The perception and manipulation of spatial information are essential for mathematical learning, and research highlights gender differences in spatial abilities. The present study contributes to the question of whether these differences are evident at earlier ages and how they interact with task complexity in mental rotation. We developed the…

Purpose: Both fictional oral narrative and expository oral discourse skills are critical language competencies that support children's academic success. Few studies, however, have examined African American children's microstructure performance across these genres. To address this gap in the literature, the study compared African American…

Purpose: This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features. Method: This study…

Research has investigated how lexical-semantic and participant factors impact word learning in young children and adults. However, limited information pertaining to expressive vocabulary development exists for school-aged bilinguals--particularly those with developmental language disorder (DLD). Cross-linguistic differences in the semantic…

Purpose: This study examines the effect of age and task complexity on the macrostructure of story production in preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic--speaking children. It also compares the children's production of core and complementary macrostructure story elements. Method: A descriptive, cross-sectional research design was used to explore…

Purpose: Reading requires the ability to decode and comprehend. Impairments in working memory (WM) are often implicated in students who are poor decoders. It is unclear whether this is a domain-specific issue or a task-specific issue. Therefore, this study examined how auditory-verbal (AV) WM, visual-spatial (VS) WM, and cognitive load affected…

Understanding measurement units is critical to mathematics and science learning, but it is a topic that American students find difficult. In 3 studies, we investigated the challenges underlying this difficulty in kindergarten and second grade by comparing performance on different versions of a linear measurement task. Children measured crayons…

Children in the elementary grades are expected to solve equations to demonstrate prealgebraic proficiency. Prealgebraic differences may emerge based equation type (i.e., standard vs. nonstandard), the operation shown or required for solution (i.e., addition or subtraction), and the position of the unknown. Prealgebraic differences may also be…