Fostering early literacy depends in part on engaging and inspiring children’s early interest in reading. Enriching the causal content of children’s books may be one way to do so, as causal information has been empirically shown to capture children’s attention. To more directly test whether children’s book preferences might be driven by causal content, we created pairs of expository books closely matched for content and complexity, but with differing amounts of causal information embedded therein. Three and 4 years old participants (n = 48) were read both books and their interests and preferences were evaluated. When asked to choose, children preferred the highly causal over the minimally causal books. Results are discussed in terms of broader implications for creating books that optimally engage young children, as well as guiding book selections parents and educators make in their endeavors to promote interest in reading and early literacy. © Copyright © 2020 Shavlik, Bauer and Booth.

The three studies presented here examine children's ability to make diagnostic inferences about an interactive causal structure across different domains. Previous work has shown that children's abilities to make diagnostic inferences about a physical system develops between the ages of 5 and 8. Experiments 1 (N= 242) and 2 (N= 112) replicate this work with 4- to 10-year-olds and demonstrate that this developmental trajectory is preserved when children reason about a closely matched biological system. Unlike Experiments 1 and 2, Experiment 3 (N= 110) demonstrates that children struggle to make similar inferences when presented with a parallel task about category membership in biology. These results suggest that children might have the basic capacity for diagnostic inference at relatively early ages, but that the content of the inference task might interfere with their ability to demonstrate such capacities.

The goal was to identify the domain-general cognitive abilities and academic attitudes that are common and unique to reading and mathematics learning difficulties that in turn will have implications for intervention development. Across seventh and eighth grade, 315 (155 boys) adolescents (M age = 12.75 years) were administered intelligence, verbal short-term and working memory, and visuospatial memory, attention, and ability measures, along with measures of English and mathematics attitudes and mathematics anxiety. Teachers reported on students' in-class attentive behavior. A combination of Bayesian and multi-level models revealed that intelligence and in-class attentive behavior were common predictors of reading accuracy, reading fluency, and mathematics achievement. Verbal short-term memory was more critical for reading accuracy and fluency, whereas spatial ability and mathematics self-efficacy were more critical for mathematics achievement. The combination of intelligence and in-class attentive behavior discriminated typically achieving students from students with comorbid (D = 2.44) or mathematics (D = 1.59) learning difficulties, whereas intelligence, visuospatial attention, and verbal short-term memory discriminated typically achieving students from students with reading disability (D = 1.08). The combination of in-class attentive behavior, verbal short-term memory, and mathematics self-efficacy discriminated students with mathematics difficulties from their peers with reading difficulties (D = 1.16). Given the consistent importance of in-class attentive behavior, we conducted post hoc follow-up analyses. The results suggested that students with poor in-class attentive behavior were disengaging from academic learning which in turn contributed to their risk of learning difficulties.

Children's math self-concepts-their beliefs about themselves and math-are important for teachers, parents, and students, because they are linked to academic motivation, choices, and outcomes. There have been several attempts at improving math achievement based on the training of math skills. Here we took a complementary approach and conducted an intervention study to boost children's math self-concepts. Our primary objective was to assess the feasibility of whether a novel multicomponent intervention-one that combines explicit and implicit approaches to help children form more positive beliefs linking themselves and math-can be administered in an authentic school setting. The intervention was conducted in Spain, a country in which math achievement is below the average of other OECD countries. We tested third grade students (N = 180; M-age = 8.79 years; 96 girls), using treatment and comparison groups and pre- and posttest assessments. A novelty of this study is that we used both implicit and explicit measures of children's math self-concepts. For a subsample of students, we also obtained an assessment of year-end math achievement. Math self-concepts in the treatment and comparison groups did not significantly differ at pretest. Students in the treatment group demonstrated a significant increase in math self-concepts from pretest to posttest; students in the comparison group did not. In the treatment group, implicit math self-concepts at posttest were associated with higher year-end math achievement, assessed approximately 3 months after the completion of the intervention. Taken together, the results suggest that math self-concepts are malleable and that social-cognitive interventions can boost children's beliefs about themselves and math. Based on the favorable results of this feasibility study, it is appropriate to formally test this novel multicomponent approach for improving math self-concepts using randomized controlled trial (RCT) design.

This study investigates the nexus between municipal water consumption and economic growth for El Paso, TX, USA. Located in the semi-arid southwestern United States, El Paso water consumption has been the subject of prior economic studies. However, the relationship between water consumption and economic growth has not been previously analyzed for El Paso or any other metropolitan economies in the region. Empirical results indicate that municipal water usage and real personal income are integrated of order one, but are not co-integrated. Given that, a vector autoregression model is estimated and a Granger causality test is performed. Estimation results show unidirectional causation from real income growth to water consumption, indicating that water conservation policies will not inhibit economic growth in this urban economy.

