This article focuses on the early research domains investigated by Michael Pressley, along with the integrations and initiatives that were inspired by them. These research domains include verbal and imagery elaboration memory strategies, and developmental aspects of them; interrogative elaboration; pictorial strategies for language and literacy…

This study explores educators' reflections on professional childcare practice in different national contexts. The data were collected by showing video clips of classroom activities in Japanese, Dutch and German pre-schools to experienced German and Dutch pre-school teachers. The clips were used to elicit their opinions on playing and learning in…

The present study included observational and self-report measures to examine associations among parental stress, parental behaviour, child behaviour, and children's theory of mind and emotion understanding. Eighty-three parents and their 3- to 5-year-old children participated. Parents completed measures of parental stress, parenting (laxness,…

The "Educational Media and Technology Yearbook" is dedicated to theoretical, empirical, and practical approaches to educational media development. All chapters are invited and selected based on a variety of strategies to determine current trends and issues in the field. The 2011 edition highlights innovative Trends and Issues in Learning…

This report presents findings from the Massachusetts Family Child Care study, a two-year evaluation of the impacts of an early childhood education program on providers and children in family child care. The program--"LearningGames"--is designed to train caregivers to stimulate children's cognitive, language, and social-emotional…

Personality is defined as the dynamic organization, within an individual, of the systems that determine his or her characteristic behavior or thought. The study of personality involves many aspects of human behavior. Four approaches used to study personality are presented in this document: (1) Social Learning theory; (2) Trait theory; (3)…

This study explored children's development of a "mental time line" and considered the propositions that younger children view the temporal domain as bi-polar, while older children display signs of using finer gradations on their mental time ruler that approach conventional structures of clock and calendar time. Subjects were a group of…

Viewing language acquisition as the product of a biased learner who takes advantage of the information available from a variety of sources in his or her environment, this book provides a new way of thinking about the process of language comprehension. The analysis in the book borrows insights from theories about the development of mental models,…

Investigations of changes of conceptions during physics instruction are the logical and necessary next step to follow the successful international research on students' pre-instructional conceptions. This paper reviews theoretical issues, selected content-specific results, and general hypotheses. It is oriented towards explicit cognitive…

The Western Australian Science Education Association is an informal group which meets annually for a conference. This document contains the proceedings of the 1994 conference. Papers included were: (1) "Relationship Between Cognitive Style and Students' Proportional Reasoning Ability" (Ayo Akatugba); (2) "Alternative Modes of…

The outcomes of collaboration provide an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of cognitive change, one that is clarified by examining the collaborative processes themselves. Results from a study illustrate the dangers of focusing solely on the consequences of collaboration and emphasize why the analysis of collaborative processes is…

This study examined college students' ability to reason about everyday issues. Previous studies are reviewed and it is concluded that issues studied in the past were often not truly "everyday." For this study, 30 students responded to 10 issues, including 4 personal and 4 personally relevant political issues. Students circled one of two positions…

Piaget's studies clearly highlight two qualitative advances made during the preoperational period. The first is the breakthrough of representational intelligence, beginning around 2 years of age. The second is the emergence of coordinated representational thought, beginning around 4 years of age. This paper focuses on the second advance, which…

A central component in the young child's construction of a number system is an understanding of correspondence. Although current research demonstrates that preschool children use correspondence in a variety of tasks, the nature of the relationship between the use of correspondence action patterns and the use of correspondence as a quantifier is…

The results of a study of the meiosis models utilized by individuals at varying levels of expertise while reasoning about the process of meiosis are presented. Based on these results, the issues of sources of misconceptions/difficulties and the construction of a sound understanding of meiosis are discussed. Five individuals from each of three…