Cognitive Development and Beyond

Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Brunswick NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The overarching goals of the proposed project are to characterize the nature of early cognition as well as to continue the development of curricular and assessment tools. It will yield knowledge about how to design learning environments to nurture young learners in science and how to diffuse innovative science programs in early childhood settings. It will also provide the field with diagnostic research-based assessments that will enable us to understand starting points of different groups of learners, to track individual children's progress, and to assess the cumulative impact of high-quality science programs over time. The proposed work builds on the PIs' programs for children in the target age range of 3 to 7 years. Gelman's Preschool Pathways to Science (PrePS), aimed at preschoolers, is to be partnered with Massey and Roth's Science for Developing Minds (SDM), aimed at kindergartners and first graders. Both programs are influenced by findings that science knowledge involves coherent and organized content, specialized vocabulary that is tied to the content, and tools of doing and communicating. The PIs will address the issue of diffusion by studying and documenting the introduction of PrePS with new teachers in three new demographically diverse sites. They will also develop sets of tasks, based on published well-tested developmental paradigms, to benchmark competence for ages 3-7 across a wide socioeconomic range of children in domains that are foundational for science and math learning. These include quantity and measurement; animacy, causality, and material kinds; and scientific reasoning. The PIs will conduct experimental studies investigating the learning impacts of re-representational