Imagination is the ability of envisaging something that does not exist at the time being. Since 5-6-year-old children get through the pre-operational stage of Piaget's [2004. "Çocukta Zihinsel Gelisim" [Intellectual Development of Child] (2nd ed., H. Portakal, Trans.). Istanbul: Cem], they believe in empirical facts. Hence, Kujawski's…

This study contributes to our understanding of meaning making in CSCL environments by examining a specific aspect of collaborative problem solving in which students improvise, introduce, and make meaning with representations in disciplinary domains. These situations include the embodied and imaginative processes of discovering new representational…

Understanding children's inquiry often draws on exogenous understanding (i.e., scientists' inquiry, classroom expectations) without first understanding inquiry in children's everyday lives. In contrast, we examine young children's inquiry in their families to better understand their competent engagement in inquiry. Specifically, we develop an…

In secondary science education, students often do not feel engaged with the scientific concepts that are taught, which hinders conceptual learning. This lack of engagement can be overcome by fictional placemaking. Therefore, the purpose of our design-based research is to explore how the creation and use of fictional places lead to meaningful…

This mixed-methods study examined 220 teachers' responses from a new instrument, the Imagination, Creativity, and Innovation (ICI) Index. ICI Index scores represented teachers' predictions of how students would rate their school's support for student creativity, which was assumed to represent the teachers' perspective of the actual support for…

Compared with other age groups, the literacy practices and creative outputs of older adults (50+ years) have been seldom researched. Generally, research about older adults has tended to focus on decline and agential passivity, rather than potentiality. In this article, we report on a small ethnographic study of older Australians who were part of a…

Previous research has indicated that young children's executive functions (EFs) can be bolstered through role-play [e.g. the 'Batman™ effect'; White et al.]. However, what is not clear is whether it is the role-playing of another's perspective, or something about the role played, which is responsible for the Batman™ effect. The current experiment…

The international quality-improvement agenda for Early Childhood Education (ECE) directs attention to maximising children's learning experiences. Yet routines, and particularly those relating to sleep-rest provision, are not well conceptualised as learning opportunities. Often children who no longer sleep in the daytime are required to lie down…

Purpose: Historically, literacy education and research have been dominated by white supremacist narratives that marginalize and deficitize the literate practices of Black students. As anti-Blackness proliferates in US schools, Black youth suffer social, psychological, intellectual, and physical traumas. Despite relentless attacks of…

Early childhood settings value play as the way young children learn and educators encourage children's re-enactment of cultural practices in the imaginative play spaces provided. From a cultural-historical perspective, children expect these imaginative play spaces to contain objects from their social contexts, but what happens when technologies…

A thorough understanding of the concept of the nature of science (NOS) is essential to the development of scientific literacy among students, as it provides the students with the tools and capacity to interpret the scientific knowledge they will encounter. This study focuses on how social factors may influence 1010 Israeli 9th grade students'…

Pretend play is a quintessential activity of early childhood, and adults supply children with many toys to encourage it. Do young children actually prefer to pretend, or do they do it because they are unable to engage in some activities for real? Here we examined, for nine different activities, American middle-class preschoolers' preferences for…

This research is concerned with how children's processes of imagination, situated in cultural and social practices, come into play when they invent, anticipate, and explore a problem that is important to them. To enhance our understanding of young children's learning and meaning-making related to science and sustainability, research that…

The study presented in this article is part of a larger study called Progressive Feedback (blogs.helsinki.fi/orientate), which is an early childhood education and care (ECEC) research and development project. The aim of this article is to find out: (1) how children's tested creative thinking abilities, fluency, originality and imagination…

Mind-mindedness (MM) refers to caregivers' proclivity to treat a child as having an active and autonomous mental life. It has been shown to be a powerful predictor of many developmental outcomes and to mitigate the impact of risk conditions. However, longitudinal studies on MM reporting changes over time and individual differences among mothers…