Researchers taking a domain-general approach to the development of scientific reasoning long thought that the ability to engage in scientific reasoning did not develop until adolescence. However, more recent studies have shown that preschool children already have a basic ability to evaluate evidence and a basic understanding of experimentation.…

The aim of this study was to explore preschool children's perceptions of their performance under competitive and non-competitive conditions (NCC) and their satisfaction. Eighty preschool children (40 boys, 40 girls) aged 4-6 years (M age?=?5.48, SD?=?0.57) took part in this study. Preschool children built a tower under competitive and NCC and…

In the context of joint decision-making, we investigated whether preschoolers alter the informativeness of their justifications depending on the common ground that they share with their partner. Pairs of 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 146) were introduced to a novel animal with unique characteristics (e.g., eating rocks). In the common ground condition,…

Preschool children learn through their senses. Children learn language, daily life skills, concepts and many other things through their senses. Thus, preschool educational environments and preschool educational activities should stimulate children's senses. In this context, preschool science activities and experiments have positive effects upon…

Purpose: This study evaluated the efficacy of an instructive feedback strategy for modeling letter names and sounds during presentation of positive feedback within a small group phonological awareness intervention for preschoolers. Method: Two experiments were conducted using multiple baseline designs across children and behaviors. Letter name and…

Many studies have examined language acquisition under morphosyntactic or semantic inconsistency, but few have considered "word-form" inconsistency. Many young learners encounter word-form inconsistency due to accent variation in their communities. The current study asked how preschoolers recognize accent-variants of newly learned words.…

Many early childhood educators struggle to meet the communication needs of children with delays and disabilities. The purpose of this study was to examine the functional relation between bug-in-ear coaching and the frequency of educators' correct use of targeted communication strategies, as well as associations with children's expressive…

This research investigated children's ability to recognize gaps in their knowledge and seek missing information from appropriate informants. In Experiment 1, forty-five 4- and 5-year-olds were adept in assigning questions from 3 domains (medicine, firefighting, and farming) to corresponding experts (doctor, firefighter, or farmer). However, when…

Sensitivity to variations in the spacing of features in faces and a class of nonface objects (i.e., frontal images of cars) was tested in 3- and 4-year-old children and adults using a delayed or simultaneous two-alternative forced choice matching-to-sample task. In the adults, detection of spacing information was robust against exemplar…

Growing evidence indicates a suite of generalized differences in the attentional and cognitive processing of adults from Eastern and Western cultures. Cognition in Eastern adults is often more relational and in Western adults is more object focused. Three experiments examined whether these differences characterize the cognition of preschool…

Proponents of a geometric module have argued that instances of young children's use of features as well as geometry to reorient can be explained by a two-stage process. In this model, only the first stage is a true reorientation, accomplished by using geometric information alone; features are considered in a second stage using association (Lee,…

Children are judicious social learners. They may be particularly sensitive to communicative actions done pedagogically for their benefit, as such actions may mark important, generalizable information. Three experiments (N = 224) found striking differences in preschoolers' inductive generalization and exploration of a novel functional property,…

The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) is an international, non-profit educational organization. The Association's purpose is to advance the knowledge, theory, and quality of teaching and learning at all levels with information technology. "EdMedia + Innovate Learning" took place in Amsterdam, The…

Previous studies (Case, 1985; Siegler, 1981) have shown that children under the age of 5 years have little understanding of balance scales when required to encode the influence of weight or distance from the fulcrum. More recently, however, Halford, Andrews, Dalton, Boag, and Zielinski (2002) noted that an understanding based on weight alone is…

Most adults experience childhood amnesia: They have very few memories of events prior to 3 to 4 years of age. Nevertheless, some early memories are retained. Multiple factors likely are responsible for the survival of early childhood memories, including external representations such as videos, photographs, and conversations about past experiences,…