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This paper summarizes a theory of cognitive development and elaborates on its educational implications. The theory postulates that development occurs in cycles along multiple fronts. Cognitive competence in each cycle comprises a different profile of executive, inferential, and awareness processes, reflecting changes in developmental priorities in each cycle. Changes reflect varying needs in representing, understanding, and interacting with the world. Interaction control dominates episodic representation in infancy; attention control and perceptual awareness dominate in realistic representations in preschool; inferential control and awareness dominate rule-based representation in primary school; truth and validity control and precise self-evaluation dominate in principle-based thought in adolescence. We demonstrate that the best predictors of school learning in each cycle are the cycle's cognitive priorities. Also learning in different domains, e.g., language and mathematics, depends on an interaction between the general cognitive processes dominating in each cycle and the state of the representational systems associated with each domain. When a representational system is deficient, specific learning difficulties may emerge, e.g., dyslexia and dyscalculia. We also discuss the educational implications for evaluation and learning at school., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Demetriou, Spanoudis, Greiff, Makris, Panaoura and Kazi.)

Open access to information is now a universal phenomenon thanks to rapid technological developments across the globe. This open and universal access to information is a key value of democratic societies because, in principle, it supports well-informed decision-making on individual, local, and global matters. In practice, however, without appropriate readiness for navigation in a dynamic information landscape, such access to information can become a threat to public health, safety, and economy, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown. In the past, this readiness was often conceptualized in terms of adequate literacy levels, but the contemporarily observed highest-ever literacy levels have not immunized our societies against the risks of misinformation. Therefore, in this Perspective, we argue that democratization of access to information endows citizens with new responsibilities, and second, these responsibilities demand readiness that cannot be reduced to mere literacy levels. In fact, this readiness builds on individual adequate literacy skills, but also requires rational thinking and awareness of own information processing. We gather evidence from developmental, educational, and cognitive psychology to show how these aspects of readiness could be improved through education interventions, and how they may be related to healthy work-home balance and self-efficacy. All these components of education are critical to responsible global citizenship and will determine the future direction of our societies., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Bobrowicz, Han, Hausen and Greiff.)

Psychometrically sound short scales are required to comprehensively and yet economically assess fundamental motives in research settings such as large-scale assessments. In order to provide such a time- and cost-efficient instrument, we conducted three studies ( N = 1,568) to develop further and validate 16 German scales with three items each assessing fundamental motives [16 motives research scales (16mrs)]. In Study 1, we applied a top-down construction process to develop a preliminary item pool on the basis of a thorough revision of existing construct definitions. In Study 2, we chose an approach that allowed us to balance the optimization of psychometric properties with content coverage to select three-item scales for each of the 16 motives. For the item selection process, we combined exploratory factor analyses, confirmatory factor analyses, ant colony optimization algorithm, and Mokken scale analyses. In Study 3, we cross-validated the results obtained in Study 2 and placed the 16mrs in a nomological network consisting of Big Five traits and Power, Achievement, Affiliation, Intimacy, and Fear motives. The results of these studies indicate that the 16mrs can be used to reliably and validly assess fundamental motives that represent a level of personality that differs from the Big Five and covers motivational aspects beyond the well-established Power, Achievement, Affiliation, Intimacy, and Fear motives. Limitations concerning the reliability of the Autonomy scale and the empirical discrimination of the Dominance and Status scales are discussed. In addition to the validated German version, we also provide the English translation of the items, which, however, need to be validated before use., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Dörendahl, Greiff and Niepel.)

The fit between employees' needs and the opportunity to satisfy them in the workplace is an important predictor of job satisfaction. To make full use of this concept in career development, a fine-grained assessment of needs is necessary to allow for a straightforward interpretation. Fundamental motives provide a theoretically meaningful, self-contained framework of 16 fine-grained explicit motives, including, for instance, Social Acceptance, Curiosity, and Autonomy. Based on a series of response surface analyses in a German online sample of 723 working people, we examined the impact on job satisfaction of three different combinations of fundamental motives and their supply: exact congruence, an excess in the supply, and a shortage in the supply. For an excess in the supply, the results suggest that job satisfaction was highest for Social Acceptance, Status, Autonomy, Sex, and Retention. For a congruence of high motive levels and high supply levels, the levels of job satisfaction were highest for Curiosity, Idealism, and Social Participation. Concerning a shortage in the supply, low levels of job satisfaction were observed for Social Acceptance, Status, Sex, Retention, Curiosity, and Idealism. The results can be useful in coaching and career developments to provide information about potential sources of low job satisfaction and provide guidance to clients on how to enhance their job satisfaction., (Copyright © 2020 Dörendahl, Niepel and Greiff.)

Influencing students' educational achievements first requires understanding the underlying processes that lead to variation in students' performance. Researchers are therefore increasingly interested in analyzing the differences in behavior displayed in educational assessments rather than merely assessing their outcomes. Such analyses provide valuable information on the differences between successful and unsuccessful students and help to design appropriate interventions. Complex problem-solving (CPS) tasks have proven to provide particularly rich process data as they allow for a multitude of behaviors several of which can lead to a successful performance. So far, this data has often been analyzed on a rather aggregated level looking at an average number of actions or predefined strategies with only a few articles investigating the specific actions performed. In this paper, we report the results of an exploratory analysis of CPS log-files that is aimed at distinguishing between students that applied the correct strategy to a problem but failed to solve it and those applying the strategy successfully. In that, the sequence of behavior displayed is reduced to interpretable parts (n-grams) that allow searching for meaningful differences between the two groups of students. This level of analysis allows finding previously undefined or unknown patterns within the data and increases our understanding of the processes underlying successful problem-solving behavior even further.

Scientists have studied the development of the human mind for decades and have accumulated an impressive number of empirical studies that have provided ample support for the notion that early cognitive performance during infancy and childhood is an important predictor of later cognitive performance during adulthood. As children move from childhood into adolescence, their mental development increasingly involves higher-order cognitive skills that are crucial for successful planning, decision-making, and problem solving skills. However, few studies have employed higher-order thinking skills such as complex problem solving (CPS) as developmental outcomes in adolescents. To fill this gap, we tested a longitudinal developmental model in a sample of 2,021 Finnish sixth grade students (M = 12.41 years, SD = 0.52; 1,041 female, 978 male, 2 missing sex). We assessed working memory (WM) and fluid reasoning (FR) at age 12 as predictors of two CPS dimensions: knowledge acquisition and knowledge application. We further assessed students' CPS performance 3 years later as a developmental outcome (N = 1696; M = 15.22 years, SD = 0.43; 867 female, 829 male). Missing data partly occurred due to dropout and technical problems during the first days of testing and varied across indicators and time with a mean of 27.2%. Results revealed that FR was a strong predictor of both CPS dimensions, whereas WM exhibited only a small influence on one of the two CPS dimensions. These results provide strong support for the view that CPS involves FR and, to a lesser extent, WM in childhood and from there evolves into an increasingly complex structure of higher-order cognitive skills in adolescence.