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…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…

A total of 268 primary school children (age 8.75 ± 0.65) spent one day at a wildlife park attending environmental education aiming at high cognitive achievement and motivation alongside maintained discipline. To accomplish this at an out-of-school learning setting, we compared our preferred 'guided learning at workstations' (G) combining the…

This article offers a brief and personal account of the historical background, implementation and principal findings from the Trois-Rivieres regional project, a large-scale quasi-experimental intervention that tested the impact of providing a daily hour of specialist-taught quality physical education upon the physical and mental development of…

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…

Children experience good and bad days in their performance. Although this phenomenon is well-known to teachers, parents, and students it has not been investigated empirically. We examined whether children's working memory performance varies systematically from day to day and to which extent fluctuations at faster timescales (i.e., occasions,…

Preschool parent interventions may produce downstream benefits if initial intervention gains are sustained and improve later socialization experiences. This study explored associations between initial effects of the REDI (Research-based Developmentally Informed) Parent program and later benefits. A randomized trial involving 200 Head Start…

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…

The present longitudinal study tested the roles of early childhood executive control (EC) as well as exposure to poverty-related adversity at family and school levels as key predictors of low-income children's EC in elementary school ("n" = 391). Findings suggest that children's EC difficulties in preschool and lower family income from…

Data collection can be the most time- and cost-intensive part of developmental research. This article describes some long-proposed but little-used research designs that have the potential to maximize data quality (reliability and validity) while minimizing research cost. In "planned missing data designs", missing data are used…

Researchers, the authors state, link play to cognitive and affective processes important for a child's development and overall well-being. In this article, the authors examine the relationships involving pretend play, coping, and subjective well-being (the last of which they conceptualize as positive affect--positive mood--and life satisfaction)…

In the 1998 reauthorization of Head Start, Congress mandated that the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) determine, on a national level, the impact of Head Start on the children it serves. As noted by the Advisory Committee on Head Start Research, this legislative mandate required that the impact study address two main research…

In the 1998 reauthorization of Head Start, Congress mandated that the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) determine, on a national level, the impact of Head Start on the children it serves. As noted by the Advisory Committee on Head Start Research, this legislative mandate required that the impact study address two main research…

The authors investigated the performance on simple multiplication and division problems of 8-year-old children longitudinally to determine the developmental trajectories of both operations. Twice a year, during 2 consecutive school years, children performed a multiplication and division verification task and a number-matching task. All effects…