What often seems intuitive and well-meaning as a mental game strategy may be ineffective or detrimental to athletes, based on the evolution of knowledge in sport psychology. This article describes three popular ideas about the mental game and identifies them as myths, based on experience and research. These myths are (1) mental training should…

Educators' beliefs are powerful, affecting not only their pedagogical practices, but also student efficacy and success. The academic achievement of any particular student may rely greatly on whether the teacher believes that student has the ability to succeed. This article affirms the imperative for administrators and educators to spend time…

For more than three decades, theory of mind (ToM) has been one of the leading and prevalent issues in developmental psychology. ToM is the ability to ascribe mental states (e.g. beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge) to oneself and others as well as to recognise that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that differ from…

This article presents a simile for understanding the power of paradigms, mental models, and mind-sets as religion-like phenomena. The author clarifies the meaning of the three phenomena to help readers to see how the phenomena become significant sources of resistance to change. He concludes by outlining a paradigm-shifting process to assist…

Holding content explicitly requires a form of self-knowledge. But what does the relevant self-knowledge look like? Using theory of mind as an example, this paper argues that the correct answer to this question will have to take into account the crucial role of language-based deliberation but warns against the standard assumption that explicitness…

A new teacher's mindset may have more to do with her success than her natural teaching talent. When she feels overwhelmed, her mindset will determine whether she gives up or sticks with it. This article includes insights from a new teacher about how her mindset helped her through the tough days of her first year.

Recent advancements in the field of infant false-belief reasoning have brought into question whether performance on implicit and explicit measures of false belief is driven by the same level of representational understanding. The success of infants on implicit measures has also raised doubt over the role that language development plays in the…

The potential utility of a distinction between "automatic (or spontaneous) and implicit" versus "controlled and explicit" processes in theory of mind (ToM) is undercut by the fact that the terms can be employed to describe different but related distinctions within cognitive systems serving that function. These include distinctions in the…

Many authors have argued that infants understand goals, intentions, and beliefs. We posit that infants' success on such tasks might instead reveal an understanding of behaviour, that infants' proficient statistical learning abilities might enable such insights, and that maternal talk scaffolds children's learning about the social world as well. We…

The primary goal of education is to provide meaningful instruction to all students while fostering generalization throughout the curriculum and beyond. As such, educators continuously seek out instructional methods and techniques to appropriately meet individual student needs while choosing "what" and "how" to teach. The current work provides an…

For more than 30 years, researchers have focused on the important transition that children undergo between the ages of 3 and 5, when they start to solve mind-reading problems that require reasoning about complex mental states, such as beliefs. The main question for debate has been whether, during that transition, children acquire new concepts…

Self-authorship, as described by Baxter Magolda (2008), is about trusting ourselves (our internal voice), rather than relying on external voices to guide our lives. Young professionals attempt to navigate new experiences based on prior knowledge and begin to distinguish what others tell them from what they believe and value on their own. The path…

At the core of school reform is an unwavering belief in possibility: the deep conviction that each and every student can reach higher academic levels than typical expectations would have people settle for. This belief in possibility acknowledges the potential of every student to learn, every teacher to teach, and every family member to partner…