Creative idea generation involves search and retrieval of memory. There is a default tendency to rely too heavily on familiar or easily accessible information during idea generation, especially in tasks such as the alternate uses task (AUT) that involve generating novel uses for common objects. Knowing which obvious ideas to avoid may be important in creating more original ideas. The present experiments tested whether instructions encouraging participants to avoid a set of common example ideas would enhance originality or cause fixation on the AUT. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that presenting a verbal list of common example uses along with a warning to avoid those uses enhanced originality. In contrast, when the example ideas were presented in the absence of any “avoid” instructions, there was no benefit on originality, indicating that mere example exposure did not stimulate more creative idea generation. The design of Experiment 2 was parallel to that of Experiment 1, but the verbal examples were replaced with visually depicted examples. Exposure to the visual examples led to reduced originality, suggesting fixation. Although the “avoid” instruction helped to mitigate this fixation, it did not enhance originality beyond the no-example condition. The results suggest that under some conditions presenting unoriginal examples along with an “avoid” warning can allow people to shift their focus away from easily retrieved ideas and toward more novel approaches. The results are also consistent with prior work showing a negative impact of visual presentation of examples on creativity. © 2020, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.

Partition dependence, the tendency to distribute choices differently based on the way options are grouped, has important implications for decision making. This phenomenon, observed in adults across a variety of contexts such as allocating resources or making selections from a menu of items, can bias decision makers toward some choices and away from others. Only one study to date (Reichelson, Zax, Patalano, & Barth, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72, 1029-1036, 2019) has investigated the developmental trajectory of this phenomenon. In the current study we investigate children's and adults' susceptibility to partitioning effects in a child-friendly resource allocation task. In Experiment 1 (N = 80), adults distributed 12 food tokens to animals at the zoo. Based on previous findings that older children show weaker partition dependence in this task, we predicted that adults might exhibit reduced partition dependent behavior: they showed none. In Experiment 2 (N = 272), we used a less transparent task with only five food tokens, predicting that both adults and children (ages 3-10 years) would show partition dependence. Children, but not adults, made partition dependent resource allocations, with younger children exhibiting greater effects than older children. These experiments provide further evidence that children's decisions, like adults' (in other tasks), are influenced by the arbitrary partitioning of the available options. This work supports previous findings that younger children may be more susceptible to these effects, and maps developmental change in partition dependent behavior from early childhood to adulthood on this child-friendly partition dependence task.

Learning disabilities (LDs) encompass disorders of those who have difficulty learning and using academic skills, exhibiting performance below expectations for their chronological age in the areas of reading, writing, and/or mathematics. Each of the disorders making up the LDs involve different deficits; however, some commonalities can be found within that heterogeneity, such in terms of learning self-regulation and metacognition. Unlike in early ages and later educational levels, there are hardly any evidence-based evaluation protocols for adults with LDs. LDs influence academic performance but also have serious consequences in professional, social, and family contexts. In response to this, the current work proposes a multimodal evaluation protocol focused on metacognitive, self-regulation of learning, and emotional processes, which make up the basis of the difficulties in adults with LDs. The assessment is carried out through analysis of the on-line learning process using a variety methods, techniques, and sensors (e.g., eye tracking, facial expressions of emotion, physiological responses, concurrent verbalizations, log files, screen recordings of human-machine interactions) and off-line methods (e.g., questionnaires, interviews, and self-report measures). This theoretically-driven and empirically-based guideline aims to provide an accurate assessment of LDs in adulthood in order to design effective prevention and intervention proposals.

This chapter explores what is required of us, as researchers and educators, to disentangle received disciplinary knowledge and ways of knowing from what Morrison names as 'the apparatus of control', and to enable expansive and insurgent ways of learning, being, and acting in, with, and across disciplines. It posits that engaging in liberatory forms of disciplinary learning within a framework of decolonization and onto-epistemic heterogeneity is necessary for equitable, dignified, and just forms of education that support learners in who they imagine themselves to be and might become. Following Morrison, and anchoring ourselves in the history of ideas around culture and learning, the chapter argues the need for a view of disciplinary learning animated by the following political and ethical commitments: the critique and refusal of settled forms of disciplinary knowledge and practice; epistemic delinking from colonial matrices of power; and the collective imagining, articulation, and enactment of alternative possibilities for human learning and relations. The chapter conceptualizes these as the always evolving desires and practices that give form to just learning environments. As the field continues to theorize and work to enact onto-epistemic heterogeneity, it posits three sensibilities crucial to liberatory forms of disciplinary learning: multiplicity, horizontality, and dialogicality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

This chapter focuses on the challenges of measuring self-regulatory processes and learning outcomes while learning from multiple representations with advanced learning technologies (ALTs). More specifically, we present challenges associated with measuring learners' processes and outcomes while using multiple representations with ALTs. ALTs are technology-based learning and training systems designed to teach learners of all ages to learn, reason, problem solve, and understand different topics and domains such as physics, math, history, biology, medicine and can include different systems such as multimedia, hypermedia, serious games, simulations, intelligent tutoring systems, immersive virtual environments and so forth. The structure of our chapter is as follows: (1) a brief overview of the major issues related to using multiple representations for learning with ALTs; (2) a description of the analytical techniques for understanding multiple representations and their goals for successful learning with ALTs; (3) a discussion of the issues associated with using multiple representations to measure and assess learning outcomes and how we can use ALTs as research tools to capture self-regulated learning; and (4) a presentation of challenges and future directions that need to be addressed by researchers.