This study investigated the role of domain-specific and domain-general factors in predicting early literacy skills in Italian children. A sample of 239 first-grade students was evaluated using a broad neuropsychological battery to assess their cognitive skills. The results showed that phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, speed of…

This study investigated the utility of including teacher-reported callous-unemotional (CU) behaviors in the assessment of disruptive behaviors in school-based research. Participants included 138 first- and second-grade children (68% male; 76% eligible for free or reduced-price lunch; 61% Black, 9% Latinx, 23% White, and 7% multiracial) who…

This study's aim was to determine the factors affecting Turkish children's reading-writing achievements in the first grade in the preschool period. The prediction level of attention, visual perception (VP), rapid automatic naming (RAN), writing development (WD), and phonological awareness (PA) of the children in the preschool on their success in…

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…

This study investigated the utility of including teacher-reported callous-unemotional (CU) behaviors in the assessment of disruptive behaviors in school-based research. Participants included 138 first- and second-grade children (68% male; 76% eligible for free or reduced-price lunch; 61% Black, 9% Latinx, 23% White, and 7% multiracial) who…

It is common in intervention research to use measures of working memory either as an explanatory or a control variable. This study examines the contribution of cognitive abilities, including verbal working memory (WM) and attention, to language performance in first- and second-grade children. We assessed children (N = 414) on two forms of verbal…

We investigated the extent to which working memory and behavioral attention predicted reading and listening comprehension in grades 1 through 3 and, whether their relative contributions differed by modality and grade. Separate grade samples (N = 370; ns = 125, 123, and 122 for grades 1, 2, and 3 respectively) completed multiple measures of word…

Although research on cognitive correlates of spelling has been conducted, these studies generally do not distinguish between different types of targets that need to be spelled. Arguably, the contributions of these skills differ for words opposed to pseudowords and for targets that can be spelled on the basis of phoneme-to-grapheme conversion…

A person-oriented approach examined the extent to which patterns of school readiness across social and cognitive domains in 944 typically-developing 54-month-old children forecast academic achievement, social-emotional development, risk taking, and executive functioning at age 15. Prior work identified six distinct profiles of school readiness at…

The current longitudinal study used data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) to examine a model of development that emphasizes early caregiving environments as predictors of social emotional competence (including classroom competence). This path analysis…

Visual processes in Grade 1 were examined for their predictive influences in nonalphanumeric and alphanumeric rapid naming (RAN) in 51 poor early and 69 typical readers. In a lagged design, children were followed longitudinally from Grade 1 to Grade 3 over 5 testing occasions. RAN outcomes in early Grade 2 were predicted by speeded and nonspeeded…

Research Findings: This study investigated the relationships between effortful control and early literacy and mathematics achievement. A total of 181 children (85 girls and 96 boys) from rural China were assessed when they were in Grades 1 and 2. Path analyses controlling for maternal education indicated that effortful control at the beginning of…

The transition to elementary school is accompanied by increasing demands for children to regulate their attention and behavior within the classroom setting. Executive control (EC) may be critical for meeting these demands; however, few studies have rigorously examined the association between EC and observed classroom behavior. This study examined…

This study investigated the prevalence and stability of latent classes at risk for reading disabilities (RD) in elementary-aged children whose first language is Spanish. To this end, children (N = 489) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 at Wave 1 were administered a battery of reading, vocabulary, and cognitive measures (short-term memory [STM], working memory…

We had two primary purposes in the present study: (1) to examine unique child-level predictors of written composition which included language skills, literacy skills (e.g., reading and spelling), and attentiveness and (2) to examine whether instructional quality (quality in responsiveness and individualization, and quality in spelling and writing…