Past research has shown that children's mental rotation skills are malleable and can be improved through action experience--physically rotating objects--or gesture experience--showing how objects could rotate (e.g., Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe, 2013; Goldin-Meadow et al., 2012; Levine, Goldin-Meadow, Carlson, & Hemani-Lopez, 2018). These…

Spatial skill assessment and training are promising fields of application for tablets, as touch-based interaction can prime and support mental transformations of spatial knowledge. We report on a study with 49 secondary school students who used our iPad app to solve mental and physical rotation tasks. During physical rotation, students were able…

Learning to walk leads to an increase in language abilities; however, the underlying mechanisms accounting for this relation remain unclear. Investigating the quality of early gait control may offer some insights. The purpose of this study was to: (1) quantify how 13-month-olds (n = 39; 39% male) and 24-month-olds (n = 39; 59% male) adapt gait…

Although attempts are currently being made to understand the connections and differences between art and design education (Zwirn & Zande, 2015), there is little reflection on a key problematic that binds them together: the relationship between form and function. In this article, authors Tyson Lewis and James Thurman briefly share a three-part…

Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children's natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool…

The grounding of cognition in embodied actions has resulted in both theoretical formulations of encoding of information and instructional applications of these encodings. Actions on objects typically occur within matched formats: physical actions on physical objects, virtual actions on virtual objects, or mental actions on mental objects. Instead,…

In the activity described in this communication, the authors present a simple experiment that can be implemented with moderate operational costs and that allows students to acquire the manipulative skills necessary for chromatographic analysis of a familiar fuel that still plays a fundamental role in providing energy for transport of passengers…

In early childhood, young children frequently engage in object-oriented play. According to cultural-historical activity theory, object-oriented play provides children with opportunities to learn about the characteristics and cultural applications of objects and materials. These characteristics are referred to as rules or affordances of objects and…

The emerging field of mathematics educational neuroscience provides researchers with new approaches to understanding mathematical development, as well mathematics itself. This paper focuses on the role of the hand in constructing mathematics through activity. We rely on Piaget's distinction of three kinds of activity: sensorimotor activity,…

Various developmental studies have demonstrated that implied object weight is a key variable in children's interpretations of motion, such as predicting the objects' speeds. An additional bias in predictions of object motion is representational momentum (RM), where objects are anticipated to be found in a location farther along in the direction of…

The present study explores the constructs of Chinese mothers' and fathers' engagement in toddlers' play in the daily context. A sample of 238 parents of toddlers (M = 30.43 months, SD = 3.45) completed a newly-developed instrument, the Chinese Parental Involvement in Toddler Play Activity Questionnaire (CPITPAQ), to report their play engagement.…

Purpose: This study examined whether 2-year-olds are better able to acquire novel verb meanings when they appear in varying linguistic contexts, including both content nouns and pronouns, as compared to when the contexts are consistent, including only content nouns. Additionally, differences between typically developing toddlers and late talkers…

One of the biggest challenges for primary school children is moving beyond the use of counting in calculation. The purpose of this study was to investigate how Zambian Grade 1 to Grade 4 children at primary school see a group of 10 as an effective pattern and structure with the given concrete material. The study consisted of three phases…

Young children sometimes attempt an action on an object, which is inappropriate because of the object size--they make scale errors. Existing theories suggest that scale errors may result from immaturities in children's action planning system, which might be overpowered by increased complexity of object representations or developing teleofunctional…

Research Findings: Although work across developmental and educational psychology reveals that trust impacts children's acceptance of claims and that teacher-student relationships impact learning outcomes, little work has integrated these literatures to better understand how students' trust in their teacher facilitates learning. In the present…