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…

Individual characteristics of neighborhood context, like concentrated socioeconomic disadvantage, are associated with children's cognitive development, including their academic skill development and executive functions. However, questions remain regarding how neighborhood structural, process, and physical features uniquely predict children's…

Differentiation hypotheses concern changes in the structural organization of cognitive abilities that depend on the level of general intelligence (ability differentiation) or age (developmental differentiation). Part 1 of this article presents a review of the literature on ability and developmental differentiation effects in children, revealing…

This appendix provides additional details on the underlying data, statistical models, and results presented in "The Big Lift Descriptive Analyses: Progress across Three Kindergarten Classes." First the authors describe how they created each control and outcome variable and its source (e.g., parent report), followed by an overview of the…

The Big Lift™ (Big Lift), a collective impact initiative extending from preschool through third grade in San Mateo County, California, aims to boost reading proficiency and kindergarten readiness through four programmatic pillars: High-Quality Preschool, Summer Learning, Attendance, and Family Engagement. In this report, the authors present…

There is an ongoing debate over the psychophysical functions that best fit human data from numerical estimation tasks. To test whether one psychophysical function could account for data across diverse tasks, we examined 40 kindergartners, 38 first graders, 40 second graders and 40 adults' estimates using two fully crossed 2 × 2 designs, crossing…

Representations of numerical value have been assessed by using bounded (e.g., 0-1,000) and unbounded (e.g., 0-?) number-line tasks, with considerable debate regarding whether 1 or both tasks elicit unique cognitive strategies (e.g., addition or subtraction) and require unique cognitive models. To test this, we examined how well a mixed log-linear…

We examined the predictive value of early spelling for later reading performance by analyzing data from 970 U.S. children whose spelling was assessed in the summer following the completion of kindergarten (M age = 6 years; 3 months). The word reading performance of most of the children was then tested after the completion of Grade 1 (age 7;5),…

Our paper builds on the construct of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) (Vygotsky in Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1978) to analyze the relationship between students' answers and the help they receive as they construct them. We report on a secondary analysis of…

ASD symptomology and behavioral problems pose challenges for children with ASD in school. Disagreement between parents and teachers in ratings of children's behavior problems may provide clinically relevant information. We examined parent-teacher disagreement on ratings of behavior problems among children with ASD during the fall and spring of the…

A significant number of studies have examined the cognitive components of basic academic skills, which has led to major changes in both teaching and early identification assessment practices. However, the majority of previous research has focused solely on reading. This study examines the cognitive components of academic writing skills across…

Learning of the mathematical number line has been hypothesized to be dependent on an inherent sense of approximate quantity. Children's number line placements are predicted to conform to the underlying properties of this system; specifically, placements are exaggerated for small numerals and compressed for larger ones. Alternative hypotheses…

An increasing number of studies has investigated the latent factor structure of executive functions. Some studies found a three-factor structure of inhibition, shifting, and updating, but others could not replicate this finding. We assumed that the task choices and scoring methods might be responsible for these contradictory findings. Therefore,…

This longitudinal study examined how language ability relates to mathematical development in a linguistically and ethnically diverse sample of children from 6 to 9 years of age. Study participants were 75 native English speakers and 92 language minority learners followed from first to fourth grades. Autoregression in a structural equation modeling…

Various measures have been used to investigate number processing in children, including a number comparison or a number line estimation task. The present study aimed to examine whether and to which extent these different measures of number representation are related to performance on a curriculum-based standardized mathematics achievement test in…