The purpose of this study was to identify the different incidents of critical thinking in five preschool classrooms in one school, and the instructional strategies preschool teachers employed in the development of children's critical thinking. The participants in this study were five self-contained preschool teachers and their corresponding…

From the 1990s until 2017 the High Ability and Inquiry Research Group (HAIR) at McGill University in Montreal, received C$1.3M in research funds from Canadian, Quebec, and US agencies to support its research and graduate training in education and educational psychology. Their research encompassed two principal areas, Inquiry in Education and…

As part of a larger longitudinal project on the assessment of preschoolers' social-emotional development, children's social information processing (SIP) responses to unambiguous hypothetical situations of peer provocation were assessed for 298 four-year-olds from Head Start and private childcare settings. Measurement focused on emotions children…

This study investigated the use of cognitive state verbs (CSVs) and complement clauses in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. In Study 1, conversational samples from 23 children with SLI (M = 6;2), 24 age-matched TD children (M = 6;2) and 21 vocabulary-matched TD children (M = 4;9) were…

This article focuses on young children's misinterpretations of storybook illustrations. Examples of misinterpretations drawn from preschool classrooms are presented and analyzed to explain four kinds of confusion that are typically involved. Based on these analyses, the authors argue that young children are capable of the reasoning required to…

This study investigated the development of length measurement ideas in students from prekindergarten through 2nd grade. The main purpose was to evaluate and elaborate the developmental progression, or levels of thinking, of a hypothesized learning trajectory for length measurement to ensure that the sequence of levels of thinking is consistent…

The representation of numerical and non-numerical ordered sequences was investigated in children from preschool to grade 3. The child's conception of how sequence items map onto a spatial scale was tested using the Number-to-Position task (Siegler & Opfer, 2003) and new variants of the task designed to probe the representation of the alphabet…

Being able to focus, hold, and work with information in mind, filter distractions, and switch gears is like having an air traffic control system at a busy airport to manage the arrivals and departures of dozens of planes on multiple runways. In the brain, this air traffic control mechanism is called executive functioning, a group of skills that…

Although the structure of executive function (EF) during adulthood is characterized by both unity and diversity, recent evidence suggests that preschool EF may be best described by a single factor. The latent structure of EF was examined in 228 3-year-olds using confirmatory factor analysis. Children completed a battery of executive tasks that…

Is processing of conceptual information as robust as processing of perceptual information early in development? Existing empirical evidence is insufficient to answer this question. To examine this issue, 3- to 5-year-old children were presented with a flexible categorization task, in which target items (e.g., an open red umbrella) shared category…

Selectivity in encoding, aspects of attentional control and their contribution to learning performance were explored in a sample of preschoolers. While the children are performing a learning task, their encoding of relevant and attention towards irrelevant information was recorded through an eye-tracking device. Recognition of target items was…

In two experiments, we investigated whether 4- to 5-year-old children's ability to demonstrate their understanding of aspectuality was influenced by how the test question was phrased. In Experiment 1, 60 children chose whether to look or feel to gain information about a hidden object (identifiable by sight or touch). Test questions referred either…

The following manuscript is a review of research surrounding best practices for language and literacy development in children birth to age three. Part 1 of the review begins with the research on language acquisition beginning in utero, continuing through infancy and onto the emergence of speech. The review discusses the importance of language…

The present article investigates spatial- and social-cognitive processes in toddlers' mapping of concepts to real-world events. In 2 studies we explore how event segmentation might lay the groundwork for extracting actions from the event stream and conceptually mapping novel verbs to these actions. In Study 1, toddlers demonstrated the ability to…

Latent variable modeling methods have demonstrated utility for understanding the structure of executive control (EC) across development. These methods are utilized to better characterize the relation between EC and mathematics achievement in the preschool period, and to understand contributing sources of individual variation. Using the sample and…