Joan Peskin

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education | OISE · Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development (AP&HD)

To identify expert poets’ cognitive processes as they compose poetry, we asked 10 expert poets and 10 novice writers of poetry to think aloud as they composed a poem. Compared to the novices, expert poets revealed an associative playfulness and surrendering of consciousness, similar to that shown in research on general creativity in domains such as...

A critical skill in emergent writing is the developing ability to take the perspective of different readers; however, the precursors of this skill have not yet been identified. In this longitudinal study, 105 children (90 after attrition) were tested at three time-points: Pre-kindergarten (3 to 4 years, n = 105), kindergarten (5 years, n = 97), and...

The present study examines the efficacy of a social skills and Theory of Mind (S.S.ToM) intervention for children with high-functioning ASD. Children were taught to identify and consider their peer's mental states, e.g., knowledge, emotions, desires, beliefs, intentions, likes and dislikes, while learning friendship-making skills and strategies, th...

The aim of this study was to develop and test the effectiveness, maintenance, and generalization of treatment gains for a 10-week, visually scaffolded, and parent-assisted social skills intervention delivered withing community settings targeting the development of perspective-taking (Theory of Mind - ToM) skills for children with ASD. The intervent...

This study investigated when children can take the perspective of their reader if the information-processing demands of writing are removed by means of dictation to a scribe. Participants (N = 96) aged 5, 6 and 7 years dictated letters to an addressee who possessed requisite content knowledge, and then revised the letter or dictated a new letter to...

In investigating the relationship between fiction writing and perspective taking, beliefs about the ability of fiction writers to correctly infer the mental states of others were assessed via survey, in comparison to other professions. Next, two groups of fiction writers (established and intermediate) and a control group were compared across differ...

A critical component of effective communication is the ability to consider the knowledge state of one's audience, yet individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty representing the mental states of others. In the present study, youth with high-functioning ASD were trained to consider their reader's knowledge states in their compo...

Although by 11years children demonstrate impressive performance on various tasks that assess symbolic thinking in language development, research suggests that few young adolescents demonstrate evidence of symbolic processing when reading literature. This study investigated whether the difficulty might be due to a lack of adequate exposure to domain...

Throughout adolescence, children begin to develop their life story: a coherent account of their experiences and selfhood. Although the nature of this development is still being uncovered, one promising direction for research is the examination of factors that could encourage life story development. Here the authors explore the idea that exposure to...

This article reports a project in which two researchers in cognitive psychology, learning, and instruction collaborated with a high school English teacher to develop lessons that contained three scaffolds to facilitate symbolic interpretation when students read poetry. The scaffolds were based on instructional strategies that have shown to be effec...

There is growing consensus that, for trained readers, poetic-text processing involves a genre decision, which triggers genre-based conventional expectations and directs attention to the textual devices. This research examines how students recognize and process texts in poetic versus prose form at different points during their literary education. Th...

Although there has been research on professional learning communities (PLCs) in schools, little attention has been paid to them in contexts of higher education. This article chronicles the development of a PLC, involving the 18 instructors who teach educational psychology each year to 1,400 preservice teacher candidates. Through questionnaires and...

This study examined children's understanding of pretense and deception in folktales in which a villam deceives his victim by pretending to be someone else. In Experiment 1, the 3-year-olds distinguished the real from the pretend persona, but neither understood the victim's false belief nor predicted that the villain would perpetrate the unwelcome a...

This study examined secondary school students' knowledge of the conventions and aesthetic operations that theorists hypothesize are associated with the poetic genre. Students read texts presented visually both in the shape of poems as well as prose. The identification of a text as a poem triggered significantly more references to the conventional e...

This study evaluates the effects of teacher candidates' having access to expert teachers' modeling analytic thinking as the experts read case studies used in teaching educational psychology. Videos which consisted of selected segments of multiple expert teachers thinking aloud were developed. In the first experiment, one of these videos was viewed...

This study investigated whether exposing Kindergarten children to metacognitive language results in a greater conceptual understanding of mental states, and increased production and comprehension of metacognitive vocabulary. Over a 4-week period, parents, teachers and graduate assistants read about 70 picture books to each participant (N=48, mean a...

This study examined the relationship between children's developing theory of mind and their ability to engage in two social behaviors which have, as their cognitive underpinning, the representation that what one knows may not be accessible to others. Children of 3, 4, and 5 years, in a quasi-naturalistic setting, played hide-and-seek and also were...

In this study, we examined whether young children's difficulty with behavioral predictions when appearance was misleading would extend to more general domains, including those that do not require a representational understanding of mind. Children 3 and 5 years of age were provided with narratives about dressing up in costume for the extraneous reas...

Research in cognitive science has focused on expert performance in various domains, but there has been no expert-novice study on how meaning is constructed when reading poetry. In this study, "experts" were 8 PhD English candidates, and "novices" were 8 undergraduates or advanced high school students. Participants thought aloud as they attempted to...

This study reports a marked development between the ages of 3 and 5 years in children’s ability to conceal information. In a situation of high-affect involvement, 3-year-olds did not know to misinform or withhold information from a competitor who always chose the object for which they themselves had previously stated a preference. Although only 29%...

This study reports a marked development between the ages of 3 and 5 years in children's ability to conceal information. In a situation of high-affect involvement, 3-year-olds did not know to misinform or withhold information from a competitor who always chose the object for which they themselves had previously stated a preference. Although only 29%...

A total of 48 Canadian, middle-class 3-year-olds participated in a study of their abilities to predict the actions of a story character with a false belief and a story character engaged in pretence. In the experimental situation, a red puppet with pen-markers for legs left an "inky trail" to the location of a hidden treasure in one of three cups th...

Includes questionnaire and summary. T. Thesis (M.A.)-University of the Witwatersrand, 1977. Bibliography: p. 191-198.