David R. Cross

Ordinary Learning: Pragmatic Connections Among Children’s Beliefs, Motives, and Actions

Children’s learning is the core of their everyday experiences. The principal tasks of childhood include learning physical skills for play and work, social conventions for interaction, and cognitive understanding of the environment. These tasks require a tremendous amount of children’s time and energy and are concerns of parents, teachers, and scientists alike. Our common goals are to understand and to facilitate children’s learning because it is so vital to their education and development. In this chapter we sketch a conceptual framework of children’s learning and describe motivational factors that shape children’s acquisition and refinement of various skills. We begin with several intuitive tenets about children’s learning that help to define the scope of our inquiry and to chart the paths of our proposal. We are concerned with children’s learning that is ordinary, socialized, functional, and adventurous.

Longitudinal analysis of the presence, efficacy and stability of maternal scaffolding during informal problem-solving interactions

The use of contingent instruction by parents and a related positive outcome for subsequent child behaviours have been documented in past research. In the current study the scaffolding paradigm was used to investigate patterns of maternal instructional behaviours and related child behaviours during informal problem-solving interactions and during independent problem-solving tasks. Forty-five mother-child dyads were observed at four time points across a 3-year period (children aged 16, 26, 44 and 54 months). In general, mothers showed systematic decreases in the amount of support offered and systematic increases in their use of contingent instruction, whereas children became more successful in their behaviours during the parent-child interactions. Surprisingly, there was little or no stability across time for each mother-child dyad. Mothers and children became more successful at working together during the problem-solving tasks, but each parent and each child was not consistent from one period to the next. In addition, when predicting childrens success during independent tasks at the earlier ages there was an indirect link between parent behaviours and child success, whereas at 54 months there was a direct effect for both parent behaviours and childrens previous abilities.

Another look at amphetamine-induced stereotyped locomotor activity in rats using a new statistic to measure locomotor stereotypy

AbstractRat open field behavior is often used as a tool to study the behavioral effects of drugs. In this report, drug-induced patterns of locomotion in an open field were studied with the aid of a simple new statistic. Briefly, the animals path through the open field is converted into a series of trips. Gamma (

Theory of mind and conceptual change

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A metacognitive curriculum to promote children's reading and learning

) estimates the probability that the animal will repeat the trip that it has just exhibited; thus

Assessment of Reading Comprehension: matching Test Purposes and Test Properties

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