Cumulative experience with a variety of symbolic artifacts has been hypothesized as a source of young children's increasing sensitivity to new symbol-referent relations. Evidence for this hypothesis comes from transfer studies showing that experience with a relatively easy symbolic retrieval task improves performance on a more difficult task.…

Middle school students represent a wonderful target audience for introducing neurological concepts. The preteen years of the middle grades represent a time of incredible physical and mental development. Students in a seventh-grade classroom are experiencing dramatic physiological and psychological changes. Understanding the parts and functions of…

The present investigation explores and presents a theoretical model of instruction--applied literacy in second language education (ALL2E)--and suggests a contemporary view of the roles of grammar and formal evaluation within literature-based second language (L2) classrooms. Essentially, this article addresses the question "How can instruction and…

The experiments described in the lead articles by Kowalski and Zimiles and by O'Hanlon and Roberson examine factors that lead to color term acquisition. These experiments touch on the debate regarding the relative contributions of language and concepts in word learning. In this reflection, we examine how conclusions concerning the debate depend…

Early childhood education must bolster basic cognitive and social-emotional competencies to prepare children for authentic learning. The preschool educators should view academic skills and concepts as valuable tools in the process of developing essential competencies.

According to a recent account of infants' acquisition of their physical knowledge, the incremental-knowledge account, infants form distinct event categories, such as occlusion, containment, support, and collision events. In each category, infants identify one or more vectors which correspond to distinct problems that must be solved. For each…

The purpose of this article is to frame the divide between cognitive and developmental researchers and findings and educational practitioners. Specifically, the author argues that the divide emerges as a result of practitioners and researchers approaching childhood and instruction from differing perspectives. The article presents four questions…

Global accounts of cognitive development, best illustrated by Piaget's theory, dominated the field until the 1970s and 1980s, when they were gradually superseded by domain-specific accounts. In this article I present evidence suggesting that both global and domain-specific processes make important contributions to cognitive development, and I…

Before 12 months of age, infants have difficulties coordinating and sequencing their movements to retrieve an object concealed in a box. This study examined (a) whether young infants can discover effective retrieval solutions and consolidate movement coordination earlier if exposed regularly to such a task and (b) whether different environments,…

The purpose of this research is to chart the mathematical actions-on-objects young children use to compose geometric shapes. The ultimate goal is the creation of a hypothetical learning trajectory based on previous research, as well as instrumentation to assess levels of learning along the developmental progression underlying the trajectory. We…

In generic psychiatry there has been increasing interest among scientists for the developmental perspective. However, professionals active in the mental health care of people with intellectual disability (ID) have not shown the same degree of interest. The author of this article, who has had a liberal amount of rewarding experiences with the…

This article argues that the Montessori method can be recast as a viable contemporary, constructivist programme for early childhood education. Montessori believed that children in the crucial years from birth to age six possess extraordinary, innate mental powers to "absorb" the environment. This view was typical of the now outdated zeitgeist…

An important, sometimes controversial feature of all psychological phenomena is whether they are categorical or dimensional. A conceptual and psychometric framework is described for distinguishing whether the latent structure behind manifest categories (e.g., psychiatric diagnoses, attitude groups, or stages of development) is category-like or…

Two studies examined associations between theory of mind performance and counterfactual thinking using both antecedent and consequent counterfactual tasks. Moreover, the studies examined children's abilities to generate different types of counterfactual statements in terms of direction and structure. Participants were 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old…

This study estimated the independent effects of age and schooling in grades 7-9 on scores obtained on invalid conditional and class syllogisms. The results, which point to a negative, albeit small, effect of out-of-school experience and to a sizeable positive effect of schooling, replicate previous findings in a different age range and support the…