Theory of Mind (ToM) is a skill of social cognition recently of interest to literacy researchers. This article presents initial findings from a pilot study investigating the use of ToM to teach theme identification and theme statement formation to beginning readers who are less-skilled in comprehension. The authors designed a brief, 1:1 listening…

Interest continues to be high in technology-based interventions for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Understanding the preferences and challenges of technology use among individuals with ASD can inform the design of such interventions. Through 18 interviews with parents, we used an iterative inductive-deductive approach to…

Research on Theory of Mind explores how we develop the capacity to understand that others have thoughts and feelings that differ from our own and how we are compelled to "read" them. However, a preponderance of evidence from the cognitive humanities and cognitive neurosciences tells us that our readings are often misguided or just plain…

This paper makes a conceptual argument for using the Decoding the Disciplines research paradigm as a pedagogical innovation in the field of teacher education. It incorporates empirical findings from a research project in which teacher candidates conduct Decoding interviews to deepen understanding of historical thinking and learn pedagogical…

As the field of higher education has used several methods to assess college teaching, the validation of these measures and how they relate to each other has been sparse. This study drew on data from a multi-institutional study of 587 college courses to examine the efficacy of two methods of measuring college teaching (class observation and…

Recent discussions in language communication indicate the effectiveness of technology and computer-mediated communication. Research also highlights the central role of synchronous and asynchronous modes of interaction in second and foreign language development. Gaining insights from Vygotskyan sociocultural theory of mind, the present study…

Distributed cognition, as it considers how technologies augment cognition, informs technology integration in education. Most educational technologists interested in distributed cognition embrace a representational theory of mind. As this theory assumes cognition occurs in the brain and depends on the internal representation of external…

Interest continues to be high in technology-based interventions for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Understanding the preferences and challenges of technology use among individuals with ASD can inform the design of such interventions. Through 18 interviews with parents, we used an iterative inductive-deductive approach to…

The present study evaluated: (1) the effects of two training programs designed for promoting Theory of Mind (ToM) skills in children aged 7/8; and (2) the relations between second-order recursive thinking (II-order-RT), advanced-ToM (Adv_ToM) and metacognition. Ninety-one 7- to 8-year-old children were assigned to one of three training conditions:…

We taught basic perspective-taking tasks to 3 children with autism and evaluated their ability to derive mutually entailed single-reversal deictic relations of those newly established perspective-taking skills. Furthermore, we examined the possibility of transfers of perspective-taking function to novel untrained stimuli. The methods were taken…

This study advances our understanding of the role social studies methods courses can play in supporting pre-service teachers' development of their awareness of civic identities. Specifically, this study examines the use of interactive civic activities in developing preservice teachers' awareness of how their civic identities shape their social…

Effective communication requires an understanding of the interlocutor's perspective. Being able to infer someone else's knowledge about a situation is a critical skill in any communication and social interaction. These abilities are part of Theory of Mind (ToM) skills and are known to be impaired in Down syndrome (DS). It therefore makes sense to…

Listening to narrative material stimulates and activates multiple areas in the cerebral cortex. It has been shown that such activations produce significant changes in the connectivity of the brain. In literature, findings have shown that in pathological aging (i.e., cognitive decline) patients who underwent a daily narrative training showed some…

In literature which discusses the Theory of Mind (ToM) of deaf children, the lens is usually focused on the child. Here, the lens is directed toward the practitioners and the potential they have to support the development of ToM. In considering a practice-focused approach, we report on the strategies used by five educators of five deaf children…

This study explored the development of theory of mind (ToM) in 80 Swedish-speaking 3- to 5-year-olds, a previously unstudied language and culture. The ToM scale was translated and tested in a Swedish context. The results show that the ToM abilities improve significantly with age. In addition, a gender difference was observed for the whole sample,…