Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning.

Measurement of the building blocks of everyday thought must capture the range of different ways that humans may train, develop, and use their cognitive resources in real world tasks. Executive function as a construct has been enthusiastically adopted by cognitive and education sciences due to its theorized role as an underpinning of, and constraint on, humans' accomplishment of complex cognitively demanding tasks in the world, such as identifying problems, reasoning about and executing multi-step solutions while inhibiting prepotent responses or competing desires. As EF measures have been continually refined for increased precision; however, they have also become increasingly dissociated from those everyday accomplishments. We posit three implications of this insight: (1) extant measures of EFs that reduce context actually add an implicit requirement that children reason using abstract rules that are not accomplishing a function in the world, meaning that EF scores may in part reflect experience with formal schooling and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) socialization norms, limiting their ability to predict success in everyday life across contexts, (2) measurement of relational attention and relational reasoning have not received adequate consideration in this context but are highly aligned with the key aims for measuring EFs, and may be more aligned with humans' everyday cognitive practices, but (3) relational attention and reasoning should be considered alongside rather than as an additional EF as has been suggested, for measurement clarity.

Children's Early Spontaneous Comparisons Predict Later Analogical Reasoning Skills: An Investigation of Parental Influence.

Laboratory studies have demonstrated beneficial effects of making comparisons on children's analogical reasoning skills. We extend this finding to an observational dataset comprising 42 children. The prevalence of specific comparisons, which identify a feature of similarity or difference, in children's spontaneous speech from 14-58 months is associated with higher scores in tests of verbal and non-verbal analogy in 6th grade. We test two pre-registered hypotheses about how parents influence children's production of specific comparisons: 1) via modelling, where parents produce specific comparisons during the sessions prior to child onset of this behaviour; 2) via responsiveness, where parents respond to their children's earliest specific comparisons in variably engaged ways. We do not find that parent modelling or responsiveness predicts children's production of specific comparisons. However, one of our pre-registered control analyses suggests that parents' global comparisons-comparisons that do not identify a specific feature of similarity or difference-may bootstrap children's later production of specific comparisons, controlling for parent IQ. We present exploratory analyses following up on this finding and suggest avenues for future confirmatory research. The results illuminate a potential route by which parents' behaviour may influence children's early spontaneous comparisons and potentially their later analogical reasoning skills.

Bias and sensitivity to task constraints in spontaneous relational attention.

Two experiments examined factors that predicted children's tendencies to match objects versus relations across scenes when no instruction was given. Specifically, we assessed the presence of higher relational responding in children by (a) age, (b) greater presumed experience in generating relations through socialization in China versus the United States, and (c) in children with greater manipulated experience via a relational priming task. Experiment 1 showed that Chinese and U.S. children across all ages showed an initial bias to match objects versus relations across scenes. However, older children in both regions were more likely to notice features of the task that indicated attending to relational matches was a more reliable solution, and shifted their responding toward relations over the course of the task. Experiment 2 replicated the object-mapping bias and age effects within U.S. children while also examining the impact of directly manipulating children's relational experiences to test the malleability of the bias. Before the main scene-mapping task, children did a relation generation task known to prime attention to relations. This did not override the initial bias toward object mapping, but it magnified the role of age, making older children increasingly sensitive to task features that prompted relational matches, further shifting their responding toward relations over the course of the task.

Teaching and Learning Science through Multiple Representations: Intuitions and Executive Functions.

Reasoning about visual representations in science requires the ability to control one's attention, inhibit attention to irrelevant or incorrect information, and hold information in mind while manipulating it actively-all aspects of the limited-capacity cognitive system described as humans' executive functions. This article describes pedagogical intuitions on best practices for how to sequence visual representations among pre-service teachers, adult undergraduates, and middle school children, with learning also tested in the middle school sample. Interestingly, at all ages, most people reported beliefs about teaching others that were different from beliefs about how they would learn. Teaching beliefs were most often that others would learn better from presenting representations one at a time, serially; while learning beliefs were that they themselves would learn best from simultaneous presentations. Students did learn best from simultaneously presented representations of mitosis and meiosis, but only when paired with self-explanation prompts to discuss the relationships between the graphics. These results provide new recommendations for helping students draw connections across visual representations, particularly mitosis and meiosis, and suggest that science educators would benefit from shifting their teaching beliefs to align with beliefs about their own learning from multiple visual representations.

Executive Function in Learning Mathematics by Comparison: Incorporating Everyday Classrooms into the Science of Learning.

Individual differences in Executive Function (EF) are well established to be related to overall mathematics achievement, yet the mechanisms by which this occurs are not well understood. Comparing representations (problems, solutions, concepts) is central to mathematical thinking, and relational reasoning is known to rely upon EF resources. The current manuscript explored whether individual differences in EF predicted learning from a conceptually demanding mathematics lesson that required relational reasoning. Analyses revealed that variations in EF predicted learning when measured at a delay, controlling for pretest scores. Thus, EF capacity may impact students' overall mathematics achievement by constraining their resources available to learn from cognitively demanding reasoning opportunities in everyday lessons. To assess the ecological validity of this interpretation, we report follow-up interviews with mathematics teachers who raised similar concerns that cognitively demanding activities such as comparing multiple representations in mathematics may differentially benefit their high versus struggling learners. Broader implications for ensuring that all students have access to, and benefit from, conceptually rich mathematics lessons are discussed. We also highlight the utility of integrating methods in Science of Learning (SL) research.

Analogy, higher order thinking, and education.

Analogical reasoning, the ability to understand phenomena as systems of structured relationships that can be aligned, compared, and mapped together, plays a fundamental role in the technology rich, increasingly globalized educational climate of the 21st century. Flexible, conceptual thinking is prioritized in this view of education, and schools are emphasizing 'higher order thinking', rather than memorization of a cannon of key topics. The lack of a cognitively grounded definition for higher order thinking, however, has led to a field of research and practice with little coherence across domains or connection to the large body of cognitive science research on thinking. We review literature on analogy and disciplinary higher order thinking to propose that relational reasoning can be productively considered the cognitive underpinning of higher order thinking. We highlight the utility of this framework for developing insights into practice through a review of mathematics, science, and history educational contexts. In these disciplines, analogy is essential to developing expert-like disciplinary knowledge in which concepts are understood to be systems of relationships that can be connected and flexibly manipulated. At the same time, analogies in education require explicit support to ensure that learners notice the relevance of relational thinking, have adequate processing resources available to mentally hold and manipulate relations, and are able to recognize both the similarities and differences when drawing analogies between systems of relationships.

Young children's analogical reasoning across cultures: similarities and differences.

A cross-cultural comparison between U.S. and Hong Kong preschoolers examined factors responsible for young children's analogical reasoning errors. On a scene analogy task, both groups had adequate prerequisite knowledge of the key relations, were the same age, and showed similar baseline performance, yet Chinese children outperformed U.S. children on more relationally complex problems. Children from both groups were highly susceptible to choosing a perceptual or semantic distractor during reasoning when one was present. Taken together, these similarities and differences suggest that (a) cultural differences can facilitate better knowledge representations by allowing more efficient processing of relationally complex problems and (b) inhibitory control is an important factor in explaining the development of children's analogical reasoning.