The practices emphasizing learning, reasoning and achieving the solutions in mathematics helps the students to develop their own understanding of the content. The development and understanding concepts of learning mathematics in elementary and middle schools in United States are discussed.

The current study examines relations of mean-level estimates, linear changes, and instability in income and family processes to child outcomes and addresses whether income, through its impact on family functioning, matters more for children living in poverty. Temporal changes and instability in family processes, but not income, predicted…

Significant resources have been directed at understanding and alleviating the achievement gap in education. Most programs focused on this aim rely on a top-down approach, including funding for infrastructure improvement, curriculum development, class size, and teacher salaries. This article presents findings from a randomized field trial that…

Although everybody agrees that education reform is needed, there is little agreement on the nature of the problems, and certainly not on the remedies; nevertheless, there is a central focus on curriculum issues. Three principal points are addressed in this paper: (a) new approaches in education are urgently needed, (b) new educational approaches…

Researchers who advocate the hypothesis that cognitive development is akin to theory formation have also suggested that young children possess distinct systems for explaining physical, psychological, and biological principles (see, e.g., Wellman & Gelman, 1992). One way this has been investigated is by examining how children explain human action:…

Lev Vygotsky (1986-1934) was an educational theorist and psychologist of extraordinarily wide knowledge whose major writings deal with the entire learning-teaching-development experience. Despite a wide-ranging interest in Vygotskian theory, the issue of imagination remains outside of the main line of general inquiries into his work. Thus, there…

This study investigated how 4- to 7-year-old children's second-order belief attribution might be facilitated by either reducing information processing or varying the sequence of task questions. In Experiment 1, compared with Perner and Wimmer's (1985) original second-order false-belief task, a new task with reduced information-processing demands…

Syntactic knowledge is widely held to be partially innate, rather than learned. In a classic example, it is sometimes argued that children know the proper use of anaphoric "one," although that knowledge could not have been learned from experience. Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't…

This paper examines the social origins of self-other understanding in young children. The proposition is that mental state discourse is related to the development of social understanding, and evidence for this proposal comes from cross-sectional, longitudinal, and training studies that relate discourse about mental states in a variety of…

Children are nearly as sensitive as adults to some cues to facial identity (e.g., differences in the shape of internal features and the external contour), but children are much less sensitive to small differences in the spacing of facial features. To identify factors that contribute to this pattern, we compared 8-year-olds' sensitivity to spacing…

This research examined the relative contributions of two aspects of executive function--inhibitory control and planning ability--to theory of mind in 49 3- and 4-year-olds. Children were given two standard theory of mind measures (Appearance-Reality and False Belief), three inhibitory control tasks (Bear/Dragon, Whisper, and Gift Delay), three…

In 1986, while still at Harvard, I started teaching summer school at the Bread Loaf School of English, the graduate program in English of Middlebury College. Bread Loaf offers courses in literature, theater, and writing--here I fit in. I came to that job with a background in applied linguistics and cognitive development, but not in literature, and…

Switching between tasks produces decreases in performance as compared to repeating the same task. Asymmetrical switch costs occur when switching between two tasks of unequal difficulty. This asymmetry occurs because the cost is greater when switching to the less difficult task than when switching to the more difficult task. Various theories about…

This paper reports on the developmental progression of a sample of 48 adolescents and young adults with autism who were previously assessed at preschool age and again in the mid-school period. In contrast to the earlier period when about one-third of the children made dramatic gains, cognitive and language skills tended to remain stable or decline…

Human systems, including institutional systems and informal social networks, are a major arena of modern life. We argue that distinct forms of pragmatic reasoning or "strategic thinking" are required to exercise agency within such systems. This article explores the development of strategic thinking in a youth activism program in which young people…