Research on children's knowledge of illnesses has largely concentrated on studying how children reason about common innocuous diseases. It is also important to uncover how children reason about more severe diseases, such as cancer, to be able to treat and communicate with children diagnosed with this disease. Several aspects of prevalent childhood…

The aim of this study was to explore the effects of repeat viewing on comprehension of explicitly and implicitly presented information in an animated movie. Seventy-three pre-school children watched an animated film and were tested for comprehension after either their single or fifth viewing. Only children's comprehension of explicitly …

Since its inception in 2002, the National Center for Education Research (NCER) in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has funded over 700 education research grants and over 60 education training grants. The research grants have supported exploratory research to build theory or generate hypotheses on factors that may affect educational…

Preschool and kindergarten are transition years in the U.S. educational system, and teaching four-, five- and six-year-olds means living on the margins of one educational community or another. But many preschool and kindergarten teachers like it that way. These teachers get to take ideas from the primary grades and combine them with the…

Self-regulation, or the ability to control one's actions and responses, is essential for healthy development across varied contexts. Self-regulation comes in several forms, including emotional, behavioral, and cognitive. The present study sought to examine whether individual differences in one form of self-regulation was related to children's…

This study tests the firm distinction children are said to make between living and nonliving kinds. Three, 4-, and 5-year-old children and adults reasoned about whether items that varied on 3 dimensions (alive, face, behavior) had a range of properties (biological, psychological, perceptual, artifact, novel, proper names). Findings demonstrate…

Learning names for parts of objects can be challenging for children, as it requires overcoming their tendency to name whole objects. We test whether comparing items can facilitate learning names for their parts. Applying the structure-mapping theory of comparison leads to two predictions: (a) young children will find it easier to identify a common…

Although "hindsight bias" (the "I knew it all along" phenomenon) has been documented in adults, its development has not been investigated. This is despite the fact that hindsight bias errors closely resemble the errors children make on theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Two main goals of the present work were to (a) create a battery of hindsight tasks…

Reading difficulties and disabilities present serious and potentially lifelong challenges. Children who do not read well are more likely to be retained a grade in school, drop out of high school, become a teen parent, or enter the juvenile justice system. Building on the extant research and seminal studies, including the National Reading Panel and…

Most international adoptees (IA) have rapid catch-up of the delays common at arrival. However, it is not known whether development at arrival predicts later abilities or school readiness. Therefore, we comprehensively evaluated language, fine motor, visual reception (VR), executive function (EF), attention (ATT), and sensory skills (SS) in IA…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the peer conflict strategies of preschool children are situated and therefore vary across different conflict situations. Hypothetical conflict interviews were administered through a series of puppet shows. Participants were 178 preschool children. Results indicate that preschool children's conflict…

This research investigated the relation between individual differences in inhibitory control and emotion regulation. Preschool children (N=53) ages 4-6 (M=5; 0) were assessed on brief batteries of inhibitory control of prepotent responses and emotion regulation. Individual differences in inhibitory control were significantly correlated with…

In 2 experiments we explored young preschoolers' knowledge of constraints on human action by presenting them with violations of different types of law and asking whether the violations required magic. In Experiment 1, children responded that physical violations required magic more than did social violations. In Experiment 2, violations were…

Four experiments examined the development of negative priming (NP) in 3-5-year-old children using as a measure of children's executive function (EF) the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task. In the NP version of the DCCS, the values of the sorting dimension that is relevant during the preswitch phase are removed during the postswitch phase.…

Research Findings: This study analyzed the school readiness beliefs of parents of 452 children from public pre-kindergarten and the relations of these beliefs to socioeconomic status and children's readiness skills. Parents conceived readiness largely in terms of the ability to name objects, letters, or numbers, but few included inferential…