This study examined adolescent developmental experiences and participation in extracurricular activities. Providing youth with multiple channels to nurture their development and acknowledge their interests and strengths can play a significant role in their holistic growth. This is a descriptive study of a mixed-methods design (quantitative and…

Over the course of the past decade, the state of Louisiana has developed several documents to articulate expectations for children's learning and development and provide guidance for early childhood educators. The experiences and skills that children develop during the early years are critically important to their success later in school. What…

This paper reports a small-scale study to determine whether there is a difference in problem-solving abilities, from a play perspective, between individuals who are diagnosed as ADHD and are on medication and those not on medication. Ten children, five of whom where on medication and five not, diagnosed as ADHD predominantly inattentive type, were…

Artifact knowledge requires integration of information from different areas of human commonsense knowledge--our everyday understanding of object mechanics and our everyday psychology. Here, we address the question of artifact conceptual structure, outlining evidence from tasks involving categorization, function judgments, and problem solving.

The maturation of the adolescent brain is focused on two tasks: developing autonomy and understanding self in context of the community. Therefore, parents and other adults must assure that young people have multiple opportunities to interact in supportive environments where they can develop the capacity to self-regulate and achieve autonomy.…

Drawing on data from a US study of nine mentors and mentees, including mentee scores on the Reasoning about Current Issues (RCI) Test, which offers a measure of cognitive complexity, the authors explore how differences in cognitive complexity were related to role expectations, conceptions of teaching problems, and the use of evidence for…

The expert performance approach championed by Ericsson et al. provides a scientific way forward for research on giftedness, and offers exciting new ways to further one's understanding of the determinants of high ability within a particular domain of expertise. While the methods the authors use are commendable and are likely to further one's…

As more and more early childhood programs implement response to intervention, the Individual Growth and Development Indicators (IGDIs) will be the tool of choice for fast, reliable, and ongoing progress monitoring. That's why every program needs this book, the only quick guide to conducting the popular IGDIs accurately and efficiently. Bringing…

In this article, we frame "productive learning" in a sociocultural perspective to show how it ties into a cluster of concepts on activity and transformation and illuminates the relation between learning processes and learning products. Based on two case studies, we argue that understanding learning as action entails developing the students'…

The basic assumptions of information processing theories in cognitive psychology are reviewed, and the application of this approach to problem solving in gifted education is considered. Specific implications are cited on problem selection and instruction giving. (CL)

It is argued that cognitive development has to be understood in the functional perspective provided by actions. Actions reflect all aspects of cognitive development including the motives of the child, the problems to be solved, and the constraints and possibilities of the child's body and sensorimotor system. Actions are directed into the future…

Every day, schools and communities across the U.S. identify millions of young children as "at risk"--especially those with a minority background, who live in poor neighborhoods or are learning English as a second language. FPG's Project U-STARS-PLUS (Using Science, Talents, and Abilities to Recognize Students-Promoting Learning for…

Reviews two books, the first of which explores how children conceive possible ways to solve problems and differentiate among real, possible, and necessary solutions. The second book explains the construction of knowledge as a dialectical tension of the opening of new possibilities constrained by increasingly stronger necessities from which a…

Results indicate that the formal operations tasks employed in the study are correlated, except for the Inhelder and Piaget chemical bodies tasks. (MH)

This article focuses on the Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management (IY TCM) intervention as an example of an evidence-based program that embeds fidelity and adaptation within its design. First, the core features of the IY TCM program along with the methods, processes, and principles that make the intervention effective are described. The…