Since the mid-20th century, there have been dramatic changes in our conception of how bilingualism affects children’s cognitive development, moving from one of certain negativity, to unlimited advantage, and finally resting in a current state defined largely by confusion because of the complexity in how bilingualism is defined. However, the question has great consequences, so it is important to evaluate the evidence to understand the impact. Such information determines how families make decisions about their home language, particularly regarding the maintenance of heritage languages; how schools offer programs based on alternative languages; how clinicians assess children for learning or other special needs; and how communities offer services to diverse members. By defining the concepts more precisely than has typically been the case, the complexity of the relation between bilingualism and cognition becomes clear. The evidence shows that bilingualism impacts cognitive level and brain function across the lifespan, but the nature and extent of those effects are modified by the type and degree of bilingualism and the nature of the task. Understanding the conditions under which various effects emerge is essential for interpreting the effects of bilingualism on children’s cognitive development and their potential role in education.
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Bilingual Effects on Cognition in Children
Ellen Bialystok
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Cognitive Regulation
Dale H. Schunk and Maria K. DiBenedetto
Cognitive regulation refers to the self-directed regulation of cognitions (thoughts, beliefs, affects) toward the attainment of goals. Cognitive regulation can occur before individuals engage in tasks, while they are working on them, and during pauses or when tasks are completed where individuals reflect on their performances. Researchers have addressed which cognitive regulation processes are used during various phases of task engagement, how these processes differ among individuals due to ability and achievement levels and due to development, how cognitive regulation processes operate during task engagement, and which interventions can effectively help persons become better cognitive regulators.
The implications of the research findings are that teachers and others can help learners improve their cognitive regulation skills. Some important processes are goal setting, strategy use and adaptation, monitoring of cognition and performance, motivation (e.g., self-efficacy), and self-evaluation. Effective interventions expose students to models displaying these skills and provide for practice with feedback. There are six limitations of the present research that should be addressed. This can be accomplished by conducting more intervention studies, examining fine-grained changes in cognitive regulation, conducting research in non-traditional contexts, integrating the educational and developmental literatures, exploring cognitive regulation across cultures, and investigating cognitive regulation during learning with technology.
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Conceptual Change
Lucia Mason
Individuals of all ages have misconceptions about phenomena of the natural and physical world. They may think, for example, that summer is hotter because the Earth is closer to the Sun, and it is colder in winter because the Earth is farther away from the Sun. This explanation is not compatible with the scientific explanation of the phenomenon. Scientific learning often implies the revision of naïve conceptions, or conceptual change, which is not a quick and easy process. Researchers have addressed the question of the nature of conceptual change in terms of what the acquisition of new science knowledge entails when students hold misconceptions and need to revise their mental representations. Various approaches have been proposed to account for the mechanisms that underlie conceptual change and to draw implications for teaching and learning processes.
For some decades conceptual change was only examined from a purely cognitive perspective (“cold” conceptual change), while more recently motivational and emotional aspects (“warm” conceptual change) have received attention. Research findings indicate that individual differences in misconceived prior knowledge, along with differences in achievement goals, self-efficacy, interest, and epistemic beliefs, as well as differences in the emotions experienced in learning contexts, are all associated with conceptual change. More recently, research has challenged the idea that misconceptions disappear permanently after conceptual change has taken place. Previously acquired, incorrect information still competes with the newly acquired correct information. The executive function of inhibition seems to be involved when naïve and scientific conceptions co-exist in the learner’s memory and the latter is used to produce a correct answer. Further research is needed on the role of inhibitory control in relation to learning concepts and affective states during scientific learning.
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Metacognition and Epistemic Cognition
David Moshman
Cognition refers to knowledge and associated inferential processes, ranging from elementary forms of perception to advanced forms of reasoning. Metacognition, a term used since the late 1970s, includes both knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition. Knowledge of cognition includes both general knowledge of cognition and knowledge about one’s own cognition. Regulation of cognition includes planning, monitoring, and evaluation of one’s cognitive processes and products. Metacognition is crucial to and intertwined with many aspects of cognition even in the preschool years, when children are already developing theories of mind. Much of cognitive development is the development of metacognitive knowledge and self-regulation. Educational efforts abound to teach metacognitive skills, promote metacognitive development, and/or take student metacognition into account in designing instruction.
