Background: Rapid automatised naming (RAN) has been found to predict children's reading and arithmetic abilities. However, the underlying mechanisms for its involvement in the two abilities are not clear. This study examines how RAN shared variances with domain-general and domain-specific abilities in predicting reading and arithmetic in Chinese…

Central elements of adaptive expertise in arithmetic problem solving are flexibility, using multiple strategies, and adaptivity, selecting the optimal strategy. Research shows that the strategies children actually use do not fully reflect the strategies they know: there is hidden potential. In the current study a sample of 147 third graders from…

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…

While preschool-aged children display some skills with quantitative relations, later learning of related fraction concepts is difficult for many students. We present two studies that investigate young children's tendency of Spontaneous Focusing On quantitative Relations (SFOR), which may help explain individual differences in the development of…

This study investigated the roles of different executive function (EF) components (inhibition, shifting, and working memory) in 2-step arithmetic word problem solving. A sample of 139 children aged 8 years old and regularly attending the 3rd grade of primary school were tested on 6 EF tasks measuring different EF components, a reading task and a…

The involvement of working memory (WM) was examined in two types of mental calculation tasks: exact and approximate. Specifically, children attending Grades 3 and 4 of primary school were involved in three experiments that examined the role of verbal and visuospatial WM in solving addition problems presented in vertical or horizontal format. For…

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…