Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning.

Measurement of the building blocks of everyday thought must capture the range of different ways that humans may train, develop, and use their cognitive resources in real world tasks. Executive function as a construct has been enthusiastically adopted by cognitive and education sciences due to its theorized role as an underpinning of, and constraint on, humans' accomplishment of complex cognitively demanding tasks in the world, such as identifying problems, reasoning about and executing multi-step solutions while inhibiting prepotent responses or competing desires. As EF measures have been continually refined for increased precision; however, they have also become increasingly dissociated from those everyday accomplishments.

Children's Early Spontaneous Comparisons Predict Later Analogical Reasoning Skills: An Investigation of Parental Influence.

Laboratory studies have demonstrated beneficial effects of making comparisons on children's analogical reasoning skills. We extend this finding to an observational dataset comprising 42 children. The prevalence of specific comparisons, which identify a feature of similarity or difference, in children's spontaneous speech from 14-58 months is associated with higher scores in tests of verbal and non-verbal analogy in 6th grade.

Teaching and Learning Science through Multiple Representations: Intuitions and Executive Functions.

Reasoning about visual representations in science requires the ability to control one's attention, inhibit attention to irrelevant or incorrect information, and hold information in mind while manipulating it actively-all aspects of the limited-capacity cognitive system described as humans' executive functions. This article describes pedagogical intuitions on best practices for how to sequence visual representations among pre-service teachers, adult undergraduates, and middle school children, with learning also tested in the middle school sample. Interestingly, at all ages, most people reported beliefs about teaching others that were different from beliefs about how they would learn.

Bias and sensitivity to task constraints in spontaneous relational attention.

Two experiments examined factors that predicted children's tendencies to match objects versus relations across scenes when no instruction was given. Specifically, we assessed the presence of higher relational responding in children by (a) age, (b) greater presumed experience in generating relations through socialization in China versus the United States, and (c) in children with greater manipulated experience via a relational priming task. Experiment 1 showed that Chinese and U.

Executive Function in Learning Mathematics by Comparison: Incorporating Everyday Classrooms into the Science of Learning.

Individual differences in Executive Function (EF) are well established to be related to overall mathematics achievement, yet the mechanisms by which this occurs are not well understood. Comparing representations (problems, solutions, concepts) is central to mathematical thinking, and relational reasoning is known to rely upon EF resources. The current manuscript explored whether individual differences in EF predicted learning from a conceptually demanding mathematics lesson that required relational reasoning.

Analogy, higher order thinking, and education.

Analogical reasoning, the ability to understand phenomena as systems of structured relationships that can be aligned, compared, and mapped together, plays a fundamental role in the technology rich, increasingly globalized educational climate of the 21st century. Flexible, conceptual thinking is prioritized in this view of education, and schools are emphasizing 'higher order thinking', rather than memorization of a cannon of key topics. The lack of a cognitively grounded definition for higher order thinking, however, has led to a field of research and practice with little coherence across domains or connection to the large body of cognitive science research on thinking.

Young children's analogical reasoning across cultures: similarities and differences.

A cross-cultural comparison between U.S. and Hong Kong preschoolers examined factors responsible for young children's analogical reasoning errors.