ended problem-solving construction task. The study comprised 228 children (120 boys and 108 girls). The study implemented a quantitative approach. The main research…

We investigated whether preschoolers' social-emotional competencies predict their peer relationships and academic achievements during grade one. Measures of cool and hot executive functions, theory of mind, social-problem-solving, and peer acceptance were administered to a sample of 48 preschoolers (M = 77.91 months). Academic achievement and peer…

Technological advances afford teacher educators, designers, and researchers the opportunity to use videos as an instructional tool to help parents, caregivers, teachers, and other adults support young children's mathematical development. We created five Magic Math Minute videos to highlight examples of young children's mathematical thinking and to…

The current study examined if preschoolers' understanding of fantasy and reality are related to their learning from educational videos. Forty-nine 3- to 6-year-old children watched short clips of popular educational programs in which animated characters solved problems. Following video viewing, children attempted to solve real-world problems…

This article is part of a larger project focusing upon explanatory illustrations that children encounter in pre- and primary school education. The research questions concerned (a) how preschool children make sense of iconic symbols when placing items of refuse on illustrations of refuse bins in a sorting task and (b) what stumbling blocks they…

We examined individual differences and predictions of children's patterns in behavioral, emotional and attentional efforts toward challenging puzzle tasks at 24 and 35 months using data from a large longitudinal rural representative sample. Using latent transition analysis, we found four distinct task-oriented patterns in problem-solving tasks…