To gain insight in developmental trajectories of motivation during upper primary school, the present study focused on how different aspects of students' motivation, i.e., task-orientation, self-efficacy, and school investment develop from grade three to six of primary school and how these developments differ for boys and girls, and students with…

Few studies have identified individual differences in vocational knowledge or its association with career aspirations or expectations of children. We investigated whether individual differences in grade, gender, academic achievement, and SES predict levels of vocational knowledge, and further examined the relationship between vocational knowledge…

Girls are more likely than boys to use counting strategies rather than higher-level mental strategies to solve arithmetic problems. Prior research suggests that dependence on counting strategies may have negative implications for girls' later math achievement. We investigated the relation between first-grade girls' verbal and spatial skills and…

Unique contributions of Big Five personality factors to academic performance in young elementary school children were explored. Extraversion and Openness (labeled "Culture" in our study) uniquely contributed to academic performance, over and above the contribution of executive functions in first and second grade children (N = 446). Well…

This longitudinal study examined how children's early numeracy assessed in kindergarten predicts their mathematical performance in the first grade, after controlling for the effects of age, gender, and parents' education. The participants were 212 Finnish children (107 girls and 105 boys). At the time of the first assessment (kindergarten), the…

The influence of gender beliefs on cognitive task performance has been demonstrated repeatedly for adults. For children, there is evidence that gender beliefs can substantially impede or boost math performance--a task where gender differences in favour of boys declined over past decades. Therefore, we examined this phenomenon using the Mental…

We examined the cross-lagged relations between children's task-avoidant behavior and their performance in reading and spelling in Chinese. Eighty Grade 2 and 103 Grade 4 Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese children were assessed on measures of nonverbal IQ, task value, reading accuracy, fluency, and spelling. A year later, the children were reassessed on…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of gender and linguistic diversity in the growth of Dutch word decoding skills throughout elementary school for a representative sample of children living in the Netherlands. Following a longitudinal design, the children's decoding abilities for (1) regular CVC words, (2) complex…

Using data from New Zealand's National Education Monitoring Project, a light sampling, low stakes performance based national school assessment program, reading self-efficacy, reading enjoyment, and reading achievement were examined in samples of 8 and 12 year old children. Sample sizes were n = 480 for each group. While reading achievement…

The study examined how cognitive and motivational factors predicted reading skill and whether intrinsic reading motivation would explain significantly more variance in low ability readers' reading performance. One hundred and eleven children (aged 9-11) completed assessments of reading comprehension skill, verbal IQ, decoding skill and intrinsic…

This study is an item analysis of the Matching Familiar Figures Test-20. We examined error scores in the Matching Familiar Figures Test-20 to determine the influence of the difficulty of the test on the assessment of reflection-impulsivity. The sample included 700 participants aged between 6 and 12 years. The results obtained from the corrected…

Children's symbolic number sense was examined at the beginning of first grade with a short screen of competencies related to counting, number knowledge, and arithmetic operations. Conventional mathematics achievement was then assessed at the end of both first and third grades. Controlling for age and cognitive abilities (i.e., language, spatial,…

This study investigated quantitative and qualitative changes in mental rotation performance and solution strategies with a focus on sex differences. German children (N = 519) completed the Mental Rotations Test (MRT) in the 5th and 6th grades (interval: one year; age range at time 1: 10-11 years). Boys on average outperformed girls on both…

Five variables (strategy use, fluency, accuracy, spatial ability and confidence) that have been linked to gender differences in mathematics were compared as predictors of mathematics competency. Two hundred and forty-one second grade students from seven schools in Northeast Georgia participated in the study. In fall of the second grade, children…

The purpose of the present study was to explore Dutch spelling development throughout the elementary grades. Two issues were considered (a) dimensional structure over time, and (b) rate of change. Whether the rate of change differs depending on gender, ethnicity, or word reading skill was examined in particular. A pseudolongitudinal dataset with…