Previous correlational and quasi-experimental studies of arts integration--the pedagogical practice of "teaching through the arts"--suggest its value for enhancing cognitive, academic, and social skills. This study reports the results of a small, preliminary classroom-based experiment that tested effects of arts integration on long-term…

Teachers' anxiety about an academic domain, such as math, can impact students' learning in that domain. We asked whether this relation held in the domain of spatial skill, given the importance of spatial skill for success in math and science and its malleability at a young age. We measured 1st-and 2nd-grade teachers' spatial anxiety…

There is growing evidence that children with reading difficulties show impaired auditory rhythm perception and impairments in musical beat perception tasks. Rhythmic musical interventions with poorer readers may thus improve rhythmic entrainment and consequently improve reading and phonological skills. Here we compare the effects of a musical…

Instructors ("N"?=?204) of elementary mathematics methods courses completed a survey assessing the extent to which they value cognitive research and incorporate it into their courses. Instructors' responses indicated that they view cognitive research to be fairly important for mathematics education, particularly studies of domain-specific topics,…

Working memory and planning are fundamental cognitive skills supporting fluid reasoning. We show that 2 games that train working memory and planning skills in school-aged children promote transfer to 2 different tasks: an attentional test and a fluid reasoning test. We also show long-term improvement of planning and memory capacities in…

The visual word recognition system recruits neuronal systems originally developed for object perception which are characterized by orientation insensitivity to mirror reversals. It has been proposed that during reading acquisition beginning readers have to "unlearn" this natural tolerance to mirror reversals in order to efficiently discriminate…

Identifying early precursors of body mass index (BMI) and sports participation represents an important concern from a public health perspective and can inform the development of preventive interventions. This article examines whether kindergarten child self-regulation, as measured by classroom engagement and behavioral regulation, predicts healthy…

Fractions constitute a stumbling block in mathematics education. To improve children's understanding of fractions, we designed an intervention based on learning-by-doing activities, which focused on the representation of the magnitude of fractions. Participants were 292 Grade 4 and 5 children. Half of the classes received experimental instruction,…

Numerical processing has been extensively studied by examining the performance on basic number processing tasks, such as number priming, number comparison, and number line estimation. These tasks assess the innate "number sense," which is assumed to be the breeding ground for later mathematics development. Indeed, several studies have associated…

Against the background of neuroimaging studies on how the brain processes numbers, there is now converging evidence that numerical magnitude representations are crucial for successful mathematics achievement. One major drawback of this research is that it mainly investigated mathematics performance as measured through general standardized…

This article describes an experiment utilizing a research and development strategy to design and implement an innovative school for the future. The development of Cramim Elementary School was a joint effort of researchers from Tel-Aviv University and the staff of the school. The design stage involved constructing a new theoretical framework that…

Previous research suggests that academic motivation orientation relates to students' causal interpretations about academic outcomes and their emotional reactions to those outcomes. The current study examines how student motivation may relate to certain neurophysiological systems that are thought to underlie the processing of successes and…

Using Central Conceptual Structure theory as an heuristic, learning sequences in the acquisition of number knowledge are described in three forms that bridge theory and practice: as a four-stage theoretical progression, as items on a developmental test created to test the theoretical progression, and as learning objectives in a curriculum designed…

The relation between short-term and long-term change (also known as learning and development) has been of great interest throughout the history of developmental psychology. Werner and Vygotsky believed that the two involved basically similar progressions of qualitatively distinct knowledge states; behaviorists such as Kendler and Kendler believed…

Contextual support for performance and understanding plays an important role in learning and teaching. This study investigated the temporal course of the effects of support--how it affects complexity and correctness of judgments about density in kindergarten (n = 35) and second-grade (n = 29) children. In the experimental group, a teacher provided…