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"Children's engagement with learning is important as children enter school, as it facilitates both future learning engagement and academic success. Current measures of learning engagement focus on engagement within a classroom setting and be confounded by contextual characteristics. A laboratory measure of engagement may also broaden available lines of research. This study first aimed to investigate the longitudinal measurement invariance and criterion validity of this measure and explore mean level changes of engagement across this time. Second, this study also assessed how the mechanism of emotion regulation, an important factor of early childhood, may influence the development of engagement in multiple contexts. A community sample of 278 children were brought to the lab for assessments at preschool-age, kindergarten-age, and first grade-age. Children's learning behaviors and emotion regulation were observed in the lab, and questionnaire data were procured from primary caregivers and children's teachers at kindergarten and first grade. Results demonstrated that five learning engagement behaviors, attention to instructions, on-task behavior, persistence, monitoring progress/strategy use, and negative affect cohered into a single factor at preschool-age, kindergarten, and first grade. This factor demonstrated partial scalar invariance across the three waves of data collection and was concurrently and longitudinally associated with classroom learning behaviors, academic performance, and, in some instances, school attitude. Thus, this study supports the construct and criterion validity of a laboratory learning engagement measure for young children. Results also indicated that emotion regulation at preschool-age was positively associated with behavioral learning engagement, assessed by both observe behaviors in a laboratory, teacher-reported behaviors in the classroom and affective learning engagement, operationalize as children's school attitude. This suggests that early regulatory skills may promote or constrain children's engagement with learning. However, kindergarten emotion regulation was not predictive of later engagement, suggesting that emotion regulation before the start of school may be particularly important for engaged learning processes. One bidirectional was also found: Learning behaviors in the kindergarten classroom were predictive of emotion regulation in first grade. As such, emotion regulation may be affected by children's behaviors in formal learning contexts. This study provided support for a new measure of learning engagement and expanded current knowledge about the mechanisms that support early engagement. This measure can be useful for researchers who may have difficulty collecting classroom data or are more interested in engagement specific to learning tasks. Moreover, this study suggests that early emotion regulation is important for future engagement, and that any effort to improve emotion regulation should be targeted toward children before the beginning of formal education."--Abstract from author supplied metadata

"Expertise in teacher noticing of children's thinking is central to a vision of responsive teaching in which teachers regularly elicit and build on children's thinking during instruction (Richards & Robertson, 2016). In mathematics classrooms, this core instructional practice of noticing children's mathematical thinking repeatedly occurs during instruction and involves attending to and making sense of children's mathematical thinking (Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011). Teachers daily have opportunities to notice children's mathematical thinking during their conversations with students and in students' written work. However, expertise in noticing children's mathematical thinking does not develop automatically or through years of teaching, and teachers need support developing noticing expertise. To help teachers develop noticing expertise, professional developers often employ artifacts of practice (e.g., video clips and student written work) from teachers' own classrooms as well as strategically selected artifacts from classrooms taught by teachers unfamiliar to the PD participants. This study explored the potential differences in teachers' noticing with written work from these two sources--teachers' own classrooms and classrooms unfamiliar to the teachers. Drawing on the construct of framing (Goffman, 1974), particular attention was paid to the various frames (or lenses) teachers used during noticing. Using a context of professional development focused on children's mathematical thinking in the domain of fractions, this three-phase study explored teachers' noticing and their use of frames by investigating the relationship between teachers' noticing of children's mathematical thinking in written work from their own classrooms versus unfamiliar classrooms. In the first phase, this study identified the frames individual teachers used when noticing children's thinking in written work from their own classrooms. The second phase explored the frames that small groups of teachers used when collectively noticing children's thinking in written work from unfamiliar classrooms during professional development. The third phase used in-depth interviews to investigate the relationship between the quality of teacher noticing and the use of frames of six teachers who were asked to notice children's thinking in written work on the same problem from their own classrooms and from unfamiliar classrooms. Findings identified six frames teachers used while noticing children's mathematical thinking in written work from the two sources, and they fell into three broad categories: (a) noticing focused on the child's current mathematical performance, (b) noticing focused on the child's non-mathematical performance, and (c) noticing that compared the child's performance to the expected performance based on the child's past performance, the performance of the rest of the class, or curricular or testing guidelines. Confirmation of these frames in three data sets highlighted the variety of ways teachers reason during noticing, suggesting that frames are a useful construct for understanding the complexity of teachers' noticing because frames capture the multiple and sometimes competing ideas that teachers need to coordinate. When comparing teachers' noticing of children's thinking in written work from their own classrooms versus unfamiliar classrooms, a lack of substantial evidence was found to distinguish the sources in terms of the use of particular frames, the prevalence of particular frames, or the quality of teachers' noticing of children's thinking. Further, there was evidence that teachers "imagined" insider knowledge of children from unfamiliar classrooms to assist with their noticing, which might explain why engaging with written work from either source did not seem to change the quality of teachers' noticing. On the other hand, comparative analyses identified a distinction between teachers' use of frames when they were considering one child's strategy versus several children's strategies regardless of whether the written work came from the teachers' classrooms or unfamiliar classrooms. Specifically, when teachers' noticing focused on more than one child, more frames and a greater variety of frames were invoked. Implications for professional development focus on the need to appreciate and address teachers' coordination of multiple frames and the idea that the use of these frames depends less on the source of the written work and more on the number of children involved in the task."--Abstract from author supplied metadata

