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,…

In this article, educators at University Primary School in Champaign, Illinois, share examples and understandings of the ways The Project Approach challenges young children to think critically about topics of importance in their world. Project investigations that provoke academic and social challenges for individuals and classroom communities of…

To test young children's false belief theory of mind in a morally relevant context, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, children (N=162) at 3.5, 5.5, and 7.5 years of age were administered three tasks: prototypic moral transgression task, false belief theory of mind task (ToM), and an "accidental transgressor" task, which measured a…

These studies investigate how the distinction between generic sentences (e.g., "Boys are good at math") and nongeneric sentences (e.g., "Johnny is good at math") shapes children's social cognition. These sentence types are hypothesized to have different implications about the source and nature of the properties conveyed. Specifically, generics may…

Combinatorial abilities are fundamental to experimental thinking. The aim of this work was to design didactic objects that will stimulate preschoolers' experimental thinking and to study young children's thinking in relation to these objects. Six heuristic rules for the design of didactic objects are specified, and the responses of 623 children…

Research has shown that preschoolers monitor others' prior accuracy and prefer to learn from individuals who have the best track record. We investigated the scope of preschoolers' attributions based on an individual's prior accuracy. Experiment 1 revealed that 5-year-olds (but not 4-year-olds) used an individual's prior accuracy at labelling to…

In early childhood, there is a developmental transition in spatial memory biases. Before the transition, children's memory responses are biased toward the midline of a space, while after the transition responses are biased away from midline. The Dynamic Field Theory (DFT) posits that changes in neural interaction and changes in how children…

In two experiments, we examined young children's ability to delay a response to ambiguous input. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-olds performed as poorly when they needed to choose between basing an interpretation on ambiguous input and delaying an interpretation as when making explicit evaluations of knowledge, whereas 7- and 8-year-olds found the…

Understanding how responses become prepotent is essential for understanding when inhibitory control is needed in everyday behavior. The authors investigated the conditions under which manual actions became prepotent in a go/no-go task. Children had to open boxes that contained stickers on go trials and leave shut boxes that were empty on no-go…

We investigated the conditions under which preparatory information presented 1 day before a novel event influenced 6-year-olds' recall 1 week later. Children were assigned to one of six experimental conditions. Three conditions involved preparatory information that described the event accurately but differed according to the presence and type of…

Thirty-six three- to four-year-old children were tested to assess whether hearing a word-referent link from an ignorant speaker affected children's abilities to subsequently link the same word with an alternative referent offered by another speaker. In the principal experimental conditions, children first heard either an ignorant or a…

This article examines students' ability to use the balance model to solve for unknowns. A teaching experiment was conducted in four Year 3 classrooms. This experiment focused on exploring the application of the balance model as an analogue for representing equations and solving for unknowns. The teaching experiment promoted a shift by students…