Background: Previous research showed a significant association between mathematics and working memory (WM). However, evidence regarding the different effects of verbal and visuospatial WM on mathematical abilities was very limited. Aims: The current research aims to explore the relationship between verbal and visuospatial WM with mathematical…

International research suggests that early mathematical competences predicts later mathematical outcomes. In this paper, we build on our previous study of young children's mathematical competencies (MacDonald & Carmichael, 2015) to explore the relationship between mathematical competencies at 4-5 years, as measured by teacher ratings, and…

Working memory is considered a well-established predictor of individual variation in reading comprehension in children and adults. However, how storage and processing capacities of working memory in both the phonological and semantic domain relate to reading comprehension is still unclear. In the current study, we investigated the contribution of…

The goal of the present article is to synthesize findings to date from the Delaware Longitudinal Study of Fraction Learning. The study followed a large cohort of children (N = 536) between Grades 3 and 6. The findings showed that many students, especially those with diagnosed learning disabilities, made minimal growth in fraction knowledge and…

This article presents two studies investigating the role of executive functioning in written text comprehension in children and adolescents. In a first study, the involvement of executive functions in reading comprehension performance was examined in normally developing children in fifth grade. Two aspects of text comprehension were…

We examined reading proficiency, focusing on fluency, in 56 Russian-speaking language minority (LM) students and 56 native Hebrew-speaking (NH) peers. Fifth-grade students completed measures of Hebrew reading accuracy and fluency from word to text level as well as phonological awareness (PA), RAN and vocabulary. LM students read single words less…

The purpose of the present study was to reveal the developmental pathway from third grade cognitive competencies to sixth grade conceptual and procedural fraction knowledge through the intervening whole numerical skills at fifth grade. The study used empirical data that come from 536 students in nine schools across two Delaware public school…

The simple view of reading posits that reading comprehension can be decomposed into a print-specific component (concerning decoding and sight word reading) and a language comprehension component (concerning verbal and metalinguistic skills not related to print). One might properly consider lexical skills, indexed by vocabulary measures, part of…

We report a longitudinal study investigating the predictors of reading comprehension and word reading accuracy between the ages of 7 to 8 (UK Year 3) and 10 to 11 years (Year 6). We found that different skills predicted the development of each. Reading comprehension skill measured in Year 3 was a strong predictor of comprehension in Year 6;…

This investigation analyzed the relation between cognitive functioning and mathematical achievement in 114 students in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. Differences in cognitive performance were studied concurrently in three selected achievement groups: mathematical learning disability group (MLD), low achieving group (LA), and typically achieving…

This study investigated the differential contribution of auditory-verbal and visuospatial working memory (WM) on decoding skills in second- and fifth-grade children identified with poor decoding. Thirty-two second-grade students and 22 fifth-grade students completed measures that assessed simple and complex auditory-verbal and visuospatial memory,…

This study investigated some of the underlying factors that may relate to and predict the reading comprehension of children in fourth through eighth grade (N = 47). A subset of these children previously had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD; n = 10); the remainder are classified as typically-developing (n = 37). The participants…

Kindergarten children at risk of developing language problems were administered the Florida Kindergarten Screening Battery. A principal components analysis revealed a verbal and a visual-spatial component and subsequent discriminant function analyses a high verbal/low visual-spatial group (LAL: Latent L) and a high visual-spatial flow verbal group…