"The current study investigated children's use of information about informants' cultural background and learning method to learn novel facts about an unfamiliar culture. Ninety-six 6- to 9-year-olds heard about an immersed informant (i.e., member of an unfamiliar out-group) and a non-immersed informant (i.e., member of the child's in-group) who each learned about a novel cultural practice differently (i.e., from a person vs. from a book). Children decided which informant executed the cultural practice better (i.e., correctness), which informant they would prefer to learn from (i.e., future learning preference), and how they would want to learn (i.e., learning method preference). Overall, children preferred to endorse immersed informants over non-immersed informants, but a synergistic effect emerged such that the immersed informants who learned from a person were seen as ideal for imparting information in this context. No significant age effects emerged. Relational vocabulary predicted children's performance on the correctness question. These findings are discussed in light of limitations of current selective social learning models and implications for how children learn during middle childhood."--Abstract from author supplied metadata

Learning is critical for the typical development of linguistic, social, and motor skills. However, little is known about whether learning develops during childhood or is disrupted in developmental disorders. This dissertation examined associative implicit learning, which occurs unintentionally and enables learning about variability and stability in the environment (e.g., when or where something is likely to occur). Chapter I discussed theories of brain and cognitive development that guided and informed this body of work. In Chapter II, we investigated whether younger children, older children, and adults differed in learning of simple and complex sequence structure (a source of variability in past studies). Results indicated that sequence-specific learning was sensitive age but not to sequence structure; it was reduced in younger than older children and adults for both sequence structures. Chapters III and IV addressed the status of two forms of learning, implicit sequence learning and implicit spatial contextual learning, in children with ADHD, children with ASD, and matched controls. Children with ADHD showed reduced learning on the implicit sequence task, but did not differ from controls on the implicit spatial learning task. Therefore, results indicated a selective impairment in implicit sequence learning in children with ADHD. In contrast, learning on the implicit sequence learning and implicit spatial contextual learning tasks did not differ between children with ASD and controls, indicating a general sparing of implicit learning in childhood ASD. Chapter V addressed the neural basis of probabilistic implicit sequence learning in children with ASD and controls using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Behaviorally intact general skill learning in childhood ASD was reliant upon the same neural networks as controls, whereas behaviorally intact sequence-specific learning in childhood ASD was reliant upon qualitatively different neural networks than controls. Chapter VI discussed the implications of these findings for models of brain and cognitive development in typical childhood development, childhood ADHD, and childhood ASD. The dissertation ends by suggesting that development can be considered in terms of a three-way interactions between developing systems of learning, executive control, and emotional regulation.

Young children perceive and respond to their environment in a variety of ways based upon their unique combination of approaches to learning. They use a range of intelligences in interacting with their classmates and the classroom setting: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and musical (Gardner, 1993). Children also approach learning based upon their own individual personality type (Meyers, 1980), as well as their unique temperament qualities (Chess and Thomas, 1987). Teachers of young children are interested in increasing their understanding of children's varied approaches to learning. Enhancing teachers' sensitivity to these differences by providing examples of children's different ways of learning and interacting will enable teachers to more effectively support children's individual strengths and address their needs in the classroom. This Master's Thesis includes the following components: 1. Identifying the features of Gardner's multiple intelligences, Chess and Thomas' temperament qualities, and Meyers-Briggs personality types (internal and external cognitive processor) that are observable in children interacting in an early childhood classroom; 2. Scrutinizing videotapes of classroom interactions to identify five children who represent a broad range in their approaches to learning based upon the elements listed above and analyzing their individual strengths in these categories. (Videotaping was completed over a three-month period in the kindergarten classroom of an outstanding veteran teacher at the East Hartford/Glastonbury Magnet School); 3. Identifying specific videotaped segments that exemplify each of the five students' approaches to learning in the areas of multiple intelligences, temperament qualities, and internal or external cognitive processing; 4. Developing an "Early Childhood Specialist Tip" for each video segment to support teachers' ability to recognize the behaviors that represent specific elements of multiple intelligences, temperament qualities, and personality types; 5. Selecting segments of interviews with the five children's parents to document elements of each child's approaches to learning from the parents' perspective; 6. Serving as a member of a team from the Departments of Teacher Education and Educational Leadership to develop the prototype of an interactive CD-ROM to help teachers to recognize (or to enhance teachers' sensitivity to) the elements of multiple intelligences, temperament qualities, and personality type that are observable in young children interacting in a kindergarten classroom. The prototype CD-ROM includes the contents of 3, 4 and 5 (above) and is included as part of this thesis.