Epistemic cognition is knowledge about the fundamental nature of knowledge, especially the justification and truth of beliefs. Research on epistemic development beyond childhood shows progress from objectivist to subjectivist to rationalist conceptions of knowledge. Objectivists appeal to foundational truths that can be observed, proved, or learned from the authorities. In cases of disagreement, someone must be wrong. Subjectivists recognize that knowledge is constructed, and conclude from this that truth is entirely relative to the constructor’s subjective point of view. “Truth” in any stronger sense is deemed a myth, because we all have our own equally valid perspectives. Rationalists acknowledge the subjective construction of knowledge and the perplexities of truth but maintain that some beliefs are better justified than others and that we can make progress in understanding. Research in child development shows that children proceed through a similar sequence in constructing intuitive theories of mind, suggesting that epistemic development may be a recursive process in which people reconstruct subjectivist and rationalist insights at multiple levels. Epistemic development is generally seen as the result of self-regulated processes of reflection and coordination. Research in educational psychology has highlighted individual differences in epistemic beliefs and has shown the value of active inquiry and peer argumentation in promoting epistemic progress within and across diverse fields of study.
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Teacher Self-Efficacy
Rebecca Lazarides and Lisa Marie Warner
A teacher’s belief in his or her own capability to prompt student engagement and learning, even when students are difficult or unmotivated, has been labeled “teacher self-efficacy” in the context of social learning and social cognitive theory developed by Albert Bandura. Research shows that teachers with high levels of self-efficacy are more open to new teaching methods, set themselves more challenging goals, exhibit a greater level of planning and organization, direct their efforts at solving problems, seek assistance, and adjust their teaching strategies when faced with difficulties. These efforts pay off for self-efficacious teachers themselves, who have been found to be affected by burnout less often and are more satisfied in their jobs but also for their students, who show more motivation, academic adjustment, and achievement. While self-efficacy of the individual teacher explains how the individual teacher’s beliefs relate to students’ academic development, collective teacher efficacy helps to understand the differential effect of faculty and whole schools on student outcomes. Consequently, systematically exploring effective techniques to increase teacher self-efficacy is highly relevant to the teaching context.
Previous research has suggested four sources related to the development of self-efficacy: mastery experience, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and somatic and affective states. Although there is ample evidence that teacher self-efficacy and collective self-efficacy are important for teacher and student outcomes, and some intervention programs for teachers in trainings, career teachers, and upon school factors show promising results, there is still a lack of longitudinal and experimental research on the independent effect of each of the four sources on teacher self-efficacy.
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Theories of Educational Leadership
Gabriele Lakomski and Colin W. Evers
From its beginnings in the 1940s, leadership research has been conducted as a scientific activity, with the aim of discovering the essence of leadership that, once found, would provide social–organizational benefits. However, no essence has been discovered, and research continues undeterred. Leadership theories old and new rely on the conception of science, known as logical empiricism, to support their claims. The identification of logical empiricism with science, however, is a mistake as empiricism is no longer considered valid, a mistake perpetuated in contemporary education leadership theories that present their accounts as alternatives to science. A better account of science, “naturalistic coherentism,” is able to advance the theory and practice of education leadership by growing knowledge, not by denying it.
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Working Memory: Models and Applications
Stoo Sepp, Steven J. Howard, Sharon Tindall-Ford, Shirley Agostinho, and Fred Paas
In 1956, Miller first reported on a capacity limitation in the amount of information the human brain can process, which was thought to be seven plus or minus two items. The system of memory used to process information for immediate use was coined “working memory” by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram in 1960. In 1968, Atkinson and Shiffrin proposed their multistore model of memory, which theorized that the memory system was separated into short-term memory, long-term memory, and the sensory register, the latter of which temporarily holds and forwards information from sensory inputs to short term-memory for processing. Baddeley and Hitch built upon the concept of multiple stores, leading to the development of the multicomponent model of working memory in 1974, which described two stores devoted to the processing of visuospatial and auditory information, both coordinated by a central executive system. Later, Cowan’s theorizing focused on attentional factors in the effortful and effortless activation and maintenance of information in working memory. In 1988, Cowan published his model—the scope and control of attention model. In contrast, since the early 2000s Engle has investigated working memory capacity through the lens of his individual differences model, which does not seek to quantify capacity in the same way as Miller or Cowan. Instead, this model describes working memory capacity as the interplay between primary memory (working memory), the control of attention, and secondary memory (long-term memory). This affords the opportunity to focus on individual differences in working memory capacity and extend theorizing beyond storage to the manipulation of complex information. These models and advancements have made significant contributions to understandings of learning and cognition, informing educational research and practice in particular. Emerging areas of inquiry include investigating use of gestures to support working memory processing, leveraging working memory measures as a means to target instructional strategies for individual learners, and working memory training. Given that working memory is still debated, and not yet fully understood, researchers continue to investigate its nature, its role in learning and development, and its implications for educational curricula, pedagogy, and practice.
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Creativity
Dimitrios Zbainos and Todd Lubart
Creativity refers to the ability to produce original work that is meaningful and valuable within its context. Paul J. Guilford, at the American Psychological Association conference in 1950, devoted his presidential address to creativity and stressed its importance for future generations. Guilford conceptualized creativity as a factor within a general theory of intelligence, and in this regard, creativity was an individual ability involving divergent thinking that could be developed through interaction between individuals and their environments. Since then, creative thinking processes have been extensively studied, the initial conceptions have been modified, and new perspectives are being provided; for instance, neuroscientists are examining creative thinking processes using different methods and tools than those used in traditional cognitive psychology.
