Since 1997 Uganda has seen a large increase in school enrolment. Despite this increased enrolment, universal education has remained elusive. Many children enrol in school, but not at the recommended age, and they drop out before completing school. This article focuses on one of these problems--delayed school entry. What household factors are…

We used longitudinal data from a birth cohort study, the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, to investigate the links between Head Start and school readiness in a large and diverse sample of urban children at age 5 (N = 2,803; 18 cities). We found that Head Start attendance was associated with enhanced cognitive ability and social…

Children with high levels of aggressive behavior and conduct problems create major management problems in school settings and interfere with the learning environment of their classmates and with their own academic achievement. A contextual social-cognitive model can provide a framework for understanding risk factors involved in the development and…

Modularity in the human brain remains a controversial issue, with disagreement over the nature of the modules that exist, and why, when, and how they emerge. It is a natural assumption that modularity offers some form of computational advantage, and hence evolution by natural selection has translated those advantages into the kind of modular…

Although many researchers have worked on memory development, still little is known about what develops in memory development. When one reviews the literature about memory, she encounters many types of memories such as short term vs. long term memory, working memory, explicit vs. implicit memory, trans-saccadic memory, autobiographical memory,…

In this paper, I discuss different types of models in science education and applications of them in learning and teaching science, in particular physics. Based on the literature, I categorize models as conceptual and mental models according to their characteristics. In addition to these models, there is another model called "physics model" by the…

Substance abuse counselors (SACs) at higher levels of social-cognitive maturity manage complex situations and perform counselor-related tasks more effectively than individuals at lower levels of development. This article presents an integrative clinical supervision model designed to promote the social-cognitive maturity (ego development;…

Differentiation and integration played large roles within classic developmental theories but have been relegated to obscurity within contemporary theories. However, they may have a useful role to play in modern theories as well, if conceptualized as guiding principles for analyzing change rather than as real-time mechanisms. In the present study,…

It has been argued that intervention strategies designed to reduce racial prejudice in young children have been based on weak theoretical models of racial stereotyping and prejudice with little effect on the reduction of racial bias. This paper examines the social-cognitive and intergroup scholarship post-Bigler ("J Soc Issues 55"(4), 687-705,…

The argument of this paper focuses on the relationship between cognitive structures and structures of interaction. It contends that there is still a place in moral development theory and research for a concept of moral stages. The thesis, in short, is that moral stages are not structures of thought. They are structures of action encoded in…

Susan Goldin-Meadow's "Hearing Gestures: How Our Hands Help Us to Think" synthesizes findings from various domains to demonstrate that gestures convey meaning and comprise a critical and fundamental form of communication. She also argues convincingly for the cognitive utility of gesture for the gesturer. Goldin-Meadow presents an airtight case…

In this study hemispheric asymmetries for categorizing objects at the basic versus subordinate level of abstraction were investigated. As predictions derived from different theoretical approaches are contradictory and experimental evidence is inconclusive in this regard, we conducted two categorization experiments, where we contrasted two…

In this article, we discuss the role of rostral prefrontal cortex (approximating Brodmann Area 10) in two domains relevant to education: executive function (particularly prospective memory, our ability to realize delayed intentions) and social cognition (particularly our ability to reflect on our own mental states and the mental states of others).…

Cognitive abilities are important for the economic and non-economic success of individuals and societies. For international analyses, the collection of IQ-measures from Lynn and Vanhanen was supplemented and meliorated by data from international student assessment studies (IEA-Reading, TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS). The cognitive level of a nation is highly…

The present series of experiments explores the interaction between retroactive interference and cue competition in human contingency learning. The results of two experiments show that a cue that has been exposed to a cue competition treatment (overshadowing) loses part of its ability to retroactively interfere with responding to a different cue…