The field of children's learning was thriving when the Merrill-Palmer Quarterly was launched; the field later went into eclipse and now is in the midst of a resurgence. This commentary examines reasons for these trends, and describes the emerging field of children's learning. In particular, the new field is seen as differing from the old in its…

Student achievement gaps among racial and ethnic groups are large and persistent. They mirror gaps in life and school conditions that have been found to be closely related to cognitive development and school achievement. The road to parity begins with understanding the nature of the gaps and their trends. One way the size of the gap has been…

Given the consistent findings of theory of mind deficits in children with autism, it would be extremely beneficial to examine the profile of theory of mind abilities in other clinical groups such as fragile X syndrome (FXS) and Down syndrome (DS). The aim of the present study was to assess whether boys with FXS are impaired in simple social…

The construction of healing narratives is a framework within which the college counselor can view the progressive development of the counseling process. The level of a client's narrative processing appears to depend on an interaction between experience-specific knowledge and experience-specific emotionality. Implications for college counselors and…

This study examined age-related change in the ability to inhibit responses using two varieties of the stop signal paradigm. Three age groups (29 7-year-olds, 24 10-year-olds, and 28 young adults) performed first on a visual choice reaction task in which the spatial mapping between the go signal and response was varied between blocks. The choice…

The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run with a sample of Maya children aged 4-7, and place…

Two experiments examined the effect of age and cognitive demands on children's choice strategies. Children aged 8-9 and 12-13 years were asked to choose among either two or four products that differed in several attributes of varying importance to them. Choice tasks were designed to differentiate between the lexicographic and the equal-weighting…

Calendrical calculation is the unusual ability to name days of the week for dates in the past and sometimes the future. Previous investigations of this skill have concerned savants, people with pervasive developmental disorders or general intellectual impairment. This research has yielded a hypothesis about how calendrical skills develop but no…

Two experiments examined how internal and external supports affected planning for enabling (logically linked) and conventional (arbitrarily linked) events. In Experiment 1, preschoolers were given either two or four training sessions before planning and enacting invariably sequenced art projects. In Experiment 2, preschoolers were given two…

Constructivist theory must choose between the hypothesis that felt perturbation drives cognitive development (the priority of felt perturbation) and the hypothesis that the particular process that eventually produces new cognitive structures first produces felt perturbation (the continuity of process). There is ambivalence in Piagetian theory…

The present study explored the dimensionality of infant cognition by factor analyzing measures from a battery of tasks administered to a large cohort of 7-month-old preterm and full-term infants (N=203). A principal axis factor analysis yielded three factors accounting for 37[percent] of the variance. There was one attention factor (look duration…

In this article, the authors evaluate L. Kohlberg's (1984) cognitive-developmental approach to morality, find it wanting, and introduce a more pragmatic approach. They review research designed to evaluate Kohlberg's model, describe how they revised the model to accommodate discrepant findings, and explain why they concluded that it is poorly…

Spiritual formation is a critical concern for any Christian religious educator. While Scripture provides a depiction of spiritual growth, we have often turned to the developmental theorists to better understand the ecology of spiritual formation. One neglected voice in this instance is the late Russian developmentalist Lev S. Vygotsky. His unique…

"Designing School Systems for All Students" provides a clear methodology for school leaders, teachers, and school board members to follow as they redesign their schools for the benefit of students. The authors demonstrate how school leaders set the expectations for all students to learn and grow as important contributors to the culture. In the…

Past estimates of the effect of family income on child development have often been plagued by endogeneity and measurement error. In this paper, we use two simulated instrumental variables strategies to estimate the causal effect of income on children's math and reading achievement. Our identification derives from the large, non-linear changes…