Three experiments showed that gratitude positively affected preschool children's prosocial behavior. In the studies, the experimenter induced gratitude by giving a token gift and then making a request for help or to share resources. Experiment 1 (N = 126, 4- to 6-year-olds) showed that gratitude increased helping behaviors toward the benefactor,…

Bringing together all four books in the AS CD ground-breaking Habits of Mind series, this volume presents a compelling case for why it's more relevant than ever to align the missions of schools and classrooms to teaching students how to think and behave intelligently when they encounter problems and challenges in learning and in life. Drawing on…

Question-asking is a necessary step towards formulating hypotheses, making decisions, and solving problems, and is Practice #1 in the Next Generation Science Standards. To improve question-asking, educators and researchers need a way to categorize and evaluate students' questions, so as to judge whether an intervention has been effective. We…

University research labs focusing on education, psychology, and cognitive development have been collaborating with museums more and more over the past decade. Nevertheless, cognitive science labs that primarily engage in basic as opposed to applied research may find it difficult to entice museums to collaborate, and existing collaborations may…

While reformers and policymakers focus on achievement gaps, testing, and accountability, millions of students mentally and emotionally disengage from learning and many gifted teachers leave the field. Ironically, today's schooling is damaging the single most essential component to education--the joy of learning. How do we recognize the "wounds"…

The abrupt changes in the situation and policy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic might dwindle novice teachers' well-being and add more pressure to their minds that are already clouded with uncertainty. If left untouched, it is more than likely that they would quit teaching entirely. Nevertheless, while challenges, struggles, and tensions…

Provides a list of 118 reasons why the author's students claim they study American literature, including: (1) to broaden their vocabulary, (2) to learn from other people's experiences, and (3) to develop an open mind about different kinds of literature. (JD)

Discusses how the author decided to become a writer of historical novels based in Great Britain during the Middle Ages, with an audience of adolescents in mind. Reveals the kinds of decisions authors must make to present historical material and tell a good story simultaneously. (SKC)

Teaching is about designing, creating, and inventing intellectually challenging work for students--work that engages students and is so compelling that students persist when they experience difficulty and feel satisfaction, indeed delight, when they successfully accomplish the challenge (Schlechty 1997). Whether thinking skills are taught…

Products of the mind constitute a kind of property and this belief leads to concerns in the academic community. Protection of open scientific communication and the distribution of economic value created by knowledge are discussed, addressing conflicts of interest, joint ventures for research support, and patent ownership. (DH)

One of the main limitations of natural language-based approaches to meaning is that they do not incorporate multimodal representations the way humans do. In this study, we evaluate how well different kinds of models account for people's representations of both concrete and abstract concepts. The models we compare include unimodal distributional…

A literate mind is the kind of mind people need to do their jobs well, to adjust as their jobs change, and to be able to change jobs when they need to or want to. This paper contends that today, not enough adults have this kind of literacy, nor are students learning it well enough. A literate mind matters in the following contexts: in changing…

Research on Theory of Mind (ToM) and reading comprehension is a lively and active field with numerous publications a year. ToM describes a child's ability to identify and reason about the mental states of others (e.g., think, believe, intend, want). The burgeoning findings from this research suggests ToM plays an important role in the reading…

This study aims at determining what kind of images represent the practices of TEOG and LGS in the minds of students during the transition from secondary to high school. It attempts to reveal through comparisons conducted whether any metaphorical change occurred in the minds of students during the transition from TEOG to LGS. A data gathering…

Background: Here, I examine the status of 'learning disability' as a basic concept. This kind of questioning may be thought a task for philosophy, or at least for 'theory' or 'disability studies'. Materials and methods: I identify history instead as a discipline well placed to reveal the category errors that surround the concept. Results: These…