Fine motor skills develop in childhood. In this study, we evaluate motor planning in 6- to 11-year-old children using a pegboard and midline crossing task. The results of the pegboard task showed that children modified their strategies of hand use and space use as a function of age, albeit with a transition in the 8- to 9-year-old children. The…

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to build on current discussions about the need for and role of guidance in learning and teaching, as well as to theoretically develop its specifics to further advance our scholarly understanding of how to structure and enhance entrepreneurship education. Design/methodology/approach: The paper takes a…

Research on the role of moral emotions in moral judgment, both in hypothetical dilemmas and in real-life moral decision making, has focused on preschool and elementary school age, with few studies spanning a larger age range, into adolescence and adulthood. The present special issue addresses a neglected area, the development of moral emotions and…

In this article, I draw on my experiences as a non-binary researcher in a high school to interrogate the normative construction of adulthood. I centre the discussion on the concept of adulthood in order to interrogate a presumption within the field of education that all researchers are recognized as adults. I argue that a person's adherence to…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies or standards derive from SEL frameworks. In this report, the terms "SEL competencies" and "standards" are used interchangeably to refer to statements about "what students should know and be able to do," recognizing that states may use different terms such as…

This study is an extension of an experiment where the reliability of children's environment was manipulated before children completed the Marshmallow Task (Cognition, 2013, Vol. 126, pp. 109-114). In that experiment, Kidd, Palmeri, and Aslin found a significant difference in waiting time between two conditions in which the experimenter…

Background: The emergence of language in the early years is a major developmental accomplishment that underpins learning, enables social interaction and, later, is an indicator of well-being. Learning language is an effortless process for most, but can be challenging for others. There is a need to act early. First, because there are several…

This study developed and validated a Chinese name writing scale (CNWS) for evaluating early handwriting skills of kindergarten children. We then used the validated CNWS to examine the developmental characteristics of Chinese name writing skills among kindergarten children in Hong Kong in a cross-sectional study. CNWS was developed based on English…

Background: Materialism is a topic of interest for many scholars. Among children it is often measured with the Material Values Scale for children (MVS-c) (Opree et al. in Personal Individ Differ 51(8):963-968, 2011). Although the MVS-c was originally validated for use among 8- to 12-year-olds, its 6-item version is increasingly implemented among…

This article reports results of a study that tracked growth factors in experiential training groups through Tuckman's conceptual framework of group development using Critical Incidents methodology and quantitative description. We sought to explore whether different growth factors varied in salience over the course of each of the groups' life and…

It is widely believed that exploration is a mechanism for young children's learning. The present investigation examines preschoolers' beliefs about how learning occurs. We asked 3- to 5-year-olds to articulate how characters in a set of stories learned about a new toy. Younger preschoolers were more likely to overemphasize the role of characters'…

In 1997, I argued that with the loss of Piaget's theory as an overarching guide, cognitive development had become disjointed and a new metatheory was needed to unify the field. I suggested developmental biology, particularly evolutionary theory, as a candidate. Here, I examine the increasing emphasis of biology in cognitive development research…

This experiment tests the age at which left-to-right spatial associations found in infancy shift to culture-specific spatial biases in later childhood, for both numerical and non-numerical information. Children ages 1-5 years (N = 320) were tested within an eye-tracking paradigm which required passive viewing of a video portraying a spatial…

This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio recordings of 49 children (1-36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical…

Symbolic representation refers to the use of physical or psychological processes to represent an object in a symbolic form. The present study investigated the development of children's symbolic representation using a new measure of children's block constructions. Ninety children (44 girls) in three age groups (3-4, 4-5, and 5-6 years) were…