The purpose of this study was to empirically examine the dimensionality of language ability for young children (4-8 years) from prekindergarten to third grade (n = 915), theorizing that measures of vocabulary and grammar ability will represent a unitary trait across these ages, and to determine whether discourse skills represent an additional…

Young children's oral narration typically progresses from telling disordered events to production of well-sequenced stories. To investigate how this development is supported and whether effects of support extend to literacy, 59 mother-child dyads from low-income family backgrounds were studied longitudinally. Maternal verbal input to narration was…

This article deals with important aspects regarding the checking and assessment of the knowledge and skills of third-graders (more specifically pupils ending the third grade of primary school). The text makes use of the Omnibus research reports: M. Czajkowska, B. Szurowska (2016). It is worth noting that conducting tests in children of this age…

Do social cognition and epistemological understanding promote elementary school children's experimentation skills? To investigate this question, 402 children (ages 8, 9, and 10) in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades were assessed for their experimentation skills, social cognition (advanced theory of mind [AToM]), epistemological understanding (understanding…

In this "FastFacts," a state's Department of Education requests information from the Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes (CEELO) on how the research defines skills in social-emotional development, approaches to learning, and executive function, to inform planned revisions to the early childhood indicators of progress for children…

When one effectively employs the strategies of exploratory-learning, wait-time, intervention, guided reading, meaning, and phonological-morphological-syntactical awareness-for infants and on up-to 3rd grade students-all-in a Montessori-like-learning-literacy-setting replete with semantical interactions with phonology, syllabology, morphology, and…

Across all the domains of child development, we need to understand the temporal relationship between variables suspected to underpin growth; reading research is no exception. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of the direction of the relationship between children's morphological awareness, or the awareness of and ability to manipulate the…

Background: Language minority students, who are mostly immigrant students tend to perform at lower levels in school and to be at risk of school failure when they are limited in English proficiency (LEP). Objective: Based on the previous studies that addressed the importance of students' social skills for school success, I examined the social…

We analyzed two nationally representative, longitudinal data sets of U.S. children to identify risk factors for persistent mathematics difficulties (PMD). Results indicated that children from low socioeconomic households are at elevated risk of PMD at 48 and 60 months of age, as are children with cognitive delays, identified developmental delays…

Kreutzer et al.'s (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 40(1):1-60, 1975) metamemory interview has been widely used in children's metamemory literature, yet the psychometric properties of the measure have yet to be reported, and the format and language of some subtests may pose problems for young children. Researchers often…

The authors took a population-based approach to testing how commonly studied neighborhood socioeconomic conditions are associated with the language and cognitive outcomes of residentially stable rural and urban children tracked from kindergarten (ages 5-6) to Grade 4 (ages 9-10). Child-level kindergarten Early Development Instrument (EDI) data…

This article begins by revisiting an old dispute between the children's writer Chukovsky and the child psychologist Vygotsky on whether and how child literature should mediate development. It then considers child language language lessons in South Korea for clues about how such mediation might happen, and finds the development of rote language,…

This study investigates the link between the frequency of family breakfasts and dinners and child academic and behavioral outcomes in a panel sample of 21,400 children aged 5-15. It complements previous work by examining younger and older children separately and by using information on a large number of controls and rigorous analytic methods to…

In Dutch, vowel duration spelling is phonologically consistent but morphologically inconsistent (e.g., "paar--paren"). In German, it is phonologically inconsistent but morphologically consistent (e.g., "Paar--Paare"). Contrasting the two orthographies allowed us to examine the role of phonological and morphological consistency…

As children become proficient readers, there are substantial changes in the eye movements that subserve reading. Some of these changes reflect universal developmental factors while others may be specific to a particular writing system. This study attempts to disentangle effects of universal and script-dependent factors by comparing the development…