Both early childhood maternal language input and the quality of classroom instruction in elementary school have been shown to be important environmental supports in predicting children's literacy skill development. However, no studies have simultaneously examined these two environmental supports in relation to children's early language skills and…

Word knowledge acquisition is an incremental process that relies on exposure. As a result, word knowledge can broadly range from recognizing the word's lexical status, to knowing its meaning in context, and to knowing its meaning independent of context. The present study aimed to model incremental word knowledge in 1454 upper primary school…

The current study examined the effects of grade level and object size on the ability to estimate the measurement of objects. Fifth- (n = 198) and sixth-grade (n = 208) students and freshman undergraduate students (n = 71) from Taipei city, Taiwan, participated in the study. The findings indicated a tendency for measurement estimation ability to…

Purpose: The aims of the current project were twofold: (a) to describe the use of academic words in written language samples by fifth-grade students and (b) to examine the predictive relation between academic word use in academic writing and reading comprehension. Method: Investigators utilized written expository responses of 1,128 students in…

Purpose: To address the problem of low reading comprehension scores among children with hearing impairment, it is necessary to have a better understanding of their reading vocabulary. In this study, the authors investigated whether task and word type differentiate the reading vocabulary knowledge of children with and without severe hearing loss.…

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students' text-based writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students' mastery of analytic text-based writing. Text-based writing tasks…

This study investigated the relationship between syntactic comprehension at the sentence level and text-level comprehension. The study isolated the specific contribution of syntax by asking whether sentence comprehension efficiency of difficult syntactic constructions explained variance in text comprehension after controlling for sentence…

This study examined relations among peer acceptance, inhibitory control, and math achievement in ninety-nine 4th and 5th grade early adolescents. Teachers rated students on peer acceptance and students completed a computerized executive function task assessing inhibitory control. Math achievement was assessed via end of year math grades. Results…

Morphological skills have been associated with performance on multiple literacy outcomes. While growth in derived word knowledge has been documented during mid-elementary grades, little research has studied the development of knowledge of specific morphemes, separate from whole-word knowledge. This study examined the development of knowledge of a…

Connectives (e.g., although, meanwhile) carry abstract meanings and often signal key relationships between text ideas. This study explored whether understanding of connectives represents a unique domain of vocabulary knowledge that provides special leverage for reading comprehension, and whether the contribution of knowledge of connectives to…

We studied developmental trends in 5 important reasoning tasks that are critical components of the operational definition of rational thinking. The tasks measured denominator neglect, belief bias, base rate sensitivity, resistance to framing, and the tendency toward otherside thinking. In addition to age, we examined 2 other individual difference…

This study examined the relationship between the executive control process of inhibition and self-reported dispositional mindfulness, controlling for gender, grade, and cortisol levels in 99 (43% female) fourth- and fifth-graders ([X-bar] = 10.23 years, SD = 0.53). Students completed a measure of mindful attention awareness and a computerized…

Two exploratory studies assessed the effects of an intervention on the math problem solving of students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In the first study, students were assessed on a visual task in a high stimulation classroom analog setting with and without the use of a fine motor activity. Results showed that the fine…

In this study, 32 teachers participated in a year-long professional development project related to technology integration in which they designed and implemented a WebQuest. This paper describes the extent to which higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) and levels of technology implementation (LoTI) occur in the WebQuests that participants designed.…

What is the nature of learning to read Chinese across grade levels? This study tested 199 kindergartners, 172 second graders, and 165 fifth graders on 12 different tasks purportedly tapping constructs representing phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic processing, and subcharacter processing. Confirmatory factor analyses…