Background: Around 800 million young children worldwide have cognitive-developmental limitations due to issues related to biological, environmental, and psychosocial factors. These problems lead to educational challenges, limited skill development, and higher unemployment rates. Therefore, timely interventions addressing the underlying problems in…

School readiness is recognized as one of the key starting points for children's further success in their school work and in their subsequent career. However, many kindergarten teachers still miss and long for a comprehensive, reliable and standardized diagnostic tool which could help them recognize the level of children's school readiness. That is…

In this longitudinal study, we assessed 88 Hong Kong Chinese typically developing kindergarteners' Chinese character reading accuracy four times with 6-month intervals over 1.5 years with the first testing point in the fall of the second year of kindergarten (K2), during which morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic…

A considerable body of research indicates that children's executive function (EF) skills and related school readiness constructs are important for early learning and long-term academic success. This review focuses on EF and a related construct, motor skills with a focus on visuo-motor integration, as being foundational for learning, and describes…

This study aimed to investigate the extent to which WM measured in kindergarten predicts WM measured in second grade (stability of individual WM progress) and the extent to which WM measured at kindergarten predicts academic performance at second grade (N = 94). The results showed that WM skills significantly increase during the time span from…

Research has illuminated contributions--usually modeled separately--of both executive functioning (EF) and visuomotor integration (VMI) to mathematical development in early elementary school. This study examined simultaneous associations of EF and VMI, measured at the beginning of the school year, with concurrent and later mathematics performance…

Educational research aims to understand how and why students change over time. With its emphasis on within-person change, latent change score models provide educational researchers with a more general and flexible framework for testing nuanced hypotheses regarding within-person change and between-person differences in within-person change. Models…

Weaknesses in early number skills have been found to be a risk factor for later difficulties in mathematical performance. Nevertheless, only a few intervention studies with young children have been published. In this study, the responsiveness to early support in kindergarteners with most severe difficulties was examined with two different computer…

The aim of the 2018 International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA) conference was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There have been advances in both cognitive…

Using teachers as co-researchers to collect and analyze data, this case study explored preschool and kindergarteners' learning when they were engaged in hands-on activities in the garden and greenhouse areas of a model outdoor classroom. Key findings suggest that when young children are participating in garden and greenhouse activities they are:…