Nevertheless, great creations have not always been the products of one person. On the contrary, many great creative achievements have involved the collaboration of several people, not as the sum of individual creativities but as the product of the whole group. Furthermore, both individual and group creativity, as any other psychological construct, cannot be studied isolated from the context within which it occurs. Even Guilford’s emphasis on creativity was the product of the sociopolitical and cultural conditions of the time (the Cold War, post–World War II intellectual malaise, and the dawning of the space race). Creative processes and acts are not solely an expression of individual abilities; they are also social, embodied, and temporal and should be studied as such.
In recent decades the world is characterized by rapid change; the economic and the sociocultural conditions in a globalized economy have led creativity to be a highly socially valued ability. People consume creative products at a higher rate than any other time in history, including artistic creations such as films, music, fine arts, or countless technological innovations, which in turn raises the demand for more creative productions.
Education has an important role to play to prepare students for a creativity-thirsty society. In Vygoskian terms it mediates the elements that help children to master their environments. Modern curricula stress the need for the development of students’ creativity so that they are equipped with the necessary skills for the society of tomorrow.
It is possible to consider the different facets of creativity through a 7 Cs approach. These Cs provide a framework for examining creativity in terms of creators (creative people), creating (the act of producing new work), collaborations (interactions with close others during creation), context (the physical and social environment), creation (the new production and its characteristics), consumption (the uptake and adoption of creative work), and curricula (teaching and developing creativity through education). Research on creativity, across the 7 Cs, provides numerous avenues for the educational development of creativity.
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Distributed Practice or Spacing Effect
Shana K. Carpenter
The spacing effect (also known as distributed practice) refers to the finding that two or more learning opportunities that are spaced apart, or distributed, in time produce better learning than the same opportunities that occur in close succession. A number of theories have been proposed to account for the spacing effect. These include deficient processing, encoding variability, study-phase retrieval, and consolidation. According to the deficient processing account, learning opportunities that are spaced apart in time, compared to non-spaced or “massed” learning opportunities, are more likely to receive a learner’s full attention, ultimately leading to better quality learning. The encoding variability account proposes that spaced learning opportunities, because they are separated in time, are more likely to be associated with a number of different contextual cues that can benefit later memory for the information learned. Study-phase retrieval is based on the premise that retrieval benefits learning, and spaced learning opportunities are more likely than massed learning opportunities to involve retrieval of the previous learning experience. More recent evidence suggests that spacing learning opportunities across different days may benefit memory due to sleep-dependent neural consolidation processes. Research in authentic educational contexts shows that spacing benefits learning of a wide variety of materials, from basic facts to complex scientific concepts and skills. Regarding the practical question of when spaced learning opportunities should occur, the ideal scheduling of these opportunities depends upon how long the information needs to be remembered in the future, such that retention over longer intervals of time benefits most by longer spacing between repeated learning opportunities. Despite its promise for enhancing student learning, spacing can be challenging to implement in authentic educational contexts due to the intuitive notion that immediate repetition is better for learning, and the difficulties involved in setting a spaced study schedule in advance and adhering to it. To realize the full potential of spacing to enhance educational practices, future studies are needed that can measure implementation of spacing by students and teachers in real educational environments.
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Multiple Document Comprehension
M. Anne Britt and Jean Rouet
Multiple document comprehension refers to people’s acquisition of information from more than one document for the purpose of achieving their goals. Comprehending single documents involves constructing a long-term memory representation in which text contents get integrated with the reader’s prior knowledge. Both text structure and readers’ goals are important in determining which information is included in the reader’s memory representation. In multiple document comprehension, documents are associated with distinct source features and they do not have to follow the coherence and cohesion principles that define single documents. Thus, multiple document comprehension involves several additional challenges, including selecting documents, making strategic reading decisions, and sourcing. The documents model framework (DMF) proposed two additional representations beyond those of single-document comprehension: an intertext model based on identifying and interpreting the document sources and an integrated situation model based on representing conceptual connections across documents organized around the structure of the interpreted task. The RESOLV model extended the DMF by proposing that readers formulate their reading task within a larger physical and social situation (a context model), creating goals and methods to achieve those goals (a task model). One such task situation that has received research attention presents people with documents that describe discrepant accounts of some event. The discrepancy-induced source comprehension (DISC) hypothesis predicted that readers would use source information via an intertext model to resolve the contradictory information in their situation models. Several issues that are the focus of current research include understanding the factors that influence coherence across documents, creating interventions to help students become aware of multiple document challenges, and improving our understanding of the developmental trajectory for learning these skills and how they build upon more basic literacy skills.
