Linking parents' play strategies with their preschoolers' STEM skills: The mediating roles of child STEM talk and self-regulated learning.

Previous studies document associations between parents' use of guided-play strategies and children's STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) skills. We extend existing research by exploring mediating mechanisms that may account for these links. Parents played with their preschool children (N = 75; 49% girls and 51% boys; 94% White, 3% Black, 1% biracial, 1% Asian, and 1% Native American; M = 4.

Perceptions of Skills Needed for STEM Jobs: Links to Academic Self-Concepts, Job Interests, Job Gender Stereotypes, and Spatial Ability in Young Adults.

Gender gaps in spatial skills-a domain relevant to STEM jobs-have been hypothesized to contribute to women's underrepresentation in STEM fields. To study emerging adults' beliefs about skill sets and jobs, we asked college students ( = 300) about the relevance of spatial, mathematical, science and verbal skills for each of 82 jobs. Analyses of responses revealed four job clusters-quantitative, basic & applied science, spatial, and verbal.

Instructors' Gestural Accuracy Affects Geology Learning in Interaction with Students' Spatial Skills.

Complex and often unobservable STEM constructs and processes are represented using a variety of representations, including iconic gestures in which the body is configured or moved to resemble a referent's spatial properties or actions. Earlier researchers have suggested links between gesturing and expertise, leading some to recommend instructional gestures. Earlier research, however, has been largely correlational; furthermore, some gestures may be made with misleading positions or movements.

Can a Domain-General Spatial Intervention Facilitate Children's Science Learning? A Lesson From Astronomy.

Correlational studies link spatial-test scores and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics achievement. Here we asked whether children's understanding of astronomical phenomena would benefit from a prior intervention targeting a core component of children's projective spatial concepts-understanding that viewers' visual experiences are affected by vantage point. Children (8-9 years; N = 66) received outdoor and indoor experiences that did (Experimental) or did not (Control) focus on how scene appearance is affected by viewers' positions and movements.

Mothers' distancing language relates to young children's math and literacy skills.

Parents' distancing language-language that requires cognitive abstraction and moves beyond the "here and now"-relates to children's literacy skills, but its association with mathematics remains unexamined. Participants were 242 mother-child dyads from African American, Chinese American, Dominican American, and Mexican American backgrounds. Mothers' distancing language was examined while mothers shared a wordless book with their 5-year-olds; children's math and literacy skills were assessed when children were 5.

Addressing Sexism With Children: Young Adults' Beliefs About Bias Socialization.

College students' beliefs concerning socializing children about sexism and other culturally important topics were investigated using mixed methods. In Study 1, participants (N = 71) defined sexism and explained their beliefs about addressing sexism with children. Thirty-five percent argued against childhood sexism-socialization.

Gendered Packaging of a STEM Toy Influences Children's Play, Mechanical Learning, and Mothers' Play Guidance.

To study effects of the gender-packaging of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) toys, mother-child dyads (31 daughters; 30 sons; M = 5.2 years) were randomly assigned to play with a mechanical toy packaged for girls (GoldieBlox) or boys (BobbyBlox). When familiarizing themselves with the toy to prepare for play, mothers given BobbyBlox built more with toy pieces than did mothers given GoldieBlox.

Encouraging Maternal Guidance of Preschoolers' Spatial Thinking During Block Play.

Spatial thinking, an important component of cognition, supports academic achievement and daily activities (e.g., learning science and math; using maps).

We've Come a Long Way, Baby (But We're Not There Yet): Gender Past, Present, and Future.

Gender has long been, and continues to be, a powerful predictor of developmental experiences and outcomes. Observations drawn from personal history, developmental science, and life beyond the academy show that historically, gender constraints have diminished in some ways, but remain robust in others. Reviewed are children's constructive processes that--in interaction with the embedding ecology--foster the emergence and persistence of gendered phenomena.

Affecting Girls' Activity and Job Interests Through Play: The Moderating Roles of Personal Gender Salience and Game Characteristics.

Gender schema theory (GST) posits that children approach opportunities perceived as gender appropriate, avoiding those deemed gender inappropriate, in turn affecting gender-differentiated career trajectories. To test the hypothesis that children's gender salience filters (GSF-tendency to attend to gender) moderate these processes, 62 preschool girls (M = 4.5 years) were given GSF measures.

