People read for many different reasons. These goals affect the cognitive processes and strategies they use during reading. Understanding "how" reading goals exert their effects requires investigation of whether and how they affect specific component processes, such as validation. We investigated the effects of reading goal on text-based…

Scientific reasoning is an important skill that encompasses hypothesizing, experimenting, inferencing, evaluating data and drawing conclusions. Previous research found consistent inter- and intra-individual differences in children's ability to perform these component skills, which are still largely unaccounted for. This study examined these…

The present study aims to provide a systematic understanding of how perspective-taking ability contributes to primary-school students' cooperative behaviours and learning outcomes. The present study is frontline as we combined person-oriented (e.g., describing patterns of behaviours based on individual characteristics), process-oriented (e.g.,…

This study examined the contributions of developmental changes in social-cognitive ability throughout adolescence to the development of narrative comprehension. We measured the effects of sensitivity to the causal structure of narratives and of sensitivity to differences in social-cognitive processing demands on narrative recall by children (8-10…

This study examined the representation of knowledge in text writing in 20 ten-year-old children and 20 adults in the Netherlands. The research analyzed the use of clause linking devices to compose larger text units. Special attention was given to the use of causal relational markers and the extent to which causal relations within the texts matched…

Tested the hypothesis that individual differences in reading ability increase over time, by assessing children, at seven occasions between kindergarten and third grade, on various measures of reading ability, reading behavior, and attitudes toward reading. Found that individual differences among children in word recognition, but not reading…