Clahsen and Felser (CF) deserve praise for their superlative synthesis of literature relating to grammatical processing, as well as for their original contributions to this area of research. CF "explore the idea that there might be fundamental differences between child L1 and adult L2 processing." The researchers present evidence that adult second…

Individual differences in nonword repetition (NWR) show a particularly strong association with vocabulary acquisition for both first- (L1) and second-language (L2) learners, and they serve as a behavioral marker for specific language impairment (SLI) in children (Gathercole, 2006). However, this association is susceptible to alternative…

Inhelder and Piaget (1958) studied schoolchildren's understanding of a simple pendulum as a means of investigating the development of the control of variables scheme and the "ceteris paribus" principle central to scientific experimentation.The time-consuming nature of the individual interview technique used by Inhelder has led to the development…

The authors examined the developmental course of self-regulation in a cohort of children from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The longitudinal sample included 646 children (48% girls; 52% boys; 36.2% Black, 23.4% Hispanic, 40.4% White) who were 4 to 5 years old in 1986 and who were followed up at ages 8 to 9 and ages 12 to 13. Levels of…

Groups of first-grade (mean age = 82 months), third-grade (mean age = 107 months), and fifth-grade (mean age = 131 months) children with a learning disability in mathematics (MD, n=58) and their normally achieving peers (n = 91) were administered tasks that assessed their knowledge of counting principles, working memory, and the strategies used to…

The overall purpose of this study was to explore the alcohol consumption patterns of adolescents by beverage type. A total of 705 primarily 9th grade students were recruited to participate in this study in the spring of 2002. Alcoholic beverage use differed significantly across gender and ethnicity on a number of beverage-specific drinking…

A pair of monozygotic twins discordant for symptoms of Asperger syndrome was evaluated at the age of 13.45 years using psychometric, morphometric, behavioural, and functional imaging methods. The lower-functioning twin had a smaller brain overall, a smaller right cerebellum, and a disproportionately large left frontal lobe, and manifested almost…

This study, based on constructivist learning theory, examined how effectively preservice chemistry teachers (N = 43) can be educated to think flexibly and to reorganize their thinking in a way that may complement diverse ways students approach the subject domain. The teacher's cognitive structure was assessed prior to and after a conceptual change…

The diverse life experiences of contemporary lesbians are shaped by women's differing ties to two social worlds, the majority heterosexual society and the minority subculture of the lesbian or sexual-minority world. This article presents a detailed conceptual analysis of a dual-identity framework that emphasizes lesbians' simultaneous affiliations…

This study examined the relation between the amount of mathematical input in the speech of preschool or day-care teachers and the growth of children's conventional mathematical knowledge over the school year. Three main findings emerged. First, there were marked individual differences in children's conventional mathematical knowledge by 4 years of…

Feedback is central to the development of effective learning, yet is comparatively underresearched. This article seeks to examine the notion of written feedback on assignments and argue that this feedback process is more complex than is sometimes acknowledged. The author illustrates the problematic nature of assignment feedback by drawing on a…

People categorized pairs of perceptual stimuli that varied in both category membership and pairwise similarity. Experiments 1 and 2 showed categorization of 1 color of a pair to be reliably contrasted from that of the other. This similarity-based contrast effect occurred only when the context stimulus was relevant for the categorization of the…

An ability-based guessing model is formulated and applied to several data sets regarding educational tests in language and in mathematics. The formulation of the model is such that the probability of a correct guess does not only depend on the item but also on the ability of the individual, weighted with a general discrimination parameter. By so…

In this article, the authors make an attempt to operationalize the notion of "identity" to justify the claim about its potential as an analytic tool for investigating learning. They define identity as a set of reifying, significant, endorsable stories about a person. These stories, even if individually told, are products of a collective…

Multilevel modeling allows for the simultaneous analysis of data gathered at more than 1 unit of analysis (e.g., children nested in schools). It is often used to examine the effects of various contexts on individual differences in change. This paper promotes the application of multilevel models to longitudinal dyadic data in family research. By…