Teaching the control-of-variables strategy: A meta-analysis
Publication date: Available online 24 December 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Martin Schwichow, Steve Croker, Corinne Zimmerman, Tim Höffler, Hendrik Härtig A core component of scientific inquiry is the ability to evaluate evidence generated from controlled experiments and then to relate that evidence to a hypothesis or theory. The control-of-variables strategy (CVS) is foundational for school science and scientific literacy, but it does not routinely develop without practice or instruction. This meta-analysis summarizes the findings from 72 intervention studies at least partly designed to incr...
Source: Developmental Review - December 24, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Toward an integrated clinical-developmental model of guilt
Publication date: Available online 8 December 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Tina Malti An integrated clinical-developmental model is proposed for understanding the development of guilt feelings from early childhood to adolescence. The central goal is to posit a new theoretical framework that expands existing social-cognitive models, social-domain models, and clinical approaches to the study of guilt (i.e., the Affect-Event Model [Arsenio, Gold, & Adams, 2006] and the Affect-Cognition Model [Malti & Keller, 2010]). Because guilt feelings are multifaceted and depend on both contextual vari...
Source: Developmental Review - December 8, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
A meta-analysis of the dimensional change card sort: Implications for developmental theories and the measurement of executive function in children
Publication date: Available online 10 November 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Sabine Doebel, Philip D. Zelazo The Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) is a widely used measure of executive function in children. In the standard version, children are shown cards depicting objects that vary on two dimensions (e.g., colored shapes such as red rabbits and blue boats), and are told to sort them first by one set of rules (e.g., shape) and then by another (e.g., color). Most 3-year-olds persist in sorting by the pre-switch rules, whereas 5-year-olds switch flexibly. We conducted a meta-analysis of standard and ...
Source: Developmental Review - November 10, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
How approximate and exact number skills are related to each other across development: A review☆
Publication date: Available online 6 November 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Christophe Mussolin, Julie Nys, Jacqueline Leybaert, Alain Content Human and non-human species possess a mental system of number representations that appears early in the lifespan and that supports approximate number skills, such as numerical estimation or number comparison. With the later acquisition of language and of symbolic numbers, human beings also develop exact number skills that allow using numbers precisely, such as in counting and arithmetic. Whether the exact number skills are built on the approximate number sk...
Source: Developmental Review - November 6, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Fuzzy-trace theory and lifespan cognitive development
Publication date: Available online 1 October 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): C.J. Brainerd, Valerie F. Reyna Fuzzy-trace theory (FTT) emphasizes the use of core theoretical principles, such as the verbatim-gist distinction, to predict new findings about cognitive development that are counterintuitive from the perspective of other theories or of common-sense. To the extent that such predictions are confirmed, the range of phenomena that are explained expands without increasing the complexity of the theory's assumptions. We examine research on recent examples of such predictions during four epochs of cogn...
Source: Developmental Review - October 2, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Learning in core and non-core number domains
Publication date: Available online 1 October 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Rochel Gelman Much early knowledge acquisition is domain-specific. Different knowledge structures are defined by different sets of principles. These serve to identify those data that belong to a given structure and exclude those that are irrelevant. Domain-specific structures direct attention to those aspects of experience that can be assimilated to the structure and thereby grow it. Core domains are defined by a priori skeletal structures. Learning in non-core domains occurs later and is much more dependent on structured instruc...
Source: Developmental Review - October 2, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Defenders of victims of peer aggression: Interdependence theory and an exploration of individual, interpersonal, and contextual effects on the defender participant role
Publication date: Available online 1 October 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Diana J. Meter, Noel A. Card The research on predictors and effects of defending victims of peer victimization and bullying continues to grow, but most research on this topic is lacking a strong theoretical framework. This review of defending research introduces interdependence theory as a theory with the capacity to organize many of the empirical findings from the existing defending literature into a meaningful whole. Other theories used to frame defending research are described, and limitations of these theories are discussed...
Source: Developmental Review - October 2, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Why is learning fraction and decimal arithmetic so difficult?
