Using a mixed-methods approach, we examined how participants' memories of socialization regarding death might influence their self-reported coping with losses in childhood and adulthood. We recruited 318 adults to complete an online survey. Path analyses indicated that participants who remembered their parents shielding them less from issues…

Purpose: Narrative skill, a child's ability to create a temporally sequenced account of an experience or event, is considered an important domain of children's language development. Narrative skill is strongly predictive of later language and literacy and is emphasized in curricula and educational standards. However, the need to transcribe a…

Whether birds of a feather flock together or opposites attract is a classical research question in social and personality psychology. In most existing studies, correlation-based techniques are commonly used to study the similarity/dissimilarity among social entities. Social network data comprises two primary components: actors and the possible…

Introduction: This longitudinal study designed and tested the validity of a new measure of pro-social risk taking -- risks that individuals take in order to help others. Methods: The sample was racially and ethnically diverse adolescents in the rural Southeastern United States (N = 867; Mage = 12.82 years, 10-14 years at Wave 1; 50% Girls, 33%…

This study compared 5 scoring methods in terms of their statistical assumptions. They were then used to score the Teacher Observation of Classroom Adaptation Checklist, a measure consisting of 3 subscales and 21 Likert-type items. The 5 methods used were (a) sum/average scores of items,(b) latent factor scores with continuous indicators, (c)…

Purpose: Prior theoretical and empirical work has referenced several broad stages of narrative development, particularly in terms of young children's understanding of story structure. However, there is considerable variation in how story structure has been defined and assessed across these studies. The aims of the present study were threefold: (a)…

We investigated the dimensionality and relations between L1 (a speaker's first language) and L2 (a speaker's second language) writing skills in narrative and informational genres and higher order cognitive skills--inference, perspective taking, and comprehension monitoring--for Spanish-English dual language learners in primary grades. Dimensions…

In a previous study, Mix et al. (2016) reported that spatial skill and mathematics were composed of 2 highly correlated, domain-specific factors, with a few cross-domain loadings. The overall structure was consistent across grade (kindergarten, 3rd grade, 6th grade), but the cross-domain loadings varied with age. The present study sought to…

Despite increasing interest in sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT) in children, the field is stymied by the lack of a standard symptom set that can be used across studies. Without a standard symptom set, it is difficult to determine if differences across studies are due to methodological or sample differences, or simply the way SCT was measured. To…

The relations among various spatial and mathematics skills were assessed in a cross-sectional study of 854 children from kindergarten, third, and sixth grades (i.e., 5 to 13 years of age). Children completed a battery of spatial mathematics tests and their scores were submitted to exploratory factor analyses both within and across domains. In the…

We had 3 aims in the present study: (a) to examine the dimensionality of various evaluative approaches to scoring writing samples (e.g., quality, productivity, and curriculum-based measurement [CBM] writing scoring), (b) to investigate unique language and cognitive predictors of the identified dimensions, and (c) to examine gender gap in the…

We investigated the latent factor structure of the "Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening for Kindergarteners" in Spanish ("PALS español K"). Participants included 590 Spanish-speaking, public-school kindergarteners from five states. Three theoretically-guided factor structures were measured and tested with one half of our…