The Predictive Nature of Individual Differences in Early Associative Learning and Emerging Social Behavior

Across the first year of life, infants achieve remarkable success in their ability to interact in the social world. The hierarchical nature of circuit and skill development predicts that the emergence of social behaviors may depend upon an infant's early abilities to detect contingencies, particularly socially-relevant associations. Here, we examined whether individual differences in the rate of associative learning at one month of age is an enduring predictor of social, imitative, and discriminative behaviors measured across the human infant's first year. One-month learning rate was predictive of social behaviors at 5, 9, and 12 months of age as well as face-evoked discriminative neural activity at 9 months of age. Learning was not related to general cognitive abilities. These results underscore the importance of early contingency learning and suggest the presence of a basic mechanism underlying the ontogeny of social behaviors

Looking Through the Energy Lens: A Proposed Learning Progression for Energy in Grades 3–5

This chapter presents a general framework for thinking about the goals of pre-college energy education and a detailed learning progression for Grades 3–5. This work is based on a review of existing literature on children’s understanding of energy as well as interviews and teaching interventions with elementary students. We propose that energy education focus on how scientists use what we call the “Energy Lens” to examine a broad range of phenomena in terms of energy. We identify a network of four interdependent foundational ideas that are central to a scientific understanding of energy, essential for an informed citizen, and can progressively and meaningfully evolve, with instruction, from their precursors in childhood to principles endorsed by scientists. Our proposed learning progression builds on students’ initial ideas and indicates how students’ understanding of the network of foundational energy ideas and the Energy Lens will broaden and deepen over the course of a 3-year instructional sequence from Grades 3–5. This approach shows promise to help students restructure their ideas about energy and prepare them for further instruction and learning in middle school. In pilot classroom activities, 3rd and 5th grade students began to develop language, representations, and habits of mind that enabled them to adopt a model of energy as something that manifests itself in different forms and to associate energy increases with energy decreases, paving the way to understanding energy transfer and, eventually, energy conservation