Children's ability to discriminate nonsymbolic number (e.g., the number of items in a set) is a commonly studied predictor of later math skills. Number discrimination improves throughout development, but what drives this improvement is unclear. Competing theories suggest that it may be due to a sharpening numerical representation or an improved…

For many years, researchers studied executive functions (EFs) in the laboratory with a focus on understanding an individual child's development and brain processes in a controlled environment. Building on this foundational research, there is a growing interest in EFs in the context of a child's dynamic, social world, and the contextual and…

This paper used a nationally representative sample of children from the United States to examine the extent to which physical activity and sports participation may promote growth in children's executive functions (EFs), attention, and social self-control over time. Using data from the ECLS-K:2011 (N = 18,174), findings indicated that regular…

Research has identified various domain-general and domain-specific cognitive abilities as predictors of children's individual differences in mathematics achievement. However, research into the predictors of children's individual growth rates, namely between-person differences in within-person change in mathematics achievement is scarce. We…

Math relies on mastery and integration of a wide range of simpler numerical processes and concepts. Recent work has identified several numerical competencies that predict variation in math ability. We examined the unique relations between eight basic numerical skills and early arithmetic ability in a large sample (N = 1391) of children across…

Recent findings that earlier fraction knowledge predicts later mathematics achievement raise the question of what predicts later fraction knowledge. Analyses of longitudinal data indicated that whole number magnitude knowledge in first grade predicted knowledge of fraction magnitudes in middle school, controlling for whole number arithmetic…

Socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with childhood cognitive achievement. In previous research we found that this association shows neural specificity; specifically we found that groups of low and middle SES children differed disproportionately in perisylvian/language and prefrontal/executive abilities relative to other neurocognitive…