Significant socioeconomic disparities exist across the neighborhoods where children grow up today, which may exacerbate inequities in children's educational opportunities (Leventhal et al., 2015; Leventhal & Dupere, 2019; Mijs & Roe, 2021; Reardon et al., 2018). Prior research documents associations between neighborhood socioeconomic…

Executive functions (EF) are domain-general cognitive skills that predict foundational academic skills such as literacy and numeracy. However, less is known about the relation between EFs and science achievement. The nature of this relation might be explained by the theory of mutualism, which states that development is the result of complex and…

Although we know that children who are more frequently absent from school do less well academically, we know little about whether absences matter for other domains of development and whether the timing of their absences matter. In order to address these gaps in knowledge, we examined the experiences of 1,131 kindergartners (64% Hispanic, 7% Black,…

Dual language learner children (DLLs) benefit from early childhood education (ECE) and learning multiple languages, but research has predominantly focused on English monolingual children, with limited insight on the ECE and early development of DLLs. This study investigated whether DLLs' developmental assets assessed at pre-k entry (i.e. English…

Guided by evolutionary-developmental models, this study tested the hypothesis that children's exposure to parental relationship instability, defined by initiation and dissolution of caregiver intimate relationships, has both costs in cognitive impairments and benefits in enhanced learning skills. Participants included 243 mothers and their…

Nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 2011 (n = 14,370) were used to examine the grade-level and cumulative outcomes of school absenteeism between kindergarten and fifth grade for students' school performance in the United States. Students who were more frequently absent in any year of…

The relation of morphological awareness with reading comprehension is well established. For this advance to inform instruction, the push is now on to understand how morphological awareness is related to reading comprehension. We address this question here by examining potential mechanisms. We do so with children in Grade 1, a time at which it is…

Background: Well-being is a key aspect of children's education, yet measurement issues have limited studies in early primary school. Aims: The current 12-month longitudinal study assesses the temporal stability of child- and parent-reported school well-being and examines developmental links with academic self-concept and parent-rated prosocial…

We investigated whether preschoolers' social-emotional competencies predict their peer relationships and academic achievements during grade one. Measures of cool and hot executive functions, theory of mind, social-problem-solving, and peer acceptance were administered to a sample of 48 preschoolers (M = 77.91 months). Academic achievement and peer…

This dissertation investigated the extent to which five dependent variables were included in the first-grade reading curriculum and whether district size played a role in their inclusion. This study's mixed-methods approach incorporated descriptive statistics, histograms, confidence intervals, and chi-squared analyses to assess curriculum patterns…

Teachers' implementation of differentiated supplemental instruction is critical to help students with or at risk for reading-related disabilities acquire early reading and vocabulary skills. This study represents an initial investigation of whether classroom teachers' intervention fidelity (exposure, adherence, and quality) of targeted reading…

We explored reading comprehension development in children on the spectrum from pre-school to the first (YOS1) and third year of schooling (YOS3). Children were first assessed on meaning-related skills in pre-school. Forty-one children completed follow-up assessments of reading comprehension, reading accuracy, and listening comprehension in YOS1.…

Learning to read is essential, especially for our youngest learners, as the foundational skills for learning to read can determine the future success of our students. The disruptions to learning from the COVID-19 pandemic have affected education. Researchers are still working to understand the depth of learning loss students have experienced.…

To investigate the longitudinal effects of two domain-general cognitive abilities, namely verbal working memory and visual search skill, on Chinese reading comprehension. To evaluate whether decoding and linguistic comprehension mediate such effects. A total of 202 first-grade Chinese-speaking children from mainland China (M[subscript]age =…

The role of working memory (WM) in language acquisition has been widely reported in the developmental literature, but few studies have explored the role of sentence recall in the way WM and related linguistic abilities evolve. This study seeks to explore the organization and development of the memory architecture underlying language using a…