Publication date: Available online 26 September 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Hugues Lortie-Forgues, Jing Tian, Robert S. Siegler Fraction and decimal arithmetic are crucial for later mathematics achievement and for ability to succeed in many professions. Unfortunately, these capabilities pose large difficulties for many children and adults, and students' proficiency in them has shown little sign of improvement over the past three decades. To summarize what is known about fraction and decimal arithmetic and to stimulate greater amounts of research in the area, we devoted this review to analyzing why...
Source: Developmental Review - September 27, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Evolution of human cooperation in Homo heidelbergensis: Teleology versus mentalism
We present the critical features of the teleological approach in terms of justifying reasons for action. These features differentiate teleology from theory of mind (theory theory) and mental simulation. Our emphasis on justifying reasons also distinguishes our teleology from other approaches under the same heading. We also point out the limitations of teleology when it comes to competition, understanding subjective mental perspectives and cultural differences. Although our grand picture is speculative, we firm up our claims with data from children's cooperation and their appreciation of competition that appear in stages re...
Source: Developmental Review - September 11, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
From action to abstraction: Gesture as a mechanism of change
Publication date: Available online 3 September 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Susan Goldin-Meadow Piaget was a master at observing the routine behaviors children produce as they go from knowing less to knowing more about at a task, and making inferences not only about how the children understood the task at each point, but also about how they progressed from one point to the next. In this paper, I examine a routine behavior that Piaget overlooked – the spontaneous gestures speakers produce as they explain their solutions to a problem. These gestures are not mere hand waving. They reflect ideas that the...
Source: Developmental Review - September 4, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Theories of development: In dialog with Jean Piaget
Publication date: Available online 1 September 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Susan Carey, Deborah Zaitchik, Igor Bascandziev Piaget's body of work had two major theoretical thrusts: constructivism and stage theory. Both constructivism and stage theories articulate modern work on conceptual development, albeit transformed by developments in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience. A case study of conceptual change in childhood within a framework theory of intuitive biology illustrates these points. (Source: Developmental Review)
Source: Developmental Review - September 1, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Development of episodic and autobiographical memory: The importance of remembering forgetting
Publication date: Available online 17 August 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Patricia J. Bauer Some memories of the events of our lives have a long shelf-life – they remain accessible to recollection even after long delays. Yet many other of our experiences are forgotten, sometimes very soon after they take place. In spite of the prevalence of forgetting, theories of the development of episodic and autobiographical memory largely ignore it as a potential source of variance in explanation of age-related variability in long-term recall. They focus instead on what may be viewed as positive developmental ch...
Source: Developmental Review - August 18, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Layers of awareness in development
Publication date: Available online 13 August 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Philippe Rochat Distinct layers of awareness about objects, people, and the self grow from an implicit biologically given core at birth. Each added layer of subjective experience would correspond to major qualitative shifts: the emergence of a contemplative stance by 2 months, self-consciousness from around 21 months and the manifestation of an ethical stance by 3–5 years. This new “onion” way of looking at psychological experience is meant to capture the fact that a new emerging layer of awareness does not block, re-constr...
Source: Developmental Review - August 14, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Developing adaptations
Publication date: Available online 31 July 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): David F. Bjorklund The concept of adaptation is ubiquitous in psychology and plays a central role in evolutionary psychology. In this article I provide a different way of thinking about adaptations from an evolutionary developmental psychological perspective, more in line with the theorizing of developmental systems perspective than with mainstream evolutionary psychology. Adaptations develop and are based on the highly plastic nature of infants and children's behavior/cognition/brains. The concept of evolved probabilistic cognitiv...
Source: Developmental Review - July 31, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Statistical learning of language: Theory, validity, and predictions of a statistical learning account of language acquisition
Publication date: Available online 23 June 2015 Source:Developmental Review Author(s): Lucy C. Erickson, Erik D. Thiessen Considerable research indicates that learners are sensitive to probabilistic structure in laboratory studies of artificial language learning. However, the artificial and simplified nature of the stimuli used in the pioneering work on the acquisition of statistical regularities has raised doubts about the scalability of such learning to the complexity of natural language input. In this review, we explore a central prediction of statistical learning accounts of language acquisition – that sensit...
Source: Developmental Review - July 19, 2015 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
