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1. Natural Variability in Parent-Child Puzzle Play at Home

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.733895  

   Pochinki, Nicole; Reis, Dakota; Casasola, Marianella; Oakes, Lisa M.; LoBue, Vanessa (September 2021, Frontiers in Psychology)

   null (Ed.)

   Here, we observed 3- to 4-year-old children ( N =31) and their parents playing with puzzles at home during a zoom session to provide insight into the variability of the kinds of puzzles children have in their home, and the variability in how children and their parents play with spatial toys. We observed a large amount of variability in both children and parents’ behaviors, and in the puzzles they selected. Further, we found relations between parents’ and children’s behaviors. For example, parents provided more scaffolding behaviors for younger children and parents’ persistence-focused language was related to more child attempts after failure. Altogether, the present work shows how using methods of observing children at a distance, we can gain insight into the environment in which they are developing. The results are discussed in terms of how variability in spatial toys and spatial play during naturalistic interactions can help us contextualize the conclusions we draw from lab-based studies. 

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2. “This is hard!” Children’s and parents’ talk about difficulty during dyadic interactions

   https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001555  

   Bennett-Pierre, Grace; Weinraub, Marsha; Newcombe, Nora S.; Gunderson, Elizabeth A. (July 2023, Developmental Psychology)

   Children’s beliefs about the contribution of effort and ability to success and failure shape their decisions to persist or give up on challenging tasks, with consequences for their academic success. But how do children learn about the concept of “challenge”? Prior work has shown that parents’ verbal responses to success and failure shape children’s motivational beliefs. In this study, we explore another type of talk - parent and child talk about difficulty - which could contribute to children’s motivational beliefs. We performed secondary analyses of two observational studies of parent-child interactions in the United States (Boston and Philadelphia) from age 3 to 4th grade (Study 1, 51% girls, 65.5% White, at least 43.2% below Federal poverty line) and at 1st grade (Study 2, 54% girls, 72% White, family income-to-needs ratio M(SD) = 4.41(2.95)) to identify talk about difficulty, characterize the content of those statements, and assess whether task context, child and parent gender, child age, and other parent motivational talk were associated with quantity of child and parent difficulty talk. We found that many families did discuss difficulty, with variation among families. Parents and children tended to use general statements to talk about difficulty (e.g., “That was hard!”), and task context affected child and parent difficulty talk. In the NICHD-SECCYD dataset, mothers’ highlighting how task features contributed to task difficulty was positively correlated with their process praise, suggesting that this talk could be motivationally relevant. 

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3. Teaching children to be problem posers and puzzle-creators in mathematics

   Goldenberg, E.Paul (August 2018, Proceedings of Constructionism 2018)

   Seymour Papert’s 1972 paper “Teaching Children to be Mathematicians Versus Teaching About Mathematics” started with the summary statement “The important difference between the work of a child in an elementary mathematics class and that of a mathematician is not in the subject matter…but in the fact that the mathematician is creatively engaged….” Along with “creative,” a key term Papert kept using is project rather than the common notion of problem. A project is not simply a very large problem. It centrally includes a focus on sustained and active engagement. The projects in his illustrations were essentially research projects, not just multi-step, fullyprescribed, build-a-thing tasks, no matter how nice the end product might be. A mathematical playground with enough attractive destinations in it draws children naturally to pose their own tasks and projects—as they universally do in their other personal and group playgrounds—and to learn to act and think like mathematicians. They even acquire conventionally taught content through that play. Physical construction was always available, and appealed to such thinkers as Dewey, but for Papert computer programming, newly available to school, suggested a more flexible medium and a model for an ideal playground. A fact about playgrounds is that children choose challenge. In working and playing with children I’ve seen that puzzles tap some of the same personally chosen challenge that a programming centric playground offers. Children are naturally drawn to intellectual challenges of riddles (ones they learn and ones they invent) and puzzles; and adults are so lured by puzzles that even supermarkets sell books of them. So what’s the difference between real puzzles and school problems? What’s useful about creating a puzzle or posing a problem? How might puzzles and problem posing support mathematical learning? And what’s constructionist about this? This plenary will try to respond to these questions, invite some of your own responses, let you solve and create some puzzles, and explore how problem posing in programming and puzzling can support mathematics even in an age of rigid content constraints. 

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4. Dissociable influences of reward and punishment on adaptive cognitive control

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009737  

   Leng, Xiamin; Yee, Debbie; Ritz, Harrison; Shenhav, Amitai (December 2021, PLOS Computational Biology)

   Ahn, Woo-Young (Ed.)

   To invest effort into any cognitive task, people must be sufficiently motivated. Whereas prior research has focused primarily on how the cognitive control required to complete these tasks is motivated by the potential rewards for success, it is also known that control investment can be equally motivated by the potential negative consequence for failure. Previous theoretical and experimental work has yet to examine how positive and negative incentives differentially influence the manner and intensity with which people allocate control. Here, we develop and test a normative model of control allocation under conditions of varying positive and negative performance incentives. Our model predicts, and our empirical findings confirm, that rewards for success and punishment for failure should differentially influence adjustments to the evidence accumulation rate versus response threshold, respectively. This dissociation further enabled us to infer how motivated a given person was by the consequences of success versus failure. 

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5. Measuring Emerging Number Knowledge in Toddlers

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.703598  

   Silver, Alex M.; Elliott, Leanne; Braham, Emily J.; Bachman, Heather J.; Votruba-Drzal, Elizabeth; Tamis-LeMonda, Catherine S.; Cabrera, Natasha; Libertus, Melissa E. (July 2021, Frontiers in Psychology)

   null (Ed.)

   Recent evidence suggests that infants and toddlers may recognize counting as numerically relevant long before they are able to count or understand the cardinal meaning of number words. The Give-N task, which asks children to produce sets of objects in different quantities, is commonly used to test children’s cardinal number knowledge and understanding of exact number words but does not capture children’s preliminary understanding of number words and is difficult to administer remotely. Here, we asked whether toddlers correctly map number words to the referred quantities in a two-alternative forced choice Point-to-X task (e.g., “Which has three?”). Two- to three-year-old toddlers ( N = 100) completed a Give-N task and a Point-to-X task through in-person testing or online via videoconferencing software. Across number-word trials in Point-to-X, toddlers pointed to the correct image more often than predicted by chance, indicating that they had some understanding of the prompted number word that allowed them to rule out incorrect responses, despite limited understanding of exact cardinal values. No differences in Point-to-X performance were seen for children tested in-person versus remotely. Children with better understanding of exact number words as indicated on the Give-N task also answered more trials correctly in Point-to-X. Critically, in-depth analyses of Point-to-X performance for children who were identified as 1- or 2-knowers on Give-N showed that 1-knowers do not show a preliminary understanding of numbers above their knower-level, whereas 2-knowers do. As researchers move to administering assessments remotely, the Point-to-X task promises to be an easy-to-administer alternative to Give-N for measuring children’s emerging number knowledge and capturing nuances in children’s number-word knowledge that Give-N may miss. 

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