Early childhood programs enhance children's knowledge and skills when teachers intentionally engage with children during free play. Preschool teachers' ability to notice and capitalize on teachable moments has been questioned in the literature. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to examine the efficacy of professional development designed to increase teachers' awareness of teachable moments in their informal interactions with young children during independent play, and teachers' intentionality in responding to those opportunities. The study was grounded in Vygotsky's principles of socially constructed learning, including teachers adjusting their intentional interactions to accommodate the thinking of learners. Qualitative data were collected using reflective journals kept before and after the vignette-based professional development sessions and focus group responses by 11 preschool teachers in the Southwestern United States. Chi square analysis of qualitative findings revealed significant positive change in teacher intentionality for the themes of daily schedule, awareness, and scaffolding. Vignette-based professional development coupled with reflective journaling appears to be an effective method to increase teacher awareness of intentional teaching, which may positively influence the education of preschool children.

In the wild, a variety of inter-group behavioural differences have been reported for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and it has been suggested that these may have resulted from social learning. To determine whether chimpanzees show the necessary propensity for social learning, groups of captive chimpanzees were tested in a series of experiments involving the use of two-action and bidirectional apparatuses. For comparison, and to shed light on any contrasts between our own and chimpanzee learning strategies, similar tests were also conducted with children (Homo sapiens) to ascertain the nature of their observational learning when watching conspecifics. Through the use of open diffusion and diffusion chain techniques, it was shown that both species learnt how to operate different foraging devices from observing an expert conspecific and this learning was strong enough for the generation of behavioural traditions which passed along multiple test ‘generations’. Additionally, ghost conditions were used to distinguish imitative and emulative learning by both species. With one of the two test devices used (the Slide-box) the first evidence for emulation learning by chimpanzees, through the use of a ghost condition, was shown. Children in this condition also showed apparent emulation; a contrast to previous research which has concluded that children tend to rely on imitation. Additionally, to test its potential for use in future social learning experiments, the ability of chimpanzees to learn from video-footage of an unknown conspecific was tested. It was found that the chimpanzees not only learnt how to operate two devices from observing this footage but also used the same alternative method used by the model chimpanzee.