In this article, we analyze a first grade classroom episode and individual interviews with students who participated in that classroom event to provide evidence of the variety of understandings about variable and variable notation held by first grade children approximately six years of age. Our findings illustrate that given the opportunity,…

Researchers are increasingly interested in working memory (WM) training. However, it is unclear whether it strengthens comprehension in young children who are at risk for learning difficulties. We conducted a modest study of whether the training of verbal WM would improve verbal WM and passage listening comprehension and whether training effects…

This article explores what it means to be a competent reader of picture storybooks by examining the abilities of some 4-6-year-olds, who were read stories aloud in class. Jonathan Culler's concept of "literary competence" was used to tease out the children's implicit knowledge of the structures and conventions that enable them to read a work of…

The spacing effect describes the robust finding that long-term learning is promoted when learning events are spaced out in time rather than presented in immediate succession. Studies of the spacing effect have focused on memory processes rather than for other types of learning, such as the acquisition and generalization of new concepts. In this…

This study examines first graders' epistemic reasoning, in tacit "practical epistemologies" reflected in thinking about an investigation of their own design. I analyzed children's epistemic reasoning, following a design experiment scaffolding increasing regulation of scientific inquiry in a domain they studied in depth. Participants…

To date, a number of studies have demonstrated the existence of mismatches between children's "implicit" and "explicit" knowledge at certain points in development that become manifest by their gestures and gaze orientation in different problem solving contexts. Stimulated by this research, we used eye movement measurement to…

Including gesture in instruction facilitates learning. Why? One possibility is that gesture points out objects in the immediate context and thus helps ground the words learners hear in the world they see. Previous work on gesture's role in instruction has used gestures that either point to or trace paths on objects, thus providing support for this…