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Experts claim that individual differences in children's formal understanding of mathematical equivalence have consequences for mathematics achievement; however, evidence is lacking. A prospective, longitudinal study was conducted with a diverse sample of 112 children from a midsized city in the Midwestern United States (Mage [second grade] = 8:1). As hypothesized, understanding of mathematical equivalence in second grade predicted mathematics achievement in third grade, even after controlling for second-grade mathematics achievement, IQ, gender, and socioeconomic status. Most children exhibited poor understanding of mathematical equivalence, but results provide clues about which children are on the path to constructing an understanding and which may need extra support to overcome their misconceptions. Findings suggest that mathematical equivalence may deserve more attention from educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that gesture facilitates learning, but understanding the best way to harness gesture and how gesture helps learners are still open questions. Here, we consider one of the properties that may make gesture a powerful teaching tool: its temporal alignment with spoken language. Previous work shows that the simultaneity of speech and gesture matters when children receive instruction from a teacher (Congdon et al., 2017). In Study 1, we ask whether simultaneity also matters when children themselves are the ones who produce speech and gesture strategies. Third-graders (N = 75) were taught to produce one strategy in speech and one strategy in gesture for correctly solving mathematical equivalence problems; they were told to produce these strategies either simultaneously (S + G) or sequentially (S➔G; G➔S) during a training session. Learning was assessed immediately after training, at a 24-h follow-up, and at a 4-week follow-up. Children showed evidence of learning and retention across all three conditions. Study 2 was conducted to explore whether it was the special relationship between speech and gesture that helped children learn. Third-graders (N = 87) were taught an action strategy instead of a gesture strategy; all other aspects of the design were the same. Children again learned across all three conditions. But only children who produced simultaneous speech and action retained what they had learned at the follow-up sessions. Results have implications for why gesture is beneficial to learners and, taken in relation to previous literature, reveal differences in the mechanisms by which doing versus seeing gesture facilitates learning.

Although children can use social categories to intelligently select informants, children’s preference for in-group informants has not been consistently demonstrated across age and context. This research clarifies the extent to which children use social categories to guide learning by presenting participants with a live or video-recorded action demonstration by a linguistic in-group and/or out-group model. Participants’ (N = 104) propensity to imitate these actions was assessed. Nineteen-month-olds did not selectively imitate the actions of the in-group model in live contexts, though in-group preferences were found after watching the demonstration on video. Three-year-olds selectively imitated the actions demonstrated by the in-group member regardless of context. These results indicate that in-group preferences have a more nuanced effect on social learning than previous research has indicated. Much of children’s learning is dependent on social partners. However, informants are not uniform in their ability to provide correct or relevant information, and intelligent social learners must be able to selectively consume accurate knowledge. Even young children appear to be intelligent social consumers, endorsing information tendered by those who appear accurate (e.g., Birch, Vauthier, &

Infants' direct interactions with caregivers have been shown to powerfully influence social and cognitive development. In contrast, little is known about the cognitive influence of social contexts beyond the infant's immediate interactions with others, for example, the communities in which infants live. The current study addressed this issue by asking whether neighborhood linguistic diversity predicts infants' propensity to learn from diverse social partners. Data were taken from a series of experiments in which 19-month-old infants from monolingual, English-speaking homes were tested in paradigms that assessed their tendency to imitate the actions of an adult who spoke either English or Spanish. Infants who lived in more linguistically diverse neighborhoods imitated more of the Spanish speaker's actions. This relation was observed in two separate datasets and found to be independent from variation in infants' general imitative abilities, age, median family income and population density. These results provide novel evidence suggesting that infants' social learning is predicted by the diversity of the communities in which they live.