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One of the key issues in conceptual development research concerns what kinds of causal devices young children use to understand the biological world. We review evidence that children predict and interpret biological phenomena, especially human bodily processes, on the basis of 'vitalistic causality'. That is, they assume that vital power or life force taken from food and water makes humans active, prevents them from being taken ill, and enables them to grow. These relationships are also extended readily to other animals and even to plants. Recent experimental results show that a majority of preschoolers tend to choose vitalistic explanations as most plausible. Vitalism, together with other forms of intermediate causality, constitute unique causal devices for naive biology as a core domain of thought.

In this article, we compare conventional uses of metacognition with the kinds of metacognition required by the teaching profession. We discover that many of problems and tasks used in successful metacognitive interventions tend to be reasonably well-defined problems of limited duration, with known solutions. Teaching has unique qualities that differentiate it from many of the tasks and environments that metacognitive interventions have supported. Teachers often confront highly variable situations. This led us to believe that successful teaching can benefit from what we call adaptive metacognition, which involves change to oneself and to one's environment, in response to a wide range of classroom social and instructional variability. We present several examples to illustrate the nature of metacognition required by teachers and the challenges of helping teachers recognize situations that require adaptive metacognition. We conclude the article by describing an approach, critical event-based instruction, which we have recently developed to help teachers appreciate the need for metacognitive adaptation by seeing the novelty in everyday recurrent classroom events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on George Saxe and Indigo Esmonde's monograph on cultural change and individual cognition. To understand cultural and cognitive changes, one must conduct longitudinal studies of the mutual influence between cultural-historical change and individual cognitive change. Geoffrey Saxe's work on adaptive changes in the Oksapmin body-part counting system of number due to the shift from the subsistence economy to money economy in the Oksapmin community is seminal in the field of culture and cognition research. His data were obtained from the comparison among those people who had the same cultural background but had different extent of exposure to the new economy.

Discusses the sociocultural approaches to cognitive development. Problem in developmental research on cognition; Practice approach to cognitive development; Factors that affect the cognitive consequences of repeated participation in a given practice.