Reforms within science education strive to shift early science instruction (K-2) so students have ample sense-making opportunities to construct scientific explanations. Classroom discussions play a key role in supporting these endeavors. This requires that classroom discussions are shaped in ways that foster scientific instruction and learning. In…

To successfully navigate their social worlds, children must adapt their behaviors to diverse situations and do so in a fluid fashion. The current study explored preschool-aged children's sensitivity to a gameplay context (cooperative/competitive) and messages from another (fictional) player (team-oriented/self-oriented) while distributing gameplay…

In this study, we explore how cross-linguistic differences can contribute to children's scientific thinking. We compared first and third grade Chinese students' pre-instructional ideas of the earth expressed in clinical interviews with that of their English-speaking and Greek-speaking counterparts (as recorded in the literature). Inspired by a…

There are two lines of discussion regarding the function of the Approximate Number System (ANS). The first line focuses on the extent to which visual cues affect the estimation of numerosity. The second line investigates the extent to which ANS precision is associated with symbolic math performance. The current study combined these two lines of…

Parent-child reminiscing talk about positive and negative events provides children with unique opportunities to develop emotion competence. Very little work has involved families from low-income households and ethnically diverse backgrounds. We examined: 1) event valence (positive vs. negative) and ethnic differences in mother-child reminiscing…

This study used a person-centered approach to examine mother-daughter dyad behaviors when jointly solving addition problems during a card game. The goal was to identify maternal and child profile behaviors during the interaction as predictors of children's autonomous addition accuracy and strategy use at the end of first grade. Videotaped…

Math anxiety negatively predicts young children's math achievement. While some researchers have suggested that math anxiety may stem from poor math ability, others have argued that math anxiety occurs at all levels of math ability. An important question is whether math anxiety predicts math achievement over and above foundational math skills. We…

Question asking plays a fundamental role in learning, and the cognitive development literature contains many studies of specific types of question-asking skills. However, little is known about the developmental course across different aspects of question asking, of which we explore: (a) the ability to ask questions that enable children to solve a…

This study describes the implementation and effects of a 32-week teacher-led spatial reasoning intervention in K-2 classrooms. The intervention targeted spatial visualization skills as an integrated feature of regular mathematics instruction. Compared to an active control group, children in the spatial intervention demonstrated gains in spatial…

This study investigated different math-talk facilitations, and conceptualized the teachers' talk moves for productive student mathematics discussions. Our findings suggest that students' strategy development is supported by talk moves coordinating a wide range of student strategies, representations and discussions that are at a process-level and…

As children transition from the early to later grades of elementary school, they become increasingly skilled at employing a variety of techniques -- such as rehearsal and organizational strategies -- for remembering information. Developmental changes in strategy use have been well documented, but little is known about the extent to which these…

Learning to read is a critical but often challenging academic task for young children. In the current study, we explore the relation between children's reading affect--particularly anxiety--and reading achievement in the early years of reading acquisition. We hypothesized that reading anxiety would relate to reading achievement across the school…

Many details in reading curricula (e.g., the order of materials) have analogs in laboratory studies of learning (e.g., blocking/interleaving). Principles of learning from cognitive science could be used to structure these materials to optimize learning, but they are not commonly applied. Recent work bridges this gap by "field testing"…

As the United States experiences greater income inequality, more and more students experience an early science achievement gap. This study tested several competing theoretical models of early science achievement with a longitudinal sample of 14,624 children who were followed from kindergarten entry to the end of 1st grade. To understand why and…

This study investigated longitudinal pathways leading from early spatial skills in first-grade girls to their fifth-grade analytical math reasoning abilities (N = 138). First-grade assessments included spatial skills, verbal skills, addition/subtraction skills, and frequency of choice of a decomposition or retrieval strategy on the…