There is a growing awareness among developmental scientists that the better a child can self-regulate, the better she can rise to the challenge of mastering ever more complex skills and concepts. In the simplest terms, self-regulation can be defined as the ability to stay calmly focused and alert, which often involves--but cannot be reduced…

A chronicle of the success of a small Catholic school on Long Island, N.Y. in overcoming poverty, race, and language for the 65 male students it has served in grades 5-8 for eight years. The authors posit that the secret of the school's success resides in creating goals, agency and pathways for success in its students, creating a climate of hope…

In this article, the author presents a holistic practice-based approach, consisting of two parts, to preparing candidates for quality teaching. The first part describes the essential knowledge, skills, and habits of mind for quality teaching. The emphasis is on understanding the learning process as influenced by the cultural and experiential…

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult…

Building on J. Dewey's (1907) original work with the laboratory school, the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Texas-Arlington is expanding the original concept to include partners throughout a school system and the community in order to support and advance learning in multiple learning environments. The goal is to…

In this study, academic optimism as an individual teacher belief was investigated. Teachers' self-efficacy beliefs were measured using the short form of the Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale. One subtest from the Omnibus T-Scale, the faculty trust in clients subtest, was used to measure teachers' trust in students and parents. One subtest from the…

The work and lives of teachers have always been subject to external influence as those who are nearing the end of their careers will attest, but it is arguable that what is new over the last two decades is the pace, complexity, and intensity of change as governments have responded to the shrinking world of economic competitiveness and social…

This study adds to the growing research on school outcomes associated with individual differences in preschoolers' theory of mind skills by considering whether "costs" of theory of mind (e.g., sensitivity to criticism) actually help to foster children's academic achievement. A group of 60 Italian children was tested during the last year…

Most teachers look back on their first year (or years) of teaching with humility, many with some regret. The author stresses that teachers are always learners, especially so in their first years. At the beginning of each year, they start over again with new students. A learning teacher takes risks and makes mistakes but derives new information,…

This chapter identifies three common pitfalls in the use of the concept of empathy in formal social-emotional learning interventions: (1) not distinguishing between affective and cognitive empathy ("equivocation"); (2) overestimating the role of the imagination in empathizing ("Piaget's fallacy"); and (3) not accommodating the developmental and…

Capstone courses in leadership provide students opportunities to synthesize prior knowledge about various aspects of leadership. This article describes the "Leadership for Dummies" project, which could be used as a capstone experience for leadership majors. Based on his experiences as a psychological researcher, Gardner (2008) identified five…

A growing body of evidence supports the importance of nurturing children's thinking. This article reports on an investigation of the influence of teachers' implementation of the Visible Thinking approach developed within the Harvard Graduate School of Education Project Zero on very young children's concepts of thinking, as measured by the…

Over the past thirty years, researchers have documented a remarkable growth in children's social understanding between toddlerhood and the early school years. However, it is still unclear why some children's awareness of others' thoughts and feelings lags so far behind that of their peers. Based on research that spans an extended developmental…

Relations between infant-mother attachment security at 15 months and infants' (N = 206) joint attention behaviors (a) with an experimenter at 8 and 15 months, and (b) with their mothers at 15 months were investigated. No concurrent or longitudinal relations were observed between attachment security and infants' tendency to respond to an…

As the context of human life expands from personal to global, a new vision of scientific literacy is needed. Based on a synthesis of the literature and the findings of an online survey of South Korean and US secondary science teachers, we developed a framework for scientific literacy for South Korea that includes five dimensions: content…