Analysis and evaluation of the rationales for single-sex schooling.

Amendments passed as part of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2006 made some forms of single-sex (SS) public education legal in the United States. Proponents offer a host of arguments in favor of such schooling. This chapter identifies and evaluates five broad rationales for SS schooling.

Developmental interventions to address the STEM gender gap: exploring intended and unintended consequences.

Women and girls in the United States continue to be underrepresented in STEM, particularly in engineering and technology fields. This gap has been attracting recent attention from those motivated to ensure that girls and women have access to a full range of personally satisfying careers as well as from those concerned with developing a rich talent pool to meet national workforce needs. This chapter is focused on interventions that have been designed to address this STEM gender gap.

Environmental-scale map use in middle childhood: links to spatial skills, strategies, and gender.

Researchers have shown that young children solve mapping tasks in small spaces, but have rarely tested children's performance in large, unfamiliar environments. In the current research, children (9-10 years; N = 40) explored an unfamiliar campus and marked flags' locations on a map. As hypothesized, better performance was predicted by higher spatial-test scores, greater spontaneous use of map-space coordinating strategies, and participant sex (favoring boys).

Graphic symbols as "the mind on paper": links between children's interpretive theory of mind and symbol understanding.

Children gradually develop interpretive theory of mind (iToM)-the understanding that different people may interpret identical events or stimuli differently. The present study tested whether more advanced iToM underlies children's recognition that map symbols' meanings must be communicated to others when symbols are iconic (resemble their referents). Children (6-9 years; N = 80) made maps using either iconic or abstract symbols.

Differing levels of gender salience in preschool classrooms: effects on children's gender attitudes and intergroup bias.

Developmental intergroup theory posits that when environments make social-group membership salient, children will be particularly likely to apply categorization processes to social groups, thereby increasing stereotypes and prejudices. To test the predicted impact of environmental gender salience, 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 57) completed gender attitude, intergroup bias, and personal preference measures at the beginning and end of a 2-week period during which teachers either did or did not make gender salient. Observations of peer play were also made at both times.

Gender, values, and occupational interests among children, adolescents, and adults.

Work fulfills personal values, perhaps differently for males and females. Explored here was the role values play in shaping occupational interests. Study 1 examined children's, adolescents', and adults' (N = 313) occupational values (regarding money, power, family, altruism), occupational interests, and perceptions of values afforded by traditionally masculine and feminine occupations.

A sex difference in mental rotation in young infants.

Three- to 4-month-old female and male human infants were administered a two-dimensional mental-rotation task similar to those given to older children and adults. Infants were familiarized with the number 1 (or its mirror image) in seven different rotations between 0 degrees and 360 degrees, and then preference-tested with a novel rotation of the familiar stimulus paired with its mirror image. Male infants displayed a novelty preference for the mirror-image stimulus over the novel rotation of the familiar stimulus, whereas females divided attention between the two test stimuli.

Continuities and discontinuities in children and scholarship.

This article introduces a collection of essays on continuity and discontinuity in cognitive development. In his lead essay, J. Kagan (2008) argues that limitations in past research (e.

The role of intentionality and iconicity in children's developing comprehension and production of cartographic symbols.

The contribution of intentionality understanding to symbolic development was examined. Actors added colored dots to a map, displaying either symbolic or aesthetic intentions. In Study 1, most children (5-6 years) understood actors' intentions, but when asked which graphic would help find hidden objects, most selected the incorrect (aesthetic) one whose dot color matched referent color.

Children's aesthetic understanding of photographic art and the quality of art-related parent-child interactions.

This research was designed to examine the quality of children's aesthetic understanding of photographs, observe social interactions between parents and children in this aesthetic domain, and study whether qualitatively different dyadic interactions were associated with children's own aesthetic understanding. Parents and children (7-13 years; 40 dyads) individually completed measures of aesthetic understanding and jointly selected photographs for a souvenir scrapbook. Parents' artistic experience varied widely and was associated with their own performance on aesthetic understanding measures.

A developmental intergroup theory of social stereotypes and prejudice.

Developmental intergroup theory specifies the mechanisms and rules that govern the processes by which children single out groups as targets of stereotyping and prejudice, and by which children learn and construct both the characteristics (i.e., stereotypes) and affective responses (i.