While the study of family literacy in Latino communities has grown in the U.S. since the 1990s, this is a nascent research area in Latin America, with Chile being no exception. Limited information is available about the impact of parents' literacy practice on child literacy outcomes at different developmental stages, the shared reading practices…

With the study reported on here we set about to reveal the effects of mental games on third graders' reading comprehension skills in Turkish classes. The study group comprised 71 students, 35 of whom were included in the experimental group, and 36 in the control group. The experimental group played simple to difficult mental games selected by the…

Elementary school multicultural reading curricula include characters with diverse proper names, which are often unfamiliar and differ phonetically from students' native language. These names could impact reading outcomes by increasing students' cognitive load and/or creating cognitive disfluency. In Study 1, students in grades 1 through 2 read a…

Research Findings: Home-based early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a popular form of small-group ECEC, with potential to facilitate high-quality conversations during shared book reading. To investigate how home-based early childhood educators (ECEs) take advantage of learning opportunities, educators read two storybooks with children…

Pretend play may be beneficial for young children's social development. However, empirical results to date are inconsistent and limited, which is partly due to a lack of psychometrically sound measures for children's social pretend play competence. The current study aimed to compare and validate different assessment methods for children's social…

This exploratory study examined children's experiences with producing and comprehending external representations in a preschool classroom. Data collection and analyses focused on how artifacts, spaces, adult-guided routines, and social conventions shape young children's representational development. Participants included 4- and…

This work explores whether the facilitative effect of causal information on preschoolers' word and descriptive fact learning persists in school-age children. Twenty-three 5-year-olds just beginning school and 23 6- to 7-year-olds who had accumulated over a year of schooling were taught novel words along with descriptions of causally rich,…

The present study investigated the moderating role of orthographic consistency on the development of reading comprehension in four language groups (English, n = 179; Spanish, n = 188; Czech, n = 135; Slovak, n = 194) from kindergarten to Grade 2. In all languages, early variations in phoneme awareness/letter knowledge, rapid automatised naming,…

Theory of Mind (ToM), as a relevant aspect in children's socio-cognitive development, has been widely studied. Some results have suggested that bilingual children have an advantage over their monolingual peers in development of ToM. However, there is less research regarding the predictive role of ToM in performance of oral and reading…

Symbolic objects are cognitive tools children must learn to master very early in life. A crucial factor in cognitive development is the instruction or informational support children receive in social contexts. While numerous studies have investigated the relation between instruction and development in various domains, like language or symbolic…

Many children learning English as an additional language (EAL) show reading comprehension difficulties despite adequate decoding. However, the relationship between early language and reading comprehension in this group is not fully understood. The language and literacy skills of 80 children learning English from diverse language backgrounds and 80…

The psychology supporting the use of quantifier words (e.g., "some," "most," "more") is of interest to both scientists studying quantity representation (e.g., number, area) and to scientists and linguists studying the syntax and semantics of these terms. Understanding quantifiers requires both a mastery of the…

Research Findings: Executive function begins to develop in infancy and involves an array of processes, such as attention, inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, which provide the means by which individuals control their own behavior, work toward goals, and manage complex cognitive processes. Thus, executive function plays a…

In Finland, schools' effectiveness in fostering the development of transversal skills is evaluated through large-scale learning to learn (LTL) assessments. This article presents how LTL skills--general cognitive competences and learning-related motivational beliefs--develop during primary school and how they predict pupils' CPS skills at the end…

Developing "Thinking and Understanding in Young Children" presents a comprehensive and accessible overview of contemporary theory and research about young children's developing thinking and understanding. Throughout this second edition, the ideas and theories presented are enlivened by transcripts of children's activities and